FOOD SAFETY AND SMALL FARMS: John Schwenkler writes:

Over the weekend, Tim Carney and Rod Dreher both had very nice columns on the controversy over the push for the implementation of a National Animal Identification System and other food safety measures being pushed in Congress that would likely pose serious burdens for smaller farmers and other producers who are unable to take advantage of the benefits of economies of scale. …

What Rod wants, then, is a system that puts stringent regulations in place on the larger producers while granting exemptions for smaller farmers who can’t reasonably be expected to meet them. But granting that this sort of route is clearly possible in principle, is it politically feasible? In my Doublethink piece on raw milk, the dynamic I detected in the battle over regulation in California was essentially the same one that Mark found in his work on the CPSIA controversy: in stark contrast to the naive image of anti-regulatory businessmen squared off against the would-be food nannies in government, the actual relationship between business and government was much more, well, symbiotic than that; it was the corporations that were pushing for the new regulations, and it was hard not to think that they were doing so at least partly because they were cognizant of the effects that such regulation would have on the competition. “Regulation”, as Tim Carney put it to me in a quotation from that article, “always helps the big guys by creating barriers to entry, but there’s a more important dynamic here: When you give the government power, you give the lobbyists power. It also works the other way: When only a handful of businesses dominate an industry, bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to control that industry.”

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