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Our host wrote:
One of the biggest reasons I have fallen out of love with the whole Ayn Rand/laissez faire capitalism point of view in recent years is my exposure to all of the truly horrible stuff that unbridled capitalism, tied to exccessive corporate entanglement with government, has done to us as a people over the last 50+ years.Setting aside all the truly wonderful stuff we should thank laissez faire capitalism for, let’s consider the specific horribleness he cites:
[..] the main reason for the explosion in E. Coli deaths over the last 20 years had to do with changing the diet of factory farmed cows from grass to heavily subsidized corn productsI agree that this—along with other pernicious effects of corn subsidies—is a horrible situation. However, it’s clearly a point in favor of the laissez faire model.
Free money for corn growers et. al. is a classic example of government intervention gone awry that cannot be undone because of entrenched special interests. And the market’s flooding with cheap high fructose corn syrup is exactly the result we should expect from such bad policy.
I’ve long maintained that repealing all agricultural subsidies would be one of my first acts as Benevolent Libertarian Dictator. (Right after replacing all welfare and progressive taxation with a flat negative income tax).
The rest of Metavirus’ post is an expression of general dismay after listening to Michael Pollan in Food, Inc.
As the son of a farmer myself, I heartily recommend you explore the other side of the story–particularly The Omnivore’s Delusion, a farmer’s defense of industrial agriculture.
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(DOWN THE VINE
Syndication
One of the major problems in the program was that feed lots would feed cattle chicken manure to bulk up before slaughter .
i could see exactly what your response was going to be before i hit publish (and almost wrote a prebuttal) but i was tired and out of sorts. more on this later but food subsidies are only a piece of the puzzle. what is even more dangerous and toxic is the legalized bribery and extortion we have in this country, wherein the mega companies lobby, beg, borrow and steal to change the entire legal and regulatory framework to favor them or at least go easy. laissez faire capitalism, in its truest form, requires a dramatically scaled down regulatory structure and with the megacorporations we have today, we really have no effective mechanism to prevent them from making the law bend to their will. i'll have more later but please ponder on the fact that, without completely eliminating private money from the electoral process, this legalized bribery corrupts our system in ways that appear at least to me to be irreversible and are only leading us down the road to ruin.
Another factor is compliance costs: per unit of sale, it's almost always easier for the largest corporations to comply with regulations. In fact they often lobby in favor of laws that will hurt smaller operations. See for example Mattel's behavior.
If there is an effective mechanism for avoiding special interest influence over law and regulation that doesn't involve limiting the extent of regulations and subsidies (incl. tax breaks), I haven't found it.
I'm not willing to toss out the first amendment just because you don't like what rich interests have to say or where they're paying to say it.
Well, therein lies the crux of my problem.
On the one hand, our system today is horribly corrupt — with multibillion-dollar multinationals paying off politicians to write laws that favor them, get them off the hook, loosen safety standards, squelch competition, pollute the environment, distribute contaminated food without legal liability, criminalize criticism of their industry, etc., etc.
On the other hand you have free speech and all that entails.
I really don't know what the solution is but I am convinced that we cannot continue on much longer without something being done to remedy it.
It's not such a dilemma when you support both greater economic and greater personal freedom.
I'll group your points…
solved by limiting regulation:
1) squelch competition
2) criminalize criticism of their industry
solved market forces in the absence of regulation:
3) safety standards
solved by Pigovian economics and regulation:
4) pollute the environment
solved by a better court system:
5) distribute contaminated food without legal liability
Now, to expound…
1-2) These are trivial to solve with a libertarian approach.
3) Safety regulation is a more complicated story, since we've gotten used to everything being approved by FDA-like agencies. But if we could get people away from the mentality that it's the government's job to ensure product safety, consumers would be more alert (caveat emptor!) and the market would step up. Unsafe products are bad business.
Admittedly some lives will be lost if we dissolve or pared down FDA-like agencies. But also less progress would be stifled, meaning more lives saved. I think the later produces better results over time, much like I think faster economic growth produces better results over time than doing redistribution in the name of wealth equality (as I've argued before).
But then I'm something of a 'heartless' darwinist, not a 'bleeding heart' utopianist. The further left you are the more you'll value saving people in the here-and-now by reallocating resources—at the expense of those less tangible people who get saved by greater economic progress.
4) Pigovian economics and associated regulation for the environment will remain tricky. I don't have a magic bullet here, but I do think that getting rid of the other wastes above will give us more time and other resources to devote to questions of how to efficiently price negative externalities.
5) Lastly, legal reform. I of course applaud the rule of law, but it seems to me that our adjudication system for resolving questions of liability could be a lot better. This is more your department, I'm no expert here, but I get the sense our system works for the benefit of lawyers and rich interests at the expense of just results.
More idealistic libertarians than I will speak of privatizing the court system, esp. for civil disputes. This strikes me as somewhat pie-in-the-sky, but I dunno, not my area.
"Admittedly some lives will be lost if we dissolve or pared down FDA-like agencies," apparently not a problem if it is not you our yours.
Yeah, because ensuring the safety of our water supply and food supplyis so obviously not a public good that we should use out tax dollarsto fund. /snark
A water supply is a public good if there is plenty of it and it's shared by most people.
The food supply is normally much more varied and not a public good.
I did not say it wasn't a problem, but solutions can be worse than problems.
Just to be clear do you think we should have food safety regulations,oversight and inspection
The FDA and USDA do more harm than good in my estimation.
This is not the same as saying there should be no regulations, oversight, or inspections--just that I don't think these bureaus offer a net benefit.
But we've come to rely on what they do. Most government agencies are kind of like drugs, their use expands over time and creates dependence. Taking a hatchet to them can temporarily throw a lot of things into disarray, similar to withdrawal.
And there seems to be no political will for this because people aren't good at weighing the intangibles of lost growth and efficiency, so it's not something I've given a lot of thought to other than raising awareness.