On the stuff I write about, civil rights, immigration, criminal justice, national security–I generally come down on the side of reducing government, which makes me sympathetic to a number of libertarian writers who focus on the same subject. But this is the kind of thing on which, liberaltarian leanings aside, I just can’t get on board with:
In 1971, a New York man died of botulism after eating a can of Bon Vivant soup. If you’ve never heard of Bon Vivant soup, there’s a simple explanation: In no time at all, the company was bankrupt and the brand was as defunct as William McKinley.
The farms implicated in this episode are likely to find themselves oddly short of buyers in the coming months, if not years—unless they can prove they have taken drastic steps to clean up their act. But the burden of proof will be on them.
That’s Steve Chapman on how we don’t need to regulate the egg industry despite a recent salmonella outbreak. The reason I don’t buy the “unfettered free market” reasoning on this one is that companies, like human beings, tend to discount the potential future costs of risky behavior when faced with what they feel like prohibitive costs in the present. Second, an egg company going out of business because of a salmonella outbreak doesn’t help the people who might have not gotten sick with a more effective regulator in place, nor does it have any effect on whatever company taking its place making the same mistaken calculations in the future. There is, after all, a reason why this keeps happening.
