What is the Best Paradigm for Guaranteeing Safe Foods?

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An effective talking point of the last election was that the evil Bush Administration had turned the American food supply into poison, and that a new administration would save us with bigger government and tighter regulation.

I admit, I was so focused on the slow food revolution that took place during the Bush years to notice how bad our food supply had become. Slow Foods is the idea that food should be grown locally. It includes Community Supported Argriculture (CSAs) and Farmers Markets.

For those unaccustomed to thinking, Slow Foods is the antithesis of food regulation. Slow foods is about taking what comes naturally. Regulation is about making things regular.

It is not a conincidence that there was a surge in small organic farms during an administration that was loosening some of the regulations that made such farms untenable in previous decades.

Anyway, since the new President's Food Safety Workgroup was such an important thing in our exciting changed world, I thought should check out their newly revamped FoodSafety.gov to see how things were going.

The site provides a slick presentation of the same basic food preparation and safety info found on most food safety sites ... with a big emphasis on the role that your government plays in food safety.

The site had the script for the food recall alert that I added to this post.

I scanned through the list to find out what's cooking in food safety localley. I found a food recall with a really bizarre twist. Here is the gist of the recall:

Thrive Foods, a Lindon, Utah, establishment, is recalling approximately 3,790 pounds of assorted [Freeze Dried] meat and poultry products because they were produced without the benefit of federal inspection.

The first thing that struck me about this article was that they were recalling Freeze-Dried food. This made me wonder how often freeze-dried food is the vector for food poisoning.

The other thing that struck me about the food recall was that this food appears to have been meant for the food-preparedness community. This community has been hopping of late as people who fear hyper inflation stock up on survival supplies. (The market for this food is people who are not pleased with the administration.)

The recall emphasized that the USDA had not determined that the food was bad. The reason for the recall is that the food did not "benefit from government inspection."

I doubt the survivalists who bought this food think that any food benefits from government inspection. People who see the government as the enemy are unlike to see benefits in government control of the inspection process.

Now, I actually am a big believer in inspection and quality control processes. I would even buy the idea that a company should recall a product simply for lack of quality control. The question in my mind is if the inspection should be done by the government or third party.

In my readings, I've come across quite a few horror stories of corrupt government inspectors in 3rd world countries. Government controlled food inspection often takes on political tones as inspectors have the ability to reward friends with lenient inspections and enemies with hypercritical inspections.

In many cases, it is the food inspector that destroys the livelihood of small independent farms in favor of the corporate behemoths that can adapt the inspection process into their business cycle.

Homogenized control of the inspection process invariably favors large conglomerates like Walmart with the power to control and influence the inspection process. Federally run inspection system tends to create a homogenous food supply.

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shales recounts the case Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. In this case, inspectors of the NRA objected to the bizarre kosher processing of chickens done by a the small Jewish owned firm. Surprisingly, the Supreme Court of the FDR era ruled in favor of the small kosher poultry shop.

The case shows how the intolerance of government inspectors to different food processing traditions.

So, I think that the better form of food inspection is one where there are many different inspectors, and the inspectors (along with the food producers) are liable for their food.

The quality control in freeze-dried market is different from fresh fruits, which is different from peanut butter, which is different from raw meat. The Walmart way is different from the Slow Foods way.

There needs to be quality control. I've thought the best way to go about the process is for the government to set minimum standards. Private companies could encapsulate and extend those standards.

This new hyper-partisan food safety system, where the regulators award political friends and attack political enemies, is, in my humble opinion, the worst possible direction for food safety.

Going Coupon Happy

I spent the last two days listing coupons and sales on my little ecommerce site.

This year, I've been thinking of hitting the thrift stores for Christmas. The cool thing about thrift stores is that pretty much all of the money spent on an item in a local thrift store stays in the local community. In bad economic times, I think it is wise to bulster to local economcy.

The other cool thing is that gifts purchased used tend to hold more of their value than new gifts. Most new things lose 70% to 90% of their value with the first purchase.

I had been thinking of doing some shopping on ebay. Ebay is great because it gives a good feel of the resale value of a product. The problem with eBay shopping is the hefty shipping expense.

On the selling used things puzzle. I decided to trying selling a few used books on Amazon.com. Last time I played this game, I was able to sell books for about a quarter to half the list price of the book. The books I wanted to sell had several people listing the same title for a penny. Amazon.com charges $3.99 for shipping. I am taking the large number of penny books as a sign that the bottom fell out of the used book market.

The Reason for States' Rights

I fear that many people today have never been exposed to the reasoning behind state's rights. Our public education system encourages folks to follow the following line of reasoning: The Federal Government is the biggest government. As it is the biggest government, important things like health care and education should be regulated by the Feds.

The thinking for states' rights follows a different path. This thinking holds that those things most important to an individual should be administered in a realm that can be affected by the individual.

Since it is extremely difficult to influence the decision making process 3000 miles away in Washington DC, health care and education are better left to the states.

Even the states are too large these days, which is why people are usually better off with insurance companies. The best insurance companies are small local mutual funds.

Practical experience shows that education at private schools is more cost-effective and usually does a better job than state funded education. This is because the service takes place in a realm directly under control of the customers.

The founders were happy with the protection and kinship with England, but had horrible experiences when the King of England meddled in private affairs. They understood implicitly that things that are important to a person should be administered in a realm that could be influenced by that person.

Our education system pretends to have a universal perspective of things. When we come out of school, we think of the universal perspective as a higher perspective. However, as people experience life, they find the greatest frustrations are with the big monolithic structures of big business and big government that dominates the economic landscape.

The universal perspective claimed by Hegel and Marx is at best an abstraction, at worst it is an illusion (the big lie). Society simply functions better when we realize that each person has a unique perspective and the ideal society minimizes dependencies. Where dependencies occur, the governance of the dependency should take place in a realm where the dependents have some influence on decisions.

The founders realized this nature of man and structured a government with multiple branches and layers and reserved to the states those powers which most directly affected the people.

The Senate Should Not Proceed with an Unconstitutional Effort

Every Senator took an oath to defend the Constitution. The current health care proposal to transfer the regulation of health care from the states to the Federal government is in direct opposition to the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.

The Founders of the United States believed strongly that those programs that most directly affected people should be handled by administrative authority close to the people.

This law establishing the Federal government as the primary authority over all health care creates the dynamic where only political organizations with enough clout to influence the power brokers in Washington DC will have their health concerns address.

This legislation is antithetical to the very foundations of the American Experiment.

In upcoming weeks, the Senate will have a procedural vote on the Health Care proposal.

Many argue that Senators should wait until after the reconciliation of the House and Senate bills to voice their opposition.

I contend, however, that the bill is such an egregious violation of both the Constitution and common sense that Senators should stop the bill in procedure, for there is no way for the legislation to continue without violating the virtue of distributed rule given to us in the US Constitution.

Proceeding is a direct violation of the oath of office swore by the leaders of this nation.

Competing for Government Largess

In past posts I've argued that the role of competition in the free market has been way over played. "Freedom" is the operative word of the free market. Free people choose will compete and cooperate on multiple levels through their lives.

For example, health care is an act in which a doctor and patient engage in a cooperative effort to improve the patient's health. Different doctors might compete for the patient's business. The patient will often choose a doctor based on which doctor is the most cooperative.

A multidimensional free market system has greater substance than simple competition. The free market excels because it tends to create a mix where the competition exists at levels that tend to improve service.

Government regulation and financed industries add a political dimension to markets. This political dimension tends to throw the system off kilter.

When government is involved, the players in the market compete on who is best at getting the government cash, or they compete on who is best able to game the regulatory regime.

Government tends to have a diversionary effect which transforms a market from a system optimized to the needs of the individuals to one optimized to the state's political concerns.

The proponents of government controlled health care often use the term "competition" in their rhetoric; however, improvement does not come from the mere existence of competion, but from the form of the competition.

As health is an attribute of the individual, the private market for insurance has a strong track record for improving care because the system hones competition to the needs of the patient.

NOTE: The introduction of third party insurance appears to have had a negative effect similar to government control as doctors are forced to compete on their ability to please the insurance company and not on the needs of the patient.

Using the fact that insurance is a bad model for health care does not really justify creating an even worse system.

The form of the competition matters more than the existence of competition. We would see the greatest improvement in health care if created a structure where people self-financed their care.

Making the government the primary player in health care will lead to stagnation even if there are token competitions that make health care providers compete for government largess.

Public Assistance is Better Than the Public Option

There will always be people who have needs that exceed their resources. I contend that, for these cases, openly acknowledged public assistance is preferable to the public option.

The public option, like all pooling mechanisms, tries to address health care needs by placing those with extraordinary needs in a pool with healthy people. The hope being that there's enough healthy people to cover the cost of the sick.

This system is intellectually dishonest. The system intentionally is selling people a product that they do not want.

Even worse, by taking people's health care resources, the public option reduces people who were self-sufficient into a state of dependency.

The intellectual dishonesty behind the current health care debate reduces million of once free Americans into a state of subservience.

The intellectual honesty of open public assistance is a welcome alternative to the reforms ideas that involve coercing people into systems that do not hold their best interest at heart.

The one challenge of public assistance is that it is difficult to distinguish those who legitimately need additional assistance with care from those who do not. The Medical Savings and Loan provides a structure that provides medical care as needed with loans. It can then identify those whose resources fall short of being able to provide for care.

On Intellectual Honesty in Health Care

Pooled insurance is, by its very nature, an act of intellectual dishonesty. The basic idea behind the scheme is an attempt to ignore the unfortunate reality that some medical expenses are unpredictable by jumbling up everyone's health care savings into a common pool.

Nor surprisingly, this little active of intellectual dishonesty leads to monumental corruption, waste and a great deal of angst. Even worse, it totally destroys the pricing mechanism which makes it difficult for health care providers to provide care where it is most needed.

This may seem counterintuitive to members of the political class, but the cure for intellectual dishonesty is not new layers of regulation, but a little bit of honesty.

The Medical Savings and Loan replaces pooled insurance with a system of structured savings coupled with interest free loans. The interest free loans anticipate a high default rate.

This elastic structure allows for self-funded health care but can cover unanticipated costs and does not overburden a family in case of catastrophe.

The main thing the structure accomplishes is a person by person accounting of health care costs.

By restoring honest accounting into the system, people will be in a better position to see their health care expenses in the proper context of their entire life. This necessarily will improve preventive care and might encourage people to make diet and lifestyle choices that reduce long term costs of care.

Restoring the self-financing mechanism also will restore price negotiations between doctor and patient. This will restore the pricing mechanism and bring costs down.

Finally, by honestly accounting for people's health care expenses, our society will be better positioned to identify those needing additional help with care.

The Medical Savings and Loan is not antithetical to the concept of redistributive care.

The system actually aids in the redistribution process by providing the information that separates those needing additional resources from those simply skilled at gaming the system.

The dishonest political process that we see going on in Washington is unlikely to improve the integrity of the health care system. A new business model for funding health care based on providing quality information about individual health care needs would restore the integrity of the system.

Popper on Hegel

I must confess that I've never managed to read all the way through any of Hegel's books. Yes, I know that professoriat is enchanted with the Hegellian spell and that Hegel laid the foundation of modern progressivism. I just find his find his writings to be completely vacuous.

I supsect that the real reason for Hegel's popularity is that his style allows intellectuals to read between the lines. When one gets to read between the lines, one can inject one's own random musings into the mix at will.

I've read several books by academicians about Hegel. Most of the interpretations I've read gave radically different views of what the highly influential philosopher was saying. As life is short, I gave up on Hegel, hoping that the rest of the world would have given up on the Hegelian/Marxist direction as a dead end.

I should preface that. I gave up on Hegel before American overwhelmingly elected a Hegelian style change agent into the Whitehouse.

As the Obama Administration has revived in full the Hegelian/Marxist approach to politics, I fear we might have to go back to reading Hegel and Marx to figure out how to get out the mess that the Democrats are making of our country.

Rather than reading source texts. I decided to take a short cut and start by rereading Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx. As the title suggest, Popper dislikes Hegel ... even more than me.

The reason for this post is the following quote:

[...] it seems improbably that Hegel would ever have become the most influential figure in German philosophy without the authority of the Prussian state behind him. As it happened, he became the first official philosopher of Prussianism [...] Later the state also backed his pupils (Germany had [...] only state-controlled Universities)

The Prussian state was a reactionary state that was looking for a way to restore the monarchy and to stop all of the talk of Constitutions and liberty that came from the American and French revolutions.

In order to counter the new philosophies, Prussia elevated Hegel to the position of official state philosopher. Hegel then stitched together pieces from the Western philosophic tradition to create a new dialectical philosophy in which the state was the highest entity.

Since the schools of the restored Prussia were under state control, Hegel created a political structure of community activists that infiltrated and controlled the education system.

In other words, it is likely that, from the start, Hegel's philosophy was nothing more than sound that came from his mouth while politicos did the important work of capturing and controlling the schools.

The political structure is likely the real source of Hegel's influence and not his works. The structure had the state supporting of an official philosophy and a political structure in the schools that advanced the philosophy. The primary aim of the philosophy was the preservation and stregthening of the state.

The Hegelian ideas came to the United States and became the bedrock of the American public school system through John Dewey.

While Hegel's philosophy is mushy sentimentalism, the marketing of the philosophy has, from its inception, been a cold hard targetted system of organizing activists and infiltrating schools with the goal of strengthening the state.

Paulo Freire, Bill Ayres, Ailinsky and others have added very little to the debate, they are simply executing a political formula that was in the works centuries ago.

The sad story is that the foolish conservatives have been so enthralled with the idea of centralizing power that Hegelianism has gone unchecked and is simply back to do more harm. I wish there were a way to challenge the ideas of Hegel and Marx. How to you challenge dialectical mush other than pointing out that it's pretentious mush and that it is in the classical liberal tradition (not the Hegelian inspired modern-liberalism) that people can find both the love of ideas and freedom.

The Usurped Against the Usurper

I saw a news clip in which Judge Napalitano proposed that state legislatures push forward an amendment to the Constitution to block the Federal power grab of healthcare.

Such an amendment would be the best possible outcome of the 2009 health care idiocacy.

Speaking as a fool who actually read two of the horrible bills, I would think that any rational being familiar with the damage that out-of-control unchecked legislation can do would be looking for anyway to stop this process dead in its tracks.

A Constitutional Amendment passed by the state legislatures would not only be the best possible way to stop this legislation, it could set up a precedent for states seeking to defend state's rights.

A Constitutional Amendment would also highlight a fact glossed over by the media that insurance is already a highly regulated industry. Each of the 50 states have a large insurance regulatory process in place.

I suspect that both Democratic and Republican state legislators would be supportive of an amendment preserving state control of health care as a large number of the legislators have a great deal of skin in the game with local health care efforts.

The one big obstacle to state's writing an amendment is that the state process for amending the Constitution involves a Constitutional Convention ... and their is fear that such a thing could get out of hand.

However, I think there is such focused angst about the current health care fiasco that it is highly likely that the states could establish a focused effort that addresses a single issue.

I would like to see the wording say something pithy like:

Amendment 28: "Regulation of Health care is one of powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution and reserved to the States and the people by the 10th admendment."

The pithy statement re-inforces that the health care power grab was Unconstitutional from the start.

On the Redistribution of Income

Conservatives make a big mistake when they get all lathered about the redistribution of income.

In the left/right culture war that has dominated civilization for these last centuries, the "redistribution-of-wealth" is nothing more than a slogan. It is an empty promise made by politicians in the quest for power.

To move beyond the culture war, people need to look past the slogan to strategy. The strategy behind the slogan of redistributed wealth is the ancient technique of pitting the ends against the middle. The technique of pitting the ends against the middle was precisely the technique used by Caesar in the destruction of the Republic of ancient Rome and has been used numerous times by groups seeking to rise to political power.

Emperor Napoleon pitted the ends against the middle in his moments of fame.

Using the dialectical methods of Hegel, Karl Marx penned a compelling philosophy around the strategy that has hypnotized more than one academician.

The Marxist tradition formed an alliance of the intelligentsia and the proletariat in a class struggle against the bourgeoisie. The term "intelligentsia" refers to the political and academic world. "Proletariat" refers to workers and the lower class, and "bourgeoisie" refers to the middle class.

Marxism is a class struggle that pits the ends (the ruling class and under classes) against the middle class.

The ruling class uses the promise of redistributed wealth in the class struggle. However, the redistribution of income rarely happens.

The promised redistributed income is actually paradoxical. Were the process to redistribute income as promised, it would simply create a new middle that one would feel compelled to struggle against again.

The form of the revolution in both ancient and modern times is that the ruling class will promise a redistribution of income to unite the ends against the middle. The ruling class says that if you give us unbridled power, we will use that power toward the end of social justice.

Inevitably, the consolidation of power becomes the means unto itself and the promise of redistributed justice devolves into an overall impoverishment of both the middle and lower classes.

We see that the modern revolutions that pit the ends against the middle have resulted in a series of epic atrocities with hundreds of millions perishing in famine and war.

The process of uniting the ends against the middle is paradoxical and flawed.

Unfortunately, the public debate gets dominated by people like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck who get caught up in arguing against the slogan and fail to understand that it is the strategy behind the slogan (not the slogan itself) that leads a society to ruin.

Attempts to argue against the slogan of redistributed wealth allow agitators of the left the opportunity to employ the most effective tool in their arsenal: Wealth Envy.

To win the debate, defenders of freedom must talk about substance and not slogans. After all, there really is nothing wrong with a redistribution of wealth.

For that matter, the great irony of the modern debate is that the free market, when properly implemented, has proven to be one of the most effective mechanisms for equitably redistributing wealth, while the consolidation of political power (favored by the left) tends to lead to a concentration of wealth.

When one understands the strategy behind the leftist slogan of "redistributed wealth," one realizes that the problems we face lie not with the worthy end of an equitable society, but with the fact that the strategy of pitting the ends against the middle will not result in an equitable society.

People often call the more equitable distribution of wealth in the American system social mobility. It is common for Americans who apply themselves to experience different levels of income in their lives.

Sadly, the cries for redistributed wealth usually end with the consolidation of power in an entrenched ruling class and overall impoverishment of society.

The better approach would be for people to realize that growing disparity in wealth that we see in America today is not the result of the free market, but the result of the ongoing consolidation of political and economic power. The growing disparity in income seems to coincide with the growth of government.

In conclusion, the solution for our economic frustrations is not a bigger government with the power to forcibly redistribute income. The solution is to find ways to restore the free market system that was first envisioned by the founders of the United States.