From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 15:42:18 MDT
--> Harvey Newstrom
> day, 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.
Ah, apologies. (So which of the regular posters was the laywer? My memory is
terrible).
> 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.
Well I agree with you insofar as the current system goes; consumers have far
less power than they could have. The legal system and government is so set
up that it's hard (and in many cases illegal) to be a fully informed
consumer or set up organizations that inform consumers. The government
doesn't like competition.
> > 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'm not anti-label or pro-label. I'm pro-label-choice. The need to be
absolutely for something or against something is symptomic of a system in
which you can't choose because there are monopolies of service and force is
used. If a group of people want purple labels with big spiders on them, good
for them; they should be able to find or start a purple spider labelling
food reselling outfit. But they shouldn't force arachnophobes to have to use
or buy food with the spider labels.
Insofar as the GM industry goes, that's somewhat irrelevant to my take on
this conversation. I'm just continually shocked by the depth to which the
assumption that it's ok to have coercive governments and use force on other
people goes.
"We must all get together and decide now! If you don't like the decision,
tough!" This is a fallacy; we could have choice for all in a free market if
the goverment would just keep out of it.
> I can't imagine that anyone is really against labels.
Well ok, me personally now. I want labels on my foodstuffs. The ones they
have right now are even adequate for most of my needs. What I object to is
being forced to pay for this costly and inefficient labelling system and
being restrained from having any choice in the labelling system of the
products I purchase. I have no problem with voluntarily paying for services
(like labels), but I do have a problem with a monopoly or involuntarily
subscription service that a) extracts revenues and deters competition by
threat of force and b) is not responsive to my sole power as a consumer
(i.e. not buying it).
> I am arguing for accurate product labels. I am not arguing for
> government anything.
>
> 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.
Title of the thead? The thread started off with "this is a good thing/this
is a bad thing." The government running around screwing with stuff and
wasting stolen money is a bad thing. But labels are good things for some
people, so companies will respond to that.
Anyhow. We agree that we, personally, like labels. I think we agree that
no-one should be forced to label their products by anyone else. Now I go do
work :)
> > 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.
Well of course. But customers pay less than they would pay to the
government, because the companies are in competition. You can't pass the
cost on to the consumer if your competitor decides to lower their per-item
margin to chew you out of a market. Similarly you can't be lazy and charge
goverment-level rates to do your labelling because your competitor is
Wal-Mart, deity among process cost-cutters. This is what the free market
does; lowers costs. I'm not saying that anyone gets a free ride for
anything -- but they certainly get a cheaper ride and the choice of which
ride to take.
> 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.
Yes, yes, see above. I'm not personally anti-label, you're not personally
pro-government, all misunderstandings cleared up.
> >> 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.
Um, of course, yes to the last half of that. Again, see title of thread and
how this started. Labels are a symptom, and you seemed as though you
advocated force to enforce your brand of labelling across the whole market
rather than looking at the sensible free market choice for everyone
solution.
Yes, I do believe that competing private enterprise should handle security
and there should be no police. I also believe that there should be no
corporate law and individuals should be subject to standard theft, coercion
and property damage claims for events such as those at Enron (going to
falsify those books? Not if you'd wind up personally liable you wouldn't).
You don't need an SEC and complex legal systems to resolve simple fraud even
with three extra 0s tacked on the end. There will always be criminals, and
like everything else, justice systems would benefit from free market
competition.
> 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.
If the government didn't actively prevent people from analysing companies.
If we really had a free market.
If defrauders were actually held personally accountable.
If people believed in personal responsibility in investing and the rest of
life.
If our legal system didn't reward irresponsible behavior, doublethink and
outright fraud.
etc.
etc.
But all that is a different conversation.
> > 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.
Uh-huh. And what happened to these companies when they did this? They were
found out and lost business because of it, despite the fact that the
discovery process is managed by an inefficient government monopoly. Now if
the FDA/goverment didn't actively prevent for-profit organizations from
competing to do the FDA's job, then how much more efficiently would this
discovery process happen? Trust is enforced by vigilance.
> > I can't even listen to NPR anymore out here.
>
> Neither do I. What does this have to do with the conversation at hand?
It seemed like an appropriate place to sequeway into a rant that was on my
mind at the time. So nothing and everything.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:11 MST