http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/
paul_krugman_fe.html
Paul Krugman: Fear of Eating With all the problems with the food supply
lately, are you anxious about the food you are eating? If so, Paul Krugman says
Milton Friedman is to blame:
Fear of Eating, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.
These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E.
coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your
pets food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.
Whos responsible...? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing
corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.
Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. ...[S]ince the Food and
Drug Administration has limited funds..., it can inspect only a small
percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on
the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And thats not a healthy place
to be... [L]ast month the [FDA] detained shipments from China that included
dried apples treated with carcinogenic chemicals and seafood coated with
putrefying bacteria. You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and
disgusting food ends up in American stomachs.
Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005, the F.D.A. suspected
that peanut butter produced by ConAgra ... might be contaminated with
salmonella. According to The New York Times, when agency inspectors went to
the plant..., the company acknowledged it had destroyed some product but......
refused to let the inspectors examine its records without a written
authorization.
According to the company, the agency never followed through. This brings us
to our third villain, the Bush administration.
Without question, Americas food safety system has degenerated... [S]ince
2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations...
This isnt simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure... The ...
United Fresh Produce Association says that ... without strong mandatory federal
regulations..., scrupulous growers and processors risk being undercut by
competitors more willing to cut corners on food safety. ...
Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually
wants to be regulated? Officials ... are also influenced by an ideology that
says business should never be regulated, no matter what.
The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety
seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat
is contaminated, and in this case what you dont know can hurt or even kill
you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because its
ideologically inconvenient.
Thats why I blame ... Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both
the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from
dangerous or ineffective drugs? Its in the self-interest of pharmaceutical
companies not to have these bad things, he insisted... He would presumably
have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety):
regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police
itself.
O.K., Im not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach and
poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less safe, by
legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls E. coli conservatives:
ideologues who wont accept even the most compelling case for government
regulation.
Earlier this month the administration named, you guessed it, a food safety
czar. But the food safety crisis isnt caused by the arrangement of the boxes
on the organization chart. Its caused by the dominance within our government
of a literally sickening ideology.
EconomistsView
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