Even eggs, seemingly sacrosanct in their shells, have turned out not to be eggs at all but man-made concoctions of chemicals, gelatin and paraffin. Instructions can be purchased online, the Chinese media reported.In case you are astonished, you should go look at the way things were done in this country up until the late 1930s. One company, Massengill,* sold an "elixer" that killed over 100 people and its only punishment was to pay a fine because the labels were not accurate.
There is this fantasy in some circles that holds that companies and businessmen will do the right thing because they do not want to besmirch their good name and reputation. Even if that were once true, it was true then because the businessmen lived in the same places where they made and sold their wares. If they sold defective shit, they heard about it, their relatives heard about it.
Those days ended with the development of steam-powered transport. When sausages were packed in Kansas City and sold in butcher shops in New York City, the sausage makers couldn't care less if someone in Brooklyn thought they tasted a little funny. The only thing that mattered was profit.
As a man in Shanghai, put it: “They really have no morals. They will do anything for money.”
That is exactly right. Capitalism is an amoral system. Without regulators watching for product safety, food safety and everything else along those lines (including financial regulation), then capitalism degenerates in a race to the bottom, where everything is sacrificed in the name of profit.
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* Yes, the douche people. They're now part of GlaxoSmithKline.
Did the last century not happen, or is that my imagination?
ReplyDeleteWhat about meeting in the middle? Underwriter's Labatories is an independent testing facility and certifies bazillions of electrical products. It is certified by OSHA as a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory.
ReplyDeleteThe USDA could certify food testing labs, but the certification would come from those private enterprises. The USDA workforce could probably be cut by 90%, but the testing quality remain the same. BTW, the meat processors currently pay for the USDA employees that are stationed at their plant inspecting meat and meat processing.
In the end, don't you just want someone, without influence from the business being inspected, to certify that a product is safe? It doesn't have to be a government worker.
Testing is on thing, but then how to you have enforcement, John, without the regulators being part of the government?
ReplyDeleteJohn, UL certification is certainly a gold standard of certification, but increasingly at least in the technology industry we no longer submit our product for UL certification. Instead we submit our products for CE certification, which is cheaper and less stringent. And if there was something even cheaper and less stringent than CE certification that would satisfy our customers, we'd use that instead. How, exactly, do you propose to prevent this race to the bottom in the absence of government standards?
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Technology Penguin