Where is the actual evidence that the Federal Meat Inspection Act created monopolies?

HazlittIsLit

HazlittIsLit

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According to numerous libertarian sites, such as Mises Institute, FEE, Independent Institute; the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passed in reaction to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, was endorsed by the larger meat packing companies so they could absorb fees while their smaller competitors crippled because of them. According to these same sites, Sinclair himself denounced the legislation, realizing it was this.

I haven't found a source that truly says this. What I did find was Sinclair alleging that inspection legislation (either before the FMIA or in general) is written by the big meat packers, but that's all. Furthermore, I'm not finding any evidence that the big meat packers endorsed the legislation to cripple their small business competitors. Could anyone help me out here?
 
HazlittIsLit said:
Not a troll. Just a young man with questions. Why don't you do a better job at defending libertarianism?
Click to expand...
I have better things to do than let you waste my time debating whether all libertarians are secret NAZIs or whether big business advocates for big government.
We just had the big car companies try to lobby Trump to not roll back the CAFE standard and we see plenty of other examples.

Perhaps there is some member here who is familiar with the history of the Meat Inspection Act who will decide to waste a little time and address it specifically but it doesn't matter, history is often scrubbed of such embarrassing details but the principles remain the same.
 
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HazlittIsLit said:
According to numerous libertarian sites, such as Mises Institute, FEE, Independent Institute; the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passed in reaction to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, was endorsed by the larger meat packing companies so they could absorb fees while their smaller competitors crippled because of them. According to these same sites, Sinclair himself denounced the legislation, realizing it was this.

I haven't found a source that truly says this. What I did find was Sinclair alleging that inspection legislation (either before the FMIA or in general) is written by the big meat packers, but that's all. Furthermore, I'm not finding any evidence that the big meat packers endorsed the legislation to cripple their small business competitors. Could anyone help me out here?
Click to expand...

In Ought Six we did not buy meat we shot it .
 
HazlittIsLit said:
According to numerous libertarian sites, such as Mises Institute, FEE, Independent Institute; the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passed in reaction to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, was endorsed by the larger meat packing companies so they could absorb fees while their smaller competitors crippled because of them. According to these same sites, Sinclair himself denounced the legislation, realizing it was this.

I haven't found a source that truly says this. What I did find was Sinclair alleging that inspection legislation (either before the FMIA or in general) is written by the big meat packers, but that's all. Furthermore, I'm not finding any evidence that the big meat packers endorsed the legislation to cripple their small business competitors. Could anyone help me out here?
Click to expand...

Answers, plus a whole lot more, can be found in Salatin's book, "Folks, This Ain't Normal". Joel Salatin has seen, and has been subject to, the weaponization of government agencies by powerful industry. This is why you see so many industry leaders supporting various acts and regulation - to stifle their competition.

There was also a documentary that talks to this, "Food Inc".

 
HazlittIsLit said:
Not a troll. Just a young man with questions. Why don't you do a better job at defending libertarianism?
Click to expand...
Hey, listen... SwordSmyth and I don't see eye-to-eye most of the time, but I do agree with the notion that nobody is here to do your homework for you.
I'm here to do my own homework when it suits me.

It just so happens that you piqued my curiosity, and I offer the following not so much for you as I do for other readers.

In roughly 90 seconds I found this article from 2001.
https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1819&context=wmlr

I found this article as a reference to the Wiki page on the meat packing industry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_packing_industry#United_States
The source link on Wikipedia is dead but I did a simple DuckDuckGo search on the article title and found it easily.
I mention all this so you can add this easy process to your toolset.

The reason I am spending time on this is because you actually seem to have hit on something here. The Wiki article links to this mitchelhamline article as evidence that the large meat packing industries used the legislation to edge out the small competitors....
....but the mitchelhamline article says no such thing.

It brings up a ton of other libertarian-related reasons why the 1907 act is bullshit, and why it never worked properly, and how inspections are nothing more than a dog-and-pony show that is largely only put on after an outbreak... and most importantly, it points out that the reason large early-20th century meat packers pushed for regulation is because Sinclair's book devastated their sales, and they wanted government regulation to prove their product was fit for consumption. (I have a whole diatribe on how regulations don't ensure quality as much as they reduce it, and this certainly qualifies, but I digress.)

Most importantly, the article points out that not only do we not have reliable evidence that Sinclair's book was ever accurate, but we have other evidence, absolutely reliable, that market forces are better regulators of meat packers than the government ever has been, along with a case study. That the market better regulates is a working principle of libertarianism, which working principles SwordSmyth referenced when he wrote "the principles remain the same".

Another of those working principles is that big business benefits from regulation. Do we have direct proof that the meat packing industry pushed for regulation to shove out small competitors? Not yet, we don't. Do we have proof that Facebook is pushing for regulation to keep competitors down? Not really, all we have is what they are saying about why they want it. Can we crawl inside the minds of TV broadcasters and Hairdresser guilds and find out why they push for regulation? No, we can't.

But it's a working principle that small businesses can't meet the same regulatory burden, and that is axiomatic. It doesn't require proof. Whether or not the dominant market actors actively and knowingly push for such regulation for that explicit reason is beside the point. We know they do make such pushes, and we know what the result is.
 
HazlittIsLit said:
I haven't found a source that truly says this. What I did find was Sinclair alleging that inspection legislation (either before the FMIA or in general) is written by the big meat packers, but that's all. Furthermore, I'm not finding any evidence that the big meat packers endorsed the legislation to cripple their small business competitors. Could anyone help me out here?
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Maybe apply a little bit more intelligence to the operation.

So you verified the legislation to regulate meat packers was written by the big meat packers - not the small meat packers, not the vegetable packers, not the fudge packers, not the Green Bay Packers, but the big meat packers.

You can't find any evidence that big meat packers endorsed the legislation to cripple their small business competitors. What exactly are you expecting to find? An opinion article in the NYT written by a big meat packing person talking about how they need regulations to cripple their small business competitors? Why would that even exist? To expect something like that would exist, to me, seems unintelligent.

In fact, I wouldn't even expect to find evidence that they endorsed the legislation at all. I would expect to find evidence that they were opposed to the regulations - even though they wrote the legislation and secretly supported it.

That is called how shit works. It takes into account all of the facts, plus the natural economic motivations of humans.
 
Swordsmyth said:
LOL

I'm glad that I now know who I must get my official membership card from.:sarcasm:
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You don't need a card. but it sure is easy to know you don't believe have what you say youdo. You just watch what people say. basic common sense.

Your MO is that you "have better things to do". No you don't. You're on here every day "wasting time".

Either articulate the argument or just STFU.
 
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Todd said:
You don't need a card. but it sure is easy to know you don't believe have what you say youdo. You just watch what people say. basic common sense.

Your MO is that you "have better things to do". No you don't. You're on here every day "wasting time".

Either articulate the argument or just STFU.
Click to expand...
:sleeping:
 
fisharmor said:
Most importantly, the article points out that not only do we not have reliable evidence that Sinclair's book was ever accurate, but we have other evidence, absolutely reliable, that market forces are better regulators of meat packers than the government ever has been, along with a case study. That the market better regulates is a working principle of libertarianism, which working principles SwordSmyth referenced when he wrote "the principles remain the same".
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You are correct. The link you provided describes this pretty well. An excerpt:

"Indeed, there is much evidence that market forces do more to eliminate improper meat processing than doall of the efforts of the federal bureaucracy. IBP, Inc. ConAgra,and Cargill Corporations reportedly spent some $150 million onfood safety initiatives over three years in the 1990s, costs that theindustry cannot easily pass on to consumers, . in order to gain mar- 95ket advantages over their competitors. Some larger meat companies independently conduct microbial testing at their own expenseto attract contracts from large buyers such as McDonald's. 96"
 
HazlittIsLit said:
According to numerous libertarian sites, such as Mises Institute, FEE, Independent Institute; the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 passed in reaction to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, was endorsed by the larger meat packing companies so they could absorb fees while their smaller competitors crippled because of them. According to these same sites, Sinclair himself denounced the legislation, realizing it was this.

I haven't found a source that truly says this. What I did find was Sinclair alleging that inspection legislation (either before the FMIA or in general) is written by the big meat packers, but that's all. Furthermore, I'm not finding any evidence that the big meat packers endorsed the legislation to cripple their small business competitors. Could anyone help me out here?
Click to expand...

Where is the actual evidence that the Federal Meat Inspection Act has made America a better place,
safer, healthier?

:frog:
 
Swordsmyth said:
:sleeping:
Click to expand...

"I am too educated to explain my ideas to you" Bwaa ha!

source.gif
 
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