From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 11:25:40 MDT
On Saturday, July 6, 2002, at 02:56 am, Reason wrote:
> As a lawyer (you are a lawyer, right, memory isn't my strongest
> feature) you
> of all people should know that no process within a company is free. But
> that's the minor cost; enforcement and punishment is the real cost.
> Looked
> at how much money the FDA and even a small prison system chews up
> recently?
No, I am not a lawyer. I am a security systems consultant. I hack into
computer networks and then fix what I find. My entire career is based
on being pessimistic, untrusting, and finding flaws in systems that
companies want to set up. This probably shades my perception of
everything. But I think I am good at find flaws in proposed systems. I
also have extensive history with Fortune-500 companies. And my
experience has taught me that you can't trust any of them. When I
investigate e-commerce, I find the companies defrauding people much more
often than I find people defrauding the companies in online
transactions. As my speech at Extro-5 explained, big business spies on
people's internet usage more than other individuals do.
I also have a long history of consulting for the government. They
likewise are not trustworthy. They spy on people and do a lot of things
that people don't know about. I am therefore uncomfortable with any
system that relies on trust instead of disclosure. As soon as anyone
says that companies or governments don't have to tell me what they are
doing, or that they should make some decision for me instead of letting
me do it myself, warning bells go off in my head. Such a system of
"trust" is never a good idea. All I am arguing for is full disclosure.
If a company wants to see me a product, they need to describe it
completely and accurately. Anything deliberately left out of the
description to fool me into buying something I don't want is misleading.
> Sigh. As I have to explain to many, many people, a libertarian society
> performs all these sorts of testing functions through private
> for-profit and
> non-profit concerns. e.g. a corporate monitoring service that you
> subscribe
> to, food information channels on the TV, news services, etc, etc. These
> things come about because there is money to be made. Many, many such
> services compete for your dollar, advertising dollars, and so forth.
> Companies will find that they sell best by being open with these
> services.
> Right now, we just have the one major service (the government) which
> doesn't
> look kindly on competitors, does a lousy job and costs each consumer too
> much money *whether or not they want to subscribe to it*.
That seems to be the big counter-argument against labels. Whenever I
say I want companies to tell me what is in their product, everybody
seems to respond with a statement against big government. This may be a
probable side-effect, but does not directly respond to the issue. Would
you feel better about labeling if it were done by a private store where
I shop? What if someone on the corner opened a store, tested all the
products, and added their own advisory label to the food showing what
they found? Then I chose to shop their to get the labels while other
people could shop elsewhere if they didn't want labels. Would you still
be anti-label and argue that labeling would hurt the GM industry because
people might eschew GM products? Or would this solve your objections,
because you are really concerned about the government's coercion of
companies, and don't really mind labels at per se?
I can't imagine that anyone is really against labels. I think they are
confusing this issue with being against big government. They are
falsely equating labels = government, and letting their hate for the
government translate into hating labels. I don't know that anyone would
object to labels if government wasn't involved. If this is the case,
then people need to be clear. They don't reject labels, the reject a
government implementation of labels. If so, we don't disagree at all.
I am arguing for accurate product labels. I am not arguing for
government anything.
> Come on! This isn't rocket science. Rating, review and investigation
> services -- paid for *and chosen* by advertisers or consumers -- exist
> in
> many parts of the food industries right now today. It shouldn't be a
> stretch
> of the imagination to see for-profit concerns serving the consumer far,
> far
> better than the FDA does by requesting labelling, performing lab work,
> etc.
Agreed. This seems to support the argument for labels. I don't see why
you think this argues against me. This merely argues that there are
workable ways to enforce food labels which I want. Everybody seems to
be acting like they disagree with the call for food labels, and then
they give these methods for doing it well. I don't think there is much
disagreement about the value of full disclosure or labels at all.
> You agree that a monopoly, any monopoly, on a service that is
> instituted and
> maintained by force is a bad thing, right? That competition is good and
> produces better services? Or do you believe that somehow it's ok and
> fine
> and will produce great results if it's the government doing that?
I never argued for the government to be the enforcer of labels. I never
argued for a monopoly on anything. I am for competition and comparison
of services, which for me seems to imply a need for full disclosure and
labels. I do not think the government is better at doing this than
private industry. Most of your arguments against me have nothing to do
with anything I have actually promoted.
> In the libertarian society model above, everyone gets what they want,
> and
> only the people who actually desire a service have to pay for it. i.e.
> it's
> up to the consumer to educate themselves or pay for the service that
> will do
> their work for them. No-one has to go out and learn all about food, or
> do
> their own lab tests -- they pay for one of many services to do that for
> them. As I said above, right now there's one service (a monopoly
> imposed by
> threat of force), we all pay for it whether we like it or not, and it
> sucks.
If this is your position, then I have news for you. The companies won't
eat the cost of any labeling requirements. They will pass it on to the
consumer. The consumers who want it will have to pay for it. What you
are describing will happen automatically.
How about it companies sell labeled and unlabeled foods. Labeled foods
could cost a penny more for the label. People who cared would buy the
labeled food. People who didn't care would buy the unlabled food and
save a penny. Would this be an acceptable system? If you really are so
anti-label, you could buy the foods that are incompletely labeled.
Better yet, the companies could also sell cans of food with no label on
them. You could buy those sight-unseen if you wanted. Nobody should be
stuck buying labels if they don't want them. Likewise, nobody should be
stuck buying food without labels or with incomplete labels if they don't
want them. If companies produced a whole range of labels, it seems like
this would solve all objections.
>> So you think it is coercive to make Enron show us the true accounting
>> books?
> a) Yes, but with a long, long qualifier about how corporations work,
> why we
> shouldn't be refering to Enron as an entity capable of action, and the
> arbitrary evil that is the SEC.
I think that you are so against government that you rather allow
criminals like Enron go free rather than allow government to have any
power to audit them. Such an argument also implies that there should be
no police, and private enterprise should handle security. Be careful
with such an argument. You are not really arguing for Enron fraud or
the right of criminals to commit crime. You are arguing against the
government. Likewise, in this discussion, I don't think you really are
anti-label. You are merely anti-government. This whole conversation
has nothing to do with labels.
Enron is a whole other debate, but the bottom line is that they lied to
investors to get money. Had investors really known that Enron was
faking revenue, they would not have invested. They lied to their
employees. Had they known that their retirement plans were mostly
worthless stock with faked profits, they would have invested their
retirement elsewhere. I love the free market as much as anybody, but
defrauding investors, cooking the books, and forging results is NOT the
free market.
> The very idea that companies
> would put out falsely labelled on unlabelled products in a market filled
> with companies and non-profits eager to analyse their goods for profit
> or
> enter the business themselves is ludicrous.
This is not ludicrous. It happens all the time. The FDA did a study of
food labels about five years ago and found that 30% of diet foods were
exactly the same as the non-diet versions. The companies just lied on
the food labels to claim lower calories and sugar. They also found that
companies were putting "low sodium" and "low cholesterol" labels on
foods that were high sodium and high cholesterol, or were identical to
their unlabeled versions. In the UK there was a big controversy where
companies were putting vegetarian and vegan labels on products that
contained animal products because they knew it would sell better.
Companies found that it was easier to fake the label than to really
develop a new product. The recent accounting scandals are similar.
Companies are finding that it is easier to cook the books than to really
make profit. It is ludicrous to claim that big business would never
lie, because they obviously do all the time.
> I can't even listen to NPR anymore out here.
Neither do I. What does this have to do with the conversation at hand?
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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