Regulations are written in blood
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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To continue with the argument of "the market will self-regulate and people wouldn't buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again"
Okay but how many people died, how many people are suffering long-term effects, and what's stopping them from adding a different deadly thing to our food?
wouldn’t buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again
Assuming there is perfect information in the market. In reality there is heavy information asymmetry.
It also assumes free competition while we have every market dominated by a few players buying up everyone else, often with cartel like behavior.
It also assumes it is immediately deadly poison, and doesn't do something like cause early dementia 25 years later.
It also assumes the masses behave rationally, which they won’t ever.
We’ll just get the cheapest shit with the limited information we are given, unless it is life-or-death, where we will pay any price out of fear.
To continue with the argument of "the market will self-regulate and people wouldn't buy that brand anymore so they would never do it again"
Turns out the parent company owns every other brand of that product, so going to another brand is meaningless
Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean. Also it assumes healthy competition and companies that are competing to make the best product at the chrapest price. It ALSO assumes brand lotalty isn't a thing, and consumers are judging things purely objectively.
Like, i understand the idea, but in practice there are a ton of caveats.
Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean
Not just smart enough, but informed enough. That means every person spending literally hundreds/thousands of hours per week researching every single aspect of every purchase they make. Investigating supply chains, performing chemical analysis on their foods and clothing, etc. It's not even remotely realistic.
So instead, we outsource and consolidate that research and testing, by paying taxes to a central authority who verifies all manufacturers keep things safe so we don't have to worry about accidentally buying Cheerios that are laced with lead. AKA: The government and regulations.
Also, if you want inspections to make sure there isn't bird shit in the milk, then you need regulation. Otherwise people are just drinking bird shit and they don't know.
And also they're already basically Monopolies. You don't have real options. Most food products come from like 3 mega corps who own hundreds of brands.
Also the evidence shows this isn't really true, anyway.
Bleach, actually. A small amount of bleach added to spoiled milk makes it taste brand new. The government actually suggested this in a few countries for a while.
Plaster in flour was common enough that after the miller, the middle men, and then the baker all added a cut, there were loaves being sold with less than 20% flour in them. The result was mass malnutrition.
Also, and this is a spicy one but backed by basic economics, regulations are a required element to capitalism. The notion that deregulation is pro capitalism is a misinterpretation of the idea that markets are self regulating. A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations. All our current economic woes are the result of straying away from proven economic theory (mostly deregulation) to the right allowing the corruption of the marketplace and emergence of a strong oligarchy.
A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.
We've had numerous laws precisely because companies couldn't play fair, and made things worse for all involved. The government didn't pass laws against company towns, scrip, and predatory pricing because they decided to ban things for fun.
Saw dust was also added to flour. Various heavy metals would be added to food to enhance their color.
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That second paragraph is a pretty concise explanation on why ancaps and their ideas are stupid.
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Speaking of Americans, at least half of us are criminally uneducated and watch literally nothing but Fox News. You can't teach them even with indisputable proof. If the talking heads say it's bad, then it's bad.
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Pure unadulterated capitalism means adulterated bread, wine, and milk.
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What is so incredible is that we are living st a time with such massive food surplus that it would blow the mind of anyone living in the past... but they will let all of it go to waste and just add bullshit to the food just because they can...
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Regulations, and safety laws, and labor laws are WRITTEN IN BLOOD. People have literally died for every regulation we have on the books, it’s WHY the laws were written
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just to point out the other side of this...
(and I already know I'ma be downvoted for just saying that)
Some regulations are bad. Many are good and we actually need them, but some are bad. For example, when there's a few large companies in an industry, they often lobby for regulations designed to increase the cost of doing business. While the big fish can pay the costs of these extra regulations, smaller companies cant, and just cant compete with the big fish, lowering the amount of competition in the industry and promoting more monopolistic behavior. We saw Openai try to do exactly this back when they went to Congress to warn the senators about the dangers of 'agi' and how it quickly needed to be regulated. Well they failed, and now there's tons of companies with their own products that rival Chatgpt in every way other than the brand recognition.
you don’t solve this by having less regulations lmao
its solved by getting money out of politics, along with removing regulations that don't make sense and keeping the ones that do
sure but regulatory capture and a controlled market are not really a counter argument to regulation so much as an argument for more regulation
strict rules enforcing disclosure and other sunshine laws are key to exposing corruption like you are suggesting
Folks here think regulation, and immediately put it to food and Ai or other white collar applications.
Working in plastic manufacturing for ten years, and chemical manufacturing for a few more, the term deregulatuon terrifies me. Regulations keep employees safe, and aims to keep the products we make safe.
I think of environmental impacts first and foremost, which is the kind of deregulation I assumed was meant with this regimes obsession with bringing back coal, oil, and mining/deforestation if our national parks.
Getting money out of politics is implemented with regulation. We only have one environment, and they want to deregulate environmental safety/preservation.
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The tweet itself limits its scope to food safety regulations specifically. The title of this lemmy post was condensed for brevity, which might create the impression that it's trying to make a larger point about regulations in toto. But I figured I could get away with it because I figured that surely people would read the tweet before commenting.
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Old saying "Fire and flight regulations are written in blood." Food regulations are likely written in various excretions?
There have absolutely been deaths due to unsafe, mass produced foods.
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That's just the free market working as intended. Collateral damage.
Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn't want them to drink bleach.
Edit: I tried to resist adding the "/s," but we live in crazy (stupid) times, so...
The Free Market (holy be thy name) gives you the choice between $1/bottle for milk with chalk and bleach, or $10/bottle for one with less chalk and bleach. If you want one without chalk and bleach, you'll need to find your own cow.
Also, the cows all have birth defects and need uranium-powered antibiotics to stay alive.
Now, let us open our song books to number 34: "Praise Hayek and His Perfect Mustache".
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Excellent idea! I'm sure that information will be readily available from independent trustworthy sources that are not the government! Failing that, I always have my trusty mass spectrometer in my kitchen and I run all my foods through it just in case!
With no regulation there will be no other milk brands.
Maybe people should do research on the available milk brands before giving it to their children if they didn’t want them to drink bleach.
Without regulation, the company could also just lie. Nothing would dictate that they would have to tell the truth about their product.
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“But what about my rights?? Drinking spoiled milk with chalk probably cures cancer or something, of course They don’t want you doing that! Why do you hate freedom?”
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Hands up if you didn't already know that. Or intuited it. To me this seems to be something only US-Americans who argue purely ideologically for a "small government" need reminding of. They're paradoxically often the first in line calling for government intervention when their drinking water is full of poop or something.
One of the weirdest aspects of America is that we think people whose job is making money for shareholders should have more power than the public servants we, the public, hire to work for us.
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Corporations wont let us have Medicare for All - why? Why do they ALL lobby so hard against it? It would make their costs cheaper, right? They wouldn't have to pay for our health insurance. Plus we could get medicines so we can be at work more instead of home sick or spreading sickness at work. So it must not be cheaper in some way for them to have Medicare for All - right? Why do they think it would be more expensive for THEM if we all had public health care?
Because that would detect cancer (and toxins) and allow us to class action sue companies for them. Can't sue if it was never detected. Thats why they find carcinogens and lead in kids’ products so much - their products dont have more lead in them, but kids all can be on Medicaid and that catches it. Flint, MI, water poisoning was detected by a kid on Medicaid.
They don't want us to all have healthcare because that is public science and it will absolutely detect what theyve been lying and poisoning us with. It would probably destroy all the big companies like Nestle, Johnson&Johnson, Colgate, etc...
Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.
Most US foods produced under their 'regulations' are forbidden in EU.
And for good reason.
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