And it would be worse if all this stuff wasn’t tracked. You would have much more difficulty pinpointing outbreaks and defending against them My entrepreneur at least had to learn about food safety before opening in a regulated environment. I am not proposing that he is purposefully ignoring safety, just that he was ignorant of it before opening his new business.
What if pigs develop stripes and hunt zebras? I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. We are noticeably safer in a regulated environment than an unregulated one, because the market doesn’t have enough power to police and protect consumers. Safer != inoculated from all harm.
That is so true. Except they don’t make fun. They are much happier about a cleaner food supply so that even their stronger system doesn’t get sick as often, especially children and the old who are more vulnerable. They also adapt their cooking techniques. Rare meat is a virtual unknown in the Philippines. Fish is cooked until it is so dried out you must cut it with a knife.
Long story corrected - we are considerably safer than we would be without the oversight. And personally, I eat raw fish and loved unpasteurized cheese when I had it.
Actually, chance are there will be a ton of food inspectors, people who will try to get consumers to pay them to rate the safety of their food. Great market opportunity. Now, the average consumer looking at who inspected the food will not know that the inspectors are a subsidiary of the company being inspected, or set up by morons, or a real one.
Every candidate in California is endorsed by a teachers group and a police group and a firemans group. Some of them may consist of five teachers and some of 500,000, but who reading the ballot has time to look it up.
Since the U.S.A. is the land where nut-case Libertarian rhetoric thrives, I think most of the posters in this thread are applying remarks to U.S.A.
And in the U.S.A. food safety is not a big problem. (Why not? Partly due to government standards and inspectors. Yes, these standards and inspections aren’t perfect but only the nut-cases claim that an imperfect system must be abandoned altogether.)
Since the food safety discussion was more of an explanatory tangent than a real issue, I want to thank Voyager for injecting a note of sanity:
Given the choice of hundreds of salmonella deaths or the toxic poison that still lingers in our unregulated financial system, I think the former would be much preferable.
I’d love to hear the Libertarian take on the recent financial crisis. I suppose the industry wasn’t deregulated enough !
Oh, let me guess. In Libertopia we needn’t wonder about financial institutions like AIG which suffer losses in the hundreds of billions. Customers will then just move their business to a different institution. :smack:
Exactly. If food safety is important people will pay for it. So there will be a market for private food inspectors the way we have private safety ratings for cars and {gasp} investments. Those agencies will have to build a reputation, and if they are found to be a subsidiary of the food conglomerate that will impact their reputation. Turns out, the government has the same problem. I’ve been in the food industry long enough to know the government sucks at it, and partly because they’re at the whim of voters and the political system. They probably should have said a long time ago that factory produced beef and chicken is too risky for human consumption. But imagine the fallout. Omnivore’s Dilemma made fun of a Senator from South Dakota that had the gall to suggest Americans should eat less beef based on health concerns, he wasn’t re-elected.
This idea that everyone would get food poisoning just highlights the blind faith people have in the government regulatory industry.
The banking industry collapsed because people were stupid about their investments, and those are the same people that get sick. They put trust into things that should never have been trusted, they couldn’t be bothered to fact check or do a simple credit check or verify income.
Anyone that “lost money” in the crash should have known that was part of the risk of investing. From top to bottom the whole system was a mess of people that couldn’t be bothered reading the fine print. The rating agencies should not have been trusted to the point they were, which makes me wonder why they are still trusted, can anyone answer that? Mortgage lenders should have checked their clients, and the clients should have checked their banks. Meanwhile investors were LOVING the returns. How many people independently said, “no, the market is up too high, I really should be in something safer.” Hell no, people LOVED seeing their portfolio climb. They loved that their house value tripled in a couple of years. Those people could have willingly sold it for less, why didn’t they?
Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to do here? Find the imperfections in Libertarian philosophy, then use perfection to be the enemy of good?
There might be more food poisoning in Libertania, but remember that there is still plenty of it in a heavily regulated society. Glass still shows up in the proverbial burrito. But with regulation that is supposed to save us comes the addition of bullshit like bans on raw milk cheese and horse meat that is done for entirely political reasons without helping anyone. The difference is that in a libertarian environment you can’t pawn off your responsibility on the government then run around like nothing will go wrong. You might actually have to take responsibility for your own actions. That means verifying for yourself is a restaurant practices safe food handling, if a car is built with safety features, if an investment isn’t full of crap.
The idea that no one would get food poisoning highlights the blind faith libertarians have in a unregulated free market.
There is nothing wrong with putting some more onus on people to be responsible for their choices. Libertarian ideology just takes that much too far. I’m all for less government intervention; I’m not for almost no government intervention.
People took it for granted that government regulation would make their water safe. So no one thinks twice before turning on the tap.
Remove that regulation and the claim here is that everyone will die. But the reality is that instead everyone will have to take responsibility for their own water safety. They can’t just make the blind assumption it’s safe, they’ll get filters or boil or bottle. It’s the blind faith in regulation that leads to financial crises and massive outbreaks of food poisoning.
Safer != inoculated from all harm
So in both systems there will still be plenty of harm. What is it like buying a sandwich in a regulated society? The meat is tainted with listeria, the lettuce and tomato are covered with salmonella, the cook washed his hands with dirty water. But thank god the government makes sure no one has raw milk cheese.
The other threads in GD made a big deal about orphanages and kids dieing in the streets, but then ignore how many kids die in foster care.
At some point you’ll need to evaluate the regulatory system you put so much faith in.
And we haven’t even started with the failures in the TSA. All the joys of being at the airport are *reactions *to massive fuck ups the regulatory system couldn’t comprehend. Seriously, no one thought liquids might be a problem? You know after the underwear bomber they still couldn’t be bothered to check people’s underwear, but we all got to sit quietly with nothing on our laps for the last hour of an international flight.
Libertarian philosophy is fun to laugh at, but do it long enough and you’ll have to answer questions about the alternatives.
That’s the straw man people keep telling you about. Libertarians don’t say there won’t be food poisoning. What they say is that there currently is food poisoning, even though a lot of money id being thrown at the problem. Solution? More money. After that, more money.
Frankly, if you go through the list of regulatory failures, I’m pretty sure you’ll find someone that will eventually say, “It would have worked if there was more money.”
So it seems that may be the horrible, yet unacknowledged flaw, in the pro-regulatory stance. It will never ever have enough funding.
Exactly, which is why it is not about no government intervention, it’s about minimal. It’s about starting with personal responsibility and working from there, instead of starting with the assumption the government can save us–if only it had more money. It is entirely possible that certain regulation can make people more free.
You didn’t follow the bouncing ball clearly laid out for you. You posted the straw man, I mocked the straw man, then you posit that I’m posting the straw man. As a great philosopher once said, “Whatcha talkin’ about, Willis?”
Everyone, raise your hands if you followed that exchange.
That said, you are right. People in general expect too much of government, except when it comes time to pay for it. And politicians pander to those people. That said, there is a societal benefit to have one body do the work to maintain a high standard of food quality, freeing up individuals so that they don’t have to research every brand on the supermarket shelf.
By the way, I said almost no government intervention. Rational people with a libertarian bent realize that maybe you could cut 10% or 20%, maybe even 30%. Irrational libertarians start at 80% and work up.
And now a Libertarian comes out of the woodwork to show his true colors:
During the housing bubble there were many Americans who lost their savings by buying a house they couldn’t afford. These were not slick speculators who took a calculated gamble and lost. These were often high school dropouts with only a vague understanding of finance who were actively deceived by bankers and brokers.
To say that these high school dropouts “should have known better” is to admit that “Libertarianism” is nothing but love for a caveat-emptor laissez-faire Dog-eat-Dog “Utopia” of Greed.
Just as card sharks thrive on bad poker players, “Libertarian” businessmen delight in the stupidity of the masses.
Thank you, emacknight, for showing up and helping us make our case.
It would be enormous comfort to doctrinaire vegetarians if people had to slaughter and process their own meat. Tofu recipes would be all the rage. Note to self: as the libertarian jugguernaut gains momentum towards world domination, get heavily invested in soybean futures.
And what exactly happened to the brokers and bankers that tricked people into taking out loans they shouldn’t have? Didn’t the government bail them out?
Uh … I’m not sure which side of the fence you’re on…
Are you trying to argue that American government having right-wing policies that kowtow to the philosophy of Greed is an argument against rational governance? :dubious:
I’m saying that you can’t point to the crisis as a failure of a free market if everything about the crisis has the fingerprints of government intervention, including a reward of the bad actors by the government afterward.
So what you’re saying is the food industry is in terrible shape because government regulation doesn’t work.
And in a situation where there is a problem, the solution arises because of market forces.
So where are the private food inspection agencies? The ones that arise to address problems in the food industry? According to you, the problems exist now. So where is the free market solution?
Either the government is doing an adequate job and there’s no need for private food inspectors; or the food industry is suppressing the development of private food inspection; or solutions don’t just arise spontaneously even when there is a need for them. Any of which is evidence that the premises of libertarianism aren’t true.
Other posters provided answers, but there’s a much simpler one. They cut corners expecting nothing serious will happen. It’s not a perfectly rational decision to drive while impaired. However, plenty of people will nevertheless do that expecting that they won’t be killed nor kill anybody.
Even with regulations in place, it’s not particulary rare that a food producer or provider will cut corners. And this despite the risk of being fined, temporarily closed, tarnishing the company’s reputation. And despite the risk of having customers actually die, the company going bankrupt and themselves ending in a jail.
Removing food regulation and controls will result in what you would expect on the roads if there wasn’t any cop to enforce driving regulations, DUI, etc…
People aren’t perfectly rational, never were, will never be (and corporations are ran by people). Plus, there are situations where taking risks is the rational thing to do if you think only in terms of bottom line, especially short-term bottom line.
And what I’m saying is, you’re awfully cavalier about the prospect that people might die before anyone notices a problem. What makes you think you won’t be the one dying?
Do you test all your water every time you bathe or drink? Do you inspect the kitchens when you eat out? Do you interview the grocery or restaurant workers? Do you know what goes on at your meat slaughtering plants? Do you know who picked your lettuce? Do you test all the fabric in your home to make sure it’s not asbestos? Do you test all the paint to make sure there’s no lead? Do you test your bandaids to make sure they’re sanitized? Do you test your aspirin to make sure it matches the chemical composition it should?
Are you planning to start?
You mean, like, why would a baby formula maker put melamine in its products just to save a few bucks?
Or here’s a case closer to home: in 2008, Peanut Corporation of America sent out peanut butter even though they knew it had tested positive for salmonella. They “retested” it and a month later, a massive salmonella outbreak occurred which killed nine people and injured almost 700 more.
A few weeks prior to the outbreak, the FDA had become interested in a shipment of contaminated peanuts which originated at the plant and which was denied entry into Canada. After the outbreak, FDA inspectors went to the Georgia plant and found,
It later came to light that the company owner, Stewart Parnell, had been lying about the safety of his products and complaining that the testing was costing him money.
So the answer to your question, jtgain, is “short term greed and selfishness”.
It also came to light that FDA inspectors had not been at that plant since 2001. This is evidence of what happens when the FDA inspectors turn a blind eye for a couple years. What evidence do you have that says the situation would be improved if we got rid of inspectors altogether?
The U.S.government has a fair amount of regulatory apparatus in place for banks and financial markets. Just so we can be clear about our areas of agreement and disagreement, in general terms would you prefer to see that regulatory apparatus strengthened or weakened?
For the pre-crisis period one can point to regulators and economists giving strong warnings about the dangers of, e.g. unregulated derivatives trading, but the G.W. Bush Administration insisted on absolutist “libertarian” and deregulation dogma. (Yes, other players including Clinton may have helped feed the frenzy, but G.W. Bush and cronies carried deregulation to absurd extremes.)
The post-crisis rewarding of corrupt bankers and institutions is a separate matter. The fact that some big investment banks (Lehman, Bear Stearns) were happily zeroed out while other bankers are now richer than ever suggests that there was corrupt hanky-panky involved but, unless your point is that “government is often corrupt and therefore should be abolished” I don’t see this as relevant. To refuse all government support and allow Wall Street to collapse would have been irredeemably irresponsible.
