The FDA is a Scam

Here’s a guy who blames “conservatism” for the rash of E coli and other contamination in the food supply: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/e_coli_conservatives

The gravamen of the piece is that the FDA has been defanged so much that it can’t do the job of protecting the food supply. Oh, and voluntary inspections don’t work. That’s what comes of smaller government: food poisoning.

In my opinion, the unholy alliance of government and big corporations has created a situation in which the food supply is particularly vulnerable. We get our food from God knows where, handled by God knows whom, and treated with God knows how little care. It is difficult to trace the origin of food borne pathogens or toxins, and nobody much remembers what entity was responsible for the last outbreak. The FDA exists to make us more comfortable with buying food from strangers, but it doesn’t really have the capability to protect us. It’s a con.

In a free society, where there were no subsidies for long distance transport and no state granted advantages to big corporations, we would likely get our food from more local, less anonymous sources. There would be more diversity of supply and less vulnerability to contamination. Moreover, this would mean suppliers would be more accountable to their customers and would more directly suffer the consequences of sloppy practices.

Without the FDA, we would all have to take more responsibility for the safety of our food. But we should be doing do that now because the FDA is unreliable and always has been. That we haven’t seen even bigger outbreaks is a function of luck and the operation of market incentives that make food providers try not to kill their customers. Throwing more money at the FDA and giving it more power as a reward for its ineffectiveness will serve only to make the public more complacent and more vulnerable.