Dear Friends,
It seems to me regulations always becomes perverse… like when the government seizes farms and deems them unfit for agriculture, because they’re contaminated with “forever chemicals,” even as it allows the production of more forever chemicals to pollute more farms. This is an example of regulation causing a negative externality instead of preventing one. This is an example of Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, which leads to a loss of our property, access to food, and our constitutional rights themselves. A compounding factor is that the same government that’s deeming farmland off limits to agriculture, gave free fertilizer contaminated with forever chemicals to those farms! It’s almost Hegelian in its malevolent manipulation, as when the British gave Pontiac smallpox blankets.
In the US, farmland that’s deemed to be contaminated with forever chemicals is ordered to be taken out of production. Or else those forever chemicals could travel back through the food chain again. Cycling through it and therefore through us, over and over. Building up in us faster and faster. The experts and managers in the bureaucracy decided something needed to be done. So they allowed the chemical industry to continue making them and polluting us with them, but took the contaminated farmland out of production to stop the cycle. We’re still being inundated with forever chemicals but they’re brand new and not recycled. Which doesn’t really change anything, does it? Nevertheless, the small farmer clearly have less political favor… than Dow Corning.
Olson’s Logic of Collective Action is based on political favor. Political favor being the metric of how much the establishment “likes” you, based on grift and not merit. In this case, expressed through concentrated interests having more impact on regulation and law, than dispersed interests. The chemical industry spends gobs of money lobbying Congress and purchasing bureaucrats, so their interests are well looked after. The American people and farmers however, are a diverse group without cohesion, and so have little sway. Our interests are overlooked by those in power because we don’t affect them. Unless we marshal ourselves and contact them in numbers sufficient to move the needle. Then we would garner the political favor necessary to balance the chemical industry.
The reality of it is, the chemical industry knew years ago their forever chemical products had possibly deleterious effects on us. Yet they continued making them because they were profitable. Forcing the government to act to protect human health. This is what I call stupid capitalism. Destroying your markets for short term gain or drawing the wrath of government on your industry. Trading reputation for profit is often one of the ways Wall Street obliterates an entrepreneur’s company. Eventually resulting in bankruptcy. Though this paradigm can be countered for a while by effective propaganda and lobbying. Paper the right palms and an industry can get away with nearly anything. The same is true of the opposite, no matter how beneficent a firm is, if it doesn’t pay grift… it’s finished.
Illustrating the real problem with power, no matter how well it’s aimed at good, it always hits evil. In this case, the regulators that are tasked with protecting our food supply, harm the food supply without addressing the source of the issue. This is a classic collective action problem. These kinds of issues usually boil down to who has more political favor? That side gets to pollute while the rest of us suffer the negative externality. This paradigm is replicated across the administrative state. Other examples of perverse regulations are the DOJ’s civil rights division enforces racism, the Department of Energy makes energy more expensive, and education makes our kids dumber. Which is why the only solution is limiting the power of regulators to do evil. Contact your representative… and move the needle.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
