downdb.net

Obviously, a case of excessive government regulation:

Barns infested with flies, maggots and scurrying rodents, and overflowing manure pits were among the widespread food safety problems that federal inspectors found at a group of Iowa egg farms at the heart of a nationwide recall and salmonella outbreak.

Inspection reports released by the Food and Drug Administration on Monday described—often in nose-pinching detail—possible ways that salmonella could have been spread undetected through the vast complexes of two companies.

The inspections, conducted over the last three weeks, were the first to check compliance by large egg-producing companies with new federal egg safety rules that were written well before the current outbreak, but went into effect only last month.

For those who considering regulation by federal agencies like the the FDA to be an anti-business power-grab, I have to wonder what the response is to something like this.

Maybe we should wait for the free market to punish companies like this after their products kill one too many people and customer spend their money elsewhere. Absent federal inspections, though, how are customer even going to find out what’s going on at these factories? Even if they did find out, I’d bet it is extraordinarily difficult for individually consumers, standing in front of the dairy case at Stop-n-Shop, to even know which cartons might come from the factories/companies in question.

Or maybe the answer from the Free Marketeers is that there is no Constitutional basis for the FDA to inspect/regulate companies (or even to exist, for that matter).