Tuesday 26 February 2013

A brief brief and beef about beef

If we ever needed proof that regulation is a tool of big business and not for the protection of consumers, the horse / beef fiasco proves it.

A massive infrastructure dedicated to making sure that our food is good and safe has failed, despite the regulation applied specifically to large corporate suppliers and supermarkets. Every day seems to show another crack in the edifice.

And what are consumers doing? Well, those who can afford it have always used butchers. Parsimonious types are now migrating to butchers where the food chain is known by actual people and not by regulation.

I strongly contend that people who actually know the food chain and the history of the food being bought are far more trusted than any ticked boxes or paperwork that has been completed. Regulation is no substitute for knowledge.

But no, for the average statist, there is no substitute for more regulation, no matter that the failure of regulation is evident to all, the answer is always more regulation.

2 comments:

JuliaM said...

It's their only refrain and will be their only refrain while it leads to jobs for regulators! After all, their children have to work somewhere...

Anonymous said...

The narrative is already set. "We have light touch regulation" can be read in the Guardian and the BBC. And it won't be any good pointing out the reams of law to people who already have decided what they know.

When you have a ruling class that imagines it can legislate happiness, then this is small beer.