10 thoughts on “When bacon is outlawed …”

  1. When buying and selling is controlled by government, the first thing to be bought and sold is government control.

    The big corporations make sure that you need a government license for everything. That way, they can strangle competition. This is why you read of gun dealers who are in favor of regulation.

    My brother wanted to open a bowling alley in his hometown, because the nearest one is 15 miles away in the next town over. The city and county wanted over $500,000 in taxes and impact fees, so he gave up. A week later, a large grocery chain announced that they wanted to open a store in the town, and the city agreed to waive the half million in fees and taxes.

    The playing field is set up to discourage small business.

  2. a) I’d love to try to smoke my own bacon. Sounds friggin’ awesome. In fact, I’m putting that on my list of “Shit to do before I die” and rather high up at that.

    b) Divemedic is correct. Licensing is primarily a crony-capitalism enabling device. When I was an active wedding photographer, the bigger shops were trying to get the craft to require a license. Not just a high price tag, either – you had to be ‘board certified’ and your pictures had to be approved by the same companies calling for the licensing.

    I have no problems with licensing, if it is voluntary and not carried out by the state. As it is, it’s nothing more than either graft or crony-capitalism.

    That bacon looks amazing, I hope I can figure out a good enough recipe to do the same.

  3. I am generally sympathetic to government involvement when it comes to legitimate public health (not public health as socialists understand it, public health in terms of preventing outbreaks of communicable disease). But there has to be aspects of life that are beyond government control. The courts often love to use de minimis to justify government power on the margins. I think the same concept should protect freedom, even some dangerous freedoms (dangerous in terms of overall public health), on the margins. This is one of those margins.

  4. “Home-prepared food is prohibited from being sold or provided to the public,” said Chicago Public Health Department spokeswoman Quenjana Adams.

    Because heaven forbid letting people make their own choices about what they want to eat.

  5. It is more complicated than that. Even with government regulation, we’ve had hundreds of people die in 2012 because drug companies didn’t keep their drugs sterile. Mold, foreign counterfeits, etc.

    Do you know which company makes the generic drug you’re taking? What about when you or your loved one are sick in the hospital? The libertarian pipe-dream of ‘market forces’ and ‘invisible hand’ is slow and impersonal and imperfect.

    This guy might happen to know how to cook meat properly, but how far are you willing to trust strangers, if there wasn’t government oversight? If you eat bacon at a restaurant and go blind from a virulent trichinosis infection along with every other patron that night, what are you going to do? Take your lumps, or whine for a payout? And past what you would do, what do you think most Americans would do? What would the jury think is fair?

    Our society barely functions now, with parasite lawyers bleeding the health care system now. If you want more liberty and less government oversight, you should be advocating for real tort reform. Our society can’t function with less government oversight + the current legal system.

    1. This guy might happen to know how to cook meat properly, but how far are you willing to trust strangers

      Well, being that EVERY SINGLE restaurant I visit is staffed by people who I do not know, pretty much unconditionally since that’s reality.

      Gov’t oversight eh? Tell me, a) are the gov’t agents you’re talking about who do the ‘oversighting’ personally known to you? Otherwise, you’re STILL trusting strangers. b) Are those oversight agents *personally responsible* for not catching something? No? Can I sue the gov’t for not performing a good inspection? No?

      Private industries who’s nuts are in the fire perform this function are a better option. One thing we have here in Florida is a company who does truck inspections. If a trucker pays this company to do inspections on his rig, he gets a transceiver. If that transceiver is detected at an inspection station, it will (generally) send him through without an inspection. The deal the state has is that so long as <1% of the few truckers they do spot check fail, they will continue to allow other truckers to sail through.

      Guess which system has been able to keep trucks on the road at <1% failure rate?

      I agree about tort reform though, but increased gov't regulation isn't even remotely a good idea.

    2. I’d note that, in theory, generic manufacturers are strictly regulated by the FDA. They still have to follow GMP.

    3. No, its not more complicated than that. In fact, more people die because the FDA takes forever to approve drugs, and because of all the regulations makes it incredibly expensive.

      The libertarian pipe-dream of ‘market forces’ and ‘invisible hand’ is slow and impersonal and imperfect.”

      Hahaha what? And the government is fast and personal and perfect? No libertarians say that the free market is perfect, or that everybody would be happy and healthy. What we do say is that its the best system we have, and it gets the most people what they want. And yes, government regulation does help some people, but it also hurts others. The balance is in favor of the hurting.

      1. Most drugs that are submitted for approval aren’t life and death products. FDA actually has a fast track program for those which accelerates the approval process. This is one area I tend to split from libertarians on. While there are a great many criticisms that could be leveled at the FDA, and currently I think they are entirely too risk averse, the fact of the matter is that in an unregulated market, drug companies would kill a lot of people with poorly tested and ineffective products. Even in the small company I worked for, I’ve seen plenty of managers not wanting to believe what the data is really saying, and pressing forward with hopeless programs in the face of good science, to trust them in a completely unregulated market.

        Even libertarians who think torts can regulate drug companies instead of government agencies misunderstand how much data it would take to even build a case. Currently people have that data because the FDA makes them do studies. If that data had to be generated independently, the only people who could afford to bring tort claims are multi-millionares and billionaires.

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