Anti-Food Safety

 Regulation  No Responses »
Apr 022009
 

I just now decided that I’m 100 percent opposed to Food Safety. Safe, healthy food I like. I even think there is a role for government in food safety. Having such a thing as a Food Safety Institute at the W.K. Kellogg Company in Battle Creek could be a good thing, too. But not when the organization that’s directing it is “an international, non-profit organization that works to develop uniform laws, regulations, and guidelines in the food safety industry.”

It’s that part about uniform laws and regulations that gets me. Uniform laws and regulations are a time-honored method to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Uniform bank regulations across state lines are what enabled a few big banks to gobble up the smaller ones and become too big to fail, leading to financial meltdown and the destruction of our political system.

Uniform laws and regulations are going to kill local food markets and producers in favor of big ones who will be able to maneuver the political and technical intricacies of compliance. The giant conglomerates tend to be annoyed by the fact that Minnesota has different regulations than Kansas. But local regulations mean there are local openings for local food-competitors in Minnesota and Kansas that the big guys would like to eliminate. Under uniform regulations, on the other hand, those who can achieve economies of scale will be the winners who take all.

Maybe Round One of new regulations isn’t going to outlaw the Amish roadside baked-goods sellers that I occasionally patronize on my bike rides in Indiana and Ohio. But eventually they will. It’s a process that has already started.

I suppose the big guys will want to act quickly on this, before too many people catch on to what’s happening to us. And there is a growing awareness. Note the article by Caleb Stegal titled “I Did Taste” at Front Porch Republic:

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting of Kansas secessionists. The participants were rowdy, complaining of economic gigantism squashing them flat and bureaucratic thugs hounding their every move. They were all sick and tired of worker-ant existence in the hive-mind of American groupthink and they wanted out. Despite the quintessentially political nature of the gathering, politics proper never came up. Conservative and liberal meant nothing in that room, and party affiliation even less.

Kansas patriots fomenting disunion? No, though there are a few of those kicking around these parts. These were local farmers organizing a farmer’s market.

It’s people like this that uniform laws and regulations will squash like a bug. And it’s not a bug that would theaten your food safety.

BTW, here’s the best one-liner from the Caleb Stegal article: “Food rots. If it doesn’t rot, it’s not food.”

Place. Limits. Liberty.

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 022009
 

Wow! This may be the best blog discovery of the year: Front Porch Republic. I found it while looking for articles about NCAA basketball and Tom Izzo, of all things.

The subheadline of this blog is “Place. Limits. Liberty.” Where else do you go to find those three words linked together like that? The “About” page has this paragraph to explain itself:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

I was tempted to highlight the words and phrases in that paragraph that push all the right buttons for me, but that would be most of them. I especially like that it links social and political issues to “Place.” That emphasis tempted me to rave about it over at The Spokesrider instead of here.

The only name I recognize in the list of contributing editors and editors-at-large is Rod Dreher — and that’s not someone I’ve paid much attention to.

An article by James Matthew Wilson titled, “Sex, Technocrats, and Technobrats,” suggests that maybe somebody besides myself has actually read Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address. I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to pope-talk, but I’ve read that speech in translation, and have since been amazed at all of the pope’s supporters and enemies who talk as though they’ve read it or heard it but have not. They may have read about it in the newspapers, but they haven’t read what he had to say.

According to this article, the pope has gotten a lot better reception in Africa than on Facebook.

Well, there are probably a lot of other blogs where I can read about pope-things. But this blog ties all these issues to place. If it continues to do that, it’s going to be a keeper.

The NYT on Goran Suton

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 012009
 

It’s good to see that there is still some redeeming social value to the New York Times. Lots of newspapers and lots of bloggers have written lots of words about Goran Suton after he was named the Midwest Regional’s Most Outstanding Player in leading the MSU Spartans to the Final Four. Many of them have told how his family came to Lansing from war-torn Bosnia. But none of them except the NYT snagged a photo of Goran and his brother playing basketball outside their home near Sarajevo, and none of them told how their grandfather chased errant balls for them so they wouldn’t be the ones to risk getting blown up by land mines.

The article is written by Joe Lapointe and is titled, “A game of survival.”

What’s good for Obamamobiles is good for America

 Bailouts  No Responses »
Apr 012009
 

It has been a couple hundred years since we last had a Renaissance man as president. But now we have someone who not only can run a successful election campaign, but whose uncanny eye for tax evaders to run his administration is not in the least diminished by his ability to simultaneously run a multinational manufacturing conglomerate and fill out his NCAA men’s basketball bracket.

It’s not all roses and sunshine, of course. There is a lot of whining about the way he’s taken over an automotive manufacturing company. But the chronic naysayers overlook the fact that this isn’t the first time a government has run a car company. Think of vehicles like the Lada Oka for the proletariat and the Volga GAZ for the nomenklatura. Those were not the products of free-market capitalism.

And despite their occasional defects those vehicles had a huge social benefit: No TV advertising. No Howie Long interrupting the NCAA basketball games to make fun of Ford’s “man-step” and of truck owners who wear dorky clothes.

True, when you see Howie Long doing his sales pitches, you now are watching your tax dollars at work. But certainly the same president who decided the bailout recipients should give back their bonuses is going to make sure that government-subsidized shills on TV should give back, too, won’t he? Why should that money go to celebrities and advertising executivies, when it could instead go straight into UAW wages and UAW campaign contributions? The same president who decided Rick Wagoner needed to step down will certainly be able to get Howie to shut up before the Final Four starts this weekend. Like I said, a huge social benefit.

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