An earlier post, Ag Outlaws, linked a Joel Salatin rant Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, in which he enumerated the ways that the regulatory system thwarted his efforts to produce and market superior foods.

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process. . .

Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

The rant goes on to detail his dilemma. How did things get so broken? These regulations are justified as being in the public's interest, and that before the advent of such regulations food was all but poisonous. Kevin Carson notes the errors of this view.

The NYT recently published an op-ed in honor of the 100th anniversary of publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. . .

“The Jungle,” and the campaign that Sinclair waged after its publication, led directly to passage of a landmark federal food safety law, which took effect 100 years ago this week. Sinclair awakened a nation not just to the dangers in the food supply, but to the central role government has to play in keeping it safe.

The only problem with the official version is that it's just about a 180-degree reversal of the truth in every detail. To get around the Art Schlesinger mythology, all you have to do is read Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism, a brilliant work of New Left history on the role of the regulated industries in formulating "The Great Trust-Buster's" regulatory agenda. You see, the big meatpackers were already subject to a federal inspection regime. The federal government had adopted the older system at their behest in the late nineteenth century, when an embarrassing tainted meat scandal threatened their market in Europe. The federal government at the time adopted inspection regulations for all meatpackers engaged in the export trade. It was a classic example of cartelization through the state: the meat exporters, which happened to be the largest firms, for all intents and purposes adopted an industry code enforced by the state. It was exactly the kind of code an industry might have adopted on its own initiative, with the added benefit of being non-defectable. So the costs of compliance were not a competitive issue between the big packers. There was only one drawback: it didn't apply to the small packers that didn't produce for the export market. What TR's Meat Inspection Act did was bring the small packers into the regime, to remove the competitive advantage they received from their exemption.

Kevin notes that nothing has changed and that the big players continue to seek protections.

It's a complex issue. Growers like Salatin provide the public with the very best foods, but they are usually driven out of business by "government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms". There are growers who don't have Salatin's skills or scruples that would prey on the public, for a while, if they were not prevented from doing so by regulations.

The problem is the one-size-fits-all approach of old fashioned regulatory systems. It's not hard to distinguish between growers like Salatin and the bad guys if you have any useful knowledge of the subject, but the regulations don't have that level of intelligence. If we would like to improve our food system this is one of the best ways to do it. Rather than ratcheting up the stringency of one-size-fits-all regulations - using food scares such as the recent e. coli spinach disaster as hobgoblins to menace the public - focus on developing a more intelligent regulatory system that truly serves the public rather than the food industry.