Today, I was shopping for groceries. I wanted to make a spinach salad. I actually hesitated in choosing my produce. Sure, the chances of E. coli infecting my spinach leaves aren't large, but they may be larger than my chances of getting blown up by a terrorist, and we've gone to war over that. Yet lately, my government can't seem to protect me from contaminated produce, lead paint, or even poisoned pet food.
And it wasn't always this way. I feel as if I'm too young to be waxing nostalgic about how things were "back in my day" but back in my day, regulatory agencies actually regulated things. And if a company was willfully negligent when it came to say, keeping contaminants out of food, they could expect to be sued big.
But after a decade of the right wing mantra that consumer protection regulation "interferes with our freedom" and that Tort law needs to be reformed to protect companies from "frivolous" lawsuits, this is what has come to pass. (It seems to me that if you're a company exec, you get off easy. In an enlightened western socialized democracy, we just sue your corporation as a fictional person and hold it responsible for your failures. In China the government shoots you.)
As it turns out, our government can't protect us from cow feces in our salad, but expects us to trust them with warantless wiretapping and a "War on Terror."
Excuse me, but if this is the GOP's definition of freedom, we're going to end up re-living all the calamities that led to the regulatory revolution of FDR's days all over again. Rats in our meat, poison in our playpens, mercury in our water. Upton Sinclaire gives a great read, but I'd rather not live in "The Jungle."
Fundamentally, the idea that consumer protection regulation impairs our freedom is flawed. It's not freeing to have to waste time out of my day hemming and hawing over the produce aisle, doing research on what can be done to protect my family from food contaminants, and wondering which company can be trusted.
The GOP version of "freedom" looks like HBO's Deadwood and as far as I'm concerned, they can keep it. But hey, if the privitization and anti-regulation crusaders want the freedom to chow down on E. coli, I say eat up!
other freedoms we enjoy!
I totally agree. Those people must be kidding......... Hey man you are a very good writer! Very interesting stuff!
Government Regulations
The idea that government regulation interferes with freedom and consumer choice is not flawed and has a historical background. You alluded to the "regulatory revolution FDRs days." I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you never heard of the Schecter brothers.
The Schecters, a family of Jewish immigrants, ran a poultry business in New York. The Schecter's ran afoul of the New Dealers for the grave crime of offering their customers lower prices than what the "enlightened" New Dealers ruled prices should be in The National Industrial Recovery Act. The FDR administration fined the Schecter's over $7,000 and sentenced to three months in jail for the offense of offering lower prices. The Schecters took their case to the Supreme Court and won.
Also, you are getting your Roosevelts mixed up. Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle influenced Teddy Roosevelt, not Franklin, to institute food safety regulations.
E. Coli Conservatism, baby
Rick Perlstein's been on this beat for some time now.
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