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 pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Who’s 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 that’s 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, America’s food safety system has degenerated... [S]ince 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations...

This isn’t 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 don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

That’s 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? “It’s 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., I’m 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 won’t 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 isn’t caused by the arrangement of the boxes on the organization chart. It’s caused by the dominance within our government of a literally sickening ideology.

_________________________
Previous (5/18) column: Paul Krugman: Don’t Blame Bush
Next (5/25) column: Paul Krugman: Immigrants and Politics

Comments

[Lafayette]

pk: [S]ince the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds...

Well, you've put the finger on it, PK.

Come to France and I'll show you one of the most exhaustive food tracing and surveillance systems on this planet. After the "mad cow" disease, the French went ballistic about tracing the origin and quality of foods.

This is one more item to add to the "Public Services" list of "Things to do". Let's harp back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Food is at the foundation along with shelter. It is amongst the most primeval of human needs.

"Not enough money" is the excuse of an incompetent government beholden to Big AgriBusiness, that prefers cheaper remedial than costly preventive care and caution - in the resolute pursuit of profit.

Profits are OK, but at what price to the human organism? Ask that question to BigAgri and you'll get a tsunami of verbiage in response insisting that American food is of the "highest quality".

So, PK, you should be able to sleep nights ... shouldn't you?

[jonfernquest]

I always suspected that good ole Milt was guilty of something pretty darn foul (besides collaborating with dictators in Chile)

Being smart, contrarian, unrelenting, idee fixed, he never appeared to be wrong to many, but reality is a messy thing when you actually leave your chalkboard, open up the hood and start poking around.

[reason]

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. ...

Interesting issue - the association wants MANDATORY regulations (that is why they can't do them themselves).

But this of course doesn't distinguish between GOOD regulation and BAD regulation. An outsider with unconventional but effective quality control should not be prevented from providing competition.

That is where of course the government is bad school does all its damage, it distracts from the task of making government good.

[Outside the Box]

Limited safety resources are being inefficiently allocated. There is little chance that a factory safety sealed container of Lipitor from Pfizer is contaminated. Pfizer is strongly motivated to protect its brand name. Yet enormous gov resources are devoted to tracking every last Lipitor pill.

OTOH, anonymous lettuce from China et al is potentially very dangerous. Consumers often have no idea where the lettuce came from, so market forces cannot effectively discipline providers. Yet relatively few resources are devoted to this very dangerous area.

Given that safety resources will always be limited, it would be more efficient to concentrate gov resources on the anonymous lettuce imports, and let the market discipline Pfizer's Lipitor quality control. Have the gov track the lettuce, and let Pfizer put Lipitor on retail shelves in its factory safety sealed containers.

[reason]

You import Lettuce from China? (Come on, surely not).

I toured China once. They have toilets over the fields. They don't eat anything that isn't cooked except fruit with shells.

[ndd]

I agree with Krugman and the commenters above, but I just wanted to point out that there will be a form of market discipline in the form of lawsuits. CNN featured a product liability lawyer in a segment last night, who is going to sue the farm in Oregon that was responsible for last year's Taco Bell lettuce sickness.

In the case of China, since the farms are beyond reach, the importers, wholesalers, and retailers will be sued. That should make for some interesting right-wing howls.

[real person from the real world]

Low cost is an issue for those uf us making do on low wages. Someone with good wages can buy more of everything, including better food, and health care. As a society, we need to decide what we will accept in the future: cheap shoddy goods and food that is questionable, at low prices, so the low paid can minimally survive, or a better compensated populace, with access to health care, education, and with a salary that can buy quality food, and with upwardly mobile prospects.

[jamesonburt]

Two points immediately arise by applying Gresham's Law (an economic principle).
Gresham's Law says that restrictions on, or limited information about, the market (either by regulation forcing some "equality" or by consumers' lack of information about the market/product) end with consumers getting worse quality goods.

One consequence is that foreign consumers then often get better quality goods.

One part of Gresham's Law has been know for centuries as "bad money drives out good money".

If federal regulations prohibited state governments from creating their own food laws or prohibited non-authorized labels like "Meets California's Definition of Organic", then more food would be forced to be treated as equal.
So, one can imagine laws where Chile grapes with pesticides and U.S. grapes fertilized with sewage sitting side-by-side with preferrable grapes (eg, "truly organic") -- under federal mandate that these not be differentiated. Indeed, we could imagine some obtuse (1984-ese) definition of "organic" that resulted in all these being labeled "organic".
Of course, the good food (eg, the "truly organic") would then not be sold in the U.S. -- it would be sold to countries that either allowed discrimination of products or mandated informative labeling.

I believe Tailand mandates that a can of food label the percent of each product, while the U.S. labels only a ranked order of contents more-or-less. One would then expect that Tailand's more detailed information would result in a better product chosen by their consumers than chosen by U.S. consumers. But more -- when the Japanese have detailed labels about wood products, U.S. equal treatment of wood products sees our best "unknown to us" wood products going to Japan, and the worst products staying in the U.S. If other governments mandate detailed information about products sold, the U.S. is behooved to either mandate such detailed information or at least NOT PREVENT such labeling.

As another example, suppose the U.S. either prohibits or doesn't require labeling soybeans as "genetically modified" (surprise: most soybeans are genetically modified) while Europe mandates labeling.
Then one would expect most (probably all) non-genetically modified soybeans produced in the U.S. would be sold outside the U.S.

What would result if labeling included "producing country"?
I expect U.S. consumers would purchase far more European food, almost no Chinese food, and perhaps less U.S. food.

Inserting more information into the marketplace would be welcomed by the consumer, and, in the case of food, could greatly change the choice of products consumed.
While the producer/seller side incurs costs to supply that information, even they often prefer more information.
Since all food is a substitute for other food, what forsighted producer would risk selling no spinach whenever another farmer sold spinach with deletarious bacteria. A U.S. rancher would want his cattle tested for disease to get a higher price in the Japanese market, yet federal regulations have actually prohibited such testing. This is a most egregious act by a government -- not the action of regulating, but INVERSE-REGULATING; ie, prohibiting information from entering the market place.

For more on Gresham's Law, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greshams_law

[reason]

jamesonburt,
why does the US have such perverse regulation?
Just goes to reinforce my point about good and bad regulation.

[me]

"besides collaborating with dictators in Chile)"

Speaking of Chile, do I remember some industrial waste tainting the Chilean wine along the Argentinian border?

"TBA is typically derived from wood preservatives and flame-retardant paints used in cellar construction. The compound can then spread through a winery; porous materials like plastic hoses are particularly susceptible. TBA has become a problem for wineries in South America because the locally produced materials used to build their cellars contain bromophenols, which can create TBA. (In contrast, the building materials used by French wineries in the 1980s and '90s commonly contained chlorophenols, which can evolve into tetrachloroanisole and pentachloroanisole, which are similar to TCA. Those materials have since been banned.)"

[jean]

Buy locally. Buy only in season. Community gardens. Farmers markets. Ask your grocer (they all know where stuff comes from and if they don't, don't buy there). There are ways, but they may not be the easiest way. Vote with your purchasing power.

[Noni Mausa]

Country of origin labeling wouldn't have helped with the dog food problem, since the offending wheat gluten (adulterated with melamine) was manufactured in China, sold to another country, sold to a third country, and finally exported to US manufacturers, with most of its provenance stripped away as it moved. A New York Times article which I now cannot find detailed the movement of the wheat gluten with quite a lot of detail. What's upsetting about the case is that apparently the original wholesaler earned only a tiny price differential -- something like $12,000 rather than $10,500 -- over what he would have gotten for the unadulterated product.

Like counterfeit money, the cost of testing and finding adulterated food ingredients would fall upon the reciever, not the seller, if the seller is far enough away. Each further step away makes it harder to nail down who added the adulterant, also. "Spreading responsibility removes responsibility."

Since the responsibility cannot be nailed down, and all the ingredients exported from China are by their nature difficult to trace, and impossible for the consumer to trace, the overall effect will be to make people worldwide suspicious of all Chinese food products. The loss will be spread over the entire Chinese industry, not just petfood, but any import product -- noodles, canned goods, smoked fish etc. and in the Western world it might even throw a pall over Chinese and other oriental restaurants.

I don't know how worried China is about this effect. Perhaps they're not worried at all. But it seems to me that the chain of responsibility is so loose, and the desire of the Chinese manufacturer is so much in the moment and not in the long-term, that we cannot in the least depend upon consumer feedback to control the process in China.

Noni

[Lafayette]

jb: As another example, suppose the U.S. either prohibits or doesn't require labeling soybeans as "genetically modified" (surprise: most soybeans are genetically modified) while Europe mandates labeling. Then one would expect most (probably all) non-genetically modified soybeans produced in the U.S. would be sold outside the U.S.

And why, pray tell, should this happen? Do all markets kneel to Gresham's Law? I think you are taking the law literally.

Labeling of goods (and services, mind you) is a matter of local sensibilities. Better cuts of wood go to Japan because the Japanese appreciate them and Americans don't particularly give a damn? After all, with painting, who can admire the quality of a wood. This means American consumers are not willing, generally, to pay for a more expensive wood. Pine will do fine, if painted.

African woods are appreciated more in Europe than European northern pine, because they are esteemed as better quality - not so many unsightly knots. Painted wood is, in fact, considered a poor man's wood. European woods tend to be varnished since Europeans appreciate grained woods. It is an aesthetic appreciation that is quite different from, say, the Middle East where wood is scarce and people therefore have not developed any particular appreciation for it. (But, you cannot say that about tea in the Middle East).

In the fashioning of consumer propensity (to purchase one product in preference to another) there is more than Gresham's Law at play. The law is not absolute. Differing tastes/values also have their influence.

[Lafayette]

r: Since the responsibility cannot be nailed down, and all the ingredients exported from China are by their nature difficult to trace, and impossible for the consumer to trace, the overall effect will be to make people worldwide suspicious of all Chinese food products.

The Chinese have learned that if they want to enter certain markets they must adhere to local rules. All the electric gizmos from China that I see in Europe have the European verification label - meaning they have been tested against the norms.

It is true that, aside from Chinese beer, one sees very few food products from China. They do have specialty shops with Chinese teas and herbs. But, the ground rhinoceros horn, so prized by hyper-sexed males in China, has not made it through customs here. Because the product is illicit in Europe. (What has made through customs is fake Viagra, and much of that comes not only from China but India.)

Living in France, I see regularly news reports about either dangerous Chinese toys or outright fakes that have been stopped at customs because, as regards the former, they are dangerous to children and as regards the latter, they are outright illegal. This means the toys have been sampled and tested for compliance with European norms.

The onus of proof should be placed on the Chinese. That is, the WTO should accumulate the customs data on counterfeit produce emanating from China destined for, say, European markets and then set a fine. This is the only way China will feel the necessity, in turn, to nab the counterfeiters in China.

For the moment, there is no sanction imposed other than confiscating the goods and destroying them. Which is financially painful, yes, but has not seemed to stem the tide thus far.

[cm]

real person: While yours is an excellent and very pertinent point, paying more will not necessarily get you better merchandise. There was a milk recall shortly after 2000 in California, and the media were informing consumers to not use any milk with specific ID codes printed on the bottle. In the resulting mayhem at work quite a few people found out, and loudly vented, that the milk purchased in their more expensive brand name stores comes from the same hose as the milk raffled off in the stores where all the riff-raff buys.

[anon]

Miltie thought "competition" would make food producers and others behave. If a food producer killed people he would, eventually, be driven out of business. Great comfort that to the people he killed, of course.

[KThomas]

When greed is coupled by a lack of standards, people start dying.

Saw this little article today:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070521/sc_afp/healthchinaenvironmentcancer;_ylt=AvvfG.LA9fodOLAdWQ5zm44PLBIF

[dissent]

Uncle Miltie's notion that the private sector would police itself is magical thinking. It reminds me of neo-con fantasies about Iraq: democracy would produce itself.

What's hard to produce, easy to take for granted, and resistant to ideology is civil society.

[MF]

Let's compare markets to idealized government interventions. Look, it's market failure. Yipeeee!

[Barry]

ndd, lawsuits are a non-market thing. And the people who like lack of regulations usually also work to make sure that you or I can't sue corporations (the other way around, sure).

[ivan]

Yesterday I could not do something without much risk: eating genetically modified foods. The European Commission prevents me too, all the scientific evidence that those foods are safe notwithstanding. I blame the socialists who seem to think that government has to decide what we can and cannot eat.

says...

"You import Lettuce from China? (Come on, surely not)."

Two of our better local supermarkets carry a line of "organic" frozen food -- spinach, peas, broccolli, squash, etc. -- that is all "product of China." Not just a question of certifying that it's safe; how do you even certify that it's really organic? Because the suppliers say so?

Buying local produce is a good thing to do, but then I personally live in an area where that's easy to do because the climate's good and there are plenty of small growers and farmer's markets. But not everybody's so blessed. At this point, in many areas, there's no substitute in produce for national distribution with strong gov't regulation. Either that, or you eat a lot of carrots and cabbage all year, and that's it.

[James Killus]

I blame the socialists who seem to think that government has to decide what we can and cannot eat.

Yes, of course, ivan. No doubt this is why the U.S. agricultural industry is such a champion of always labeling foods as to content, like whether or not it is GM, point of origin, processing methods, all pesticides and herbicides used during growing, etc. What? You can't find those labels on your groceries? They must be there, otherwise your argument about socialists and "government" decisions being bad, and how people should be allowed to decide what they eat would be entirely specious.

ndd, I'm sure that the advocates of "tort reform" stipulate an exception to food product safety... Oops, I see that this post has just exceeded federally mandated limits for irony content.

[Carol]

I trust the mavens of the US food and drug industry to self-police about as much as I do the small Chinese manufacturer trying to increase his profits by adding and substituting toxic ingredients. No, not with the short-term $$$ focus and contempt for the consumer that many of these folks seem to have.

[Robinia]

Jamesonburt has a very valid point about information. In fact, the "certified organic" label is understood to comprise both a good and a service: the good is the food itself, the service is an independent, third-party verification of farmer claims regarding processes and products used in production. In a better world, government could provide this kind of service, and it would then be available to all, as of by right. At the very least, government should ALLOW the development of product-assurance-labeling standards for those who would pay to know where their food comes from, and what processes (which they may not approve of) were NOT employed in its production. Safe food , as a commenter pointed out, is pretty basic on the Maslow scale-- comparable to not having terrorists blow up your city or suffering unreasonable search and seizure by the police.

Capitalism with open, accountable information (audited by a government that maintains a fair market through judicious rules) is able to allocate resources without major ill effect. Lacking accurate and accessible information, capitalism can degenerate into pure theft, a con game. "Reputation" is a poor police in a global world, where brands buy one another at quite a clip.

Milt and the neo-cons have made the world a more dangerous place than it need be.

[save_the_rustbelt]

The most dangerous aspect of securing food in the US is driving to the supermarket.

Methinks Pk went over the top on this one.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Maybe the problem is outside our borders, you know, our favorite place to send jobs and buy merchandise...

"May 19, 2007

Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama Is Believed to Be From China

By WALT BOGDANICH and RENWICK McLEAN

Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China.

“Our preliminary information is that it came from China, but we don’t know that with certainty yet,” said Daniel Delgado Diamante, Panama’s director of customs. “We are still checking all the possible imports to see if there could be other shipments.”

Some of the toothpaste, which arrived several months ago in the free trade zone next to the Panama Canal, was re-exported to the Dominican Republic in seven shipments, customs officials said. A newspaper in Australia reported yesterday that one brand of the toothpaste had been found on supermarket shelves there and had been recalled......."

[Noni Mausa]

ndd said: I agree with Krugman and the commenters above, but I just wanted to point out that there will be a form of market discipline in the form of lawsuits.

Unfortunately, we encounter the Mosquito Effect with these lawsuits. When I slap a mosquito, she dies. But there are millions of mosquitoes...and a person has to sleep sometime...

Noni

[cm]

save_the_rustbelt: Well, do you really know what's in your food, and what for example the copious amounts of "preservatives" which are essentially toxins designed to poison bacteria and fungi are doing to your guts?

One problem with persistent but undocumented low-intensity toxic, as well as radiation exposure (wireless anybody?) is that the effects tend to be very gradual, and can conveniently show up long after the exposure, like when you are 50-60 and get all kinds of tumors. Who will know, let alone prove, whether it's from toxins in your food, or you had one drink/cigarette too many, or spent too many hours inhaling exhaust fumes in city traffic or inside your house with treated wood and plastic products gassing out solvents and flame retardents, or had too much sunshine? Etc.

But whatever it be, it's surely "irresponsible lifestyle choices".

says...

Behold, the wonders of free trade. Bon Apetit.

[James Killus]

Oh, by all means, rustbelt, let's compare every danger to driving, and be done with airline safety, lifeguards, police and fire departments, and the War on Terror. The last one isn't such a bad idea, maybe, but I'll bet you weren't making the argument that cars kill more people than terrorists on Sept. 12, 2001. In fact, have you yet begun making that argument? Let me know how it works.

says...

"Either that, or you eat a lot of carrots and cabbage all year, and that's it."

What is wrong with a seasonal diet? How did our ancestors ever survive?

[Anarcho]

> Let's compare markets to idealized government
> interventions. Look, it's market failure. Yipeeee!

unlike most right-wing economists who compare idealised markets to governments and loudly proclaim it's government failure? Yipeee!

[ndd]

barry, jk, noni:

Of course my comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Many free-market fundamentalists accept that law enforcement is a part of the market (can you say breach of waranty of fitness?). Lawsuits would be "a sort of" market discipline to the extent they are viewed as a remedy for a breach of contract. But those who normally tout such, I suspect (as do all of you) would suddenly have a touch of the vapors!

[macquechoux]

Come on people! You all need to read Russell Roberts’ thoughts at Café Hayek today. (5/22/07) You are aware that Krugman does stretch logic and overlook factoids on occasion, aren’t you?

[real person from the real world]

Just today in the NY Times, there was an article about Chinese Toothpaste containing an industrial solvent that is toxic. We shouldn't pick on the Chinese, but the problem with trade with some of these 3rd world countries is that they try sooo very hard to make a buck, they will take pennies on an item for profit. Anything to get in on the action. You see it with these IT vendors in the US. As the bottom vendor/employers holding the visa, hold their costs, and the companies on top try to low ball, the mid-level vendors says, I need to make a buck too, and will settle for a tiny profit with hopes of getting into the big action later on. Cheap has a lot of costs, not just the poor quality. Cheap permeates this society, because it has settle on squeezing wages, to everyone's misery. It may take a while to hit the elites, but it will, eventually.

[reason]

macquechoux...

Yes, you are right he hasn't presented evidence to prove his case (as Roberts says the problem is not unique). But he does none-the-less have a point, as a general principle.

Free market ideologues can be silly sometimes, and need to clarify why they should not be regarded as anti-democratic. There is a certain lack of evidence that anything other than a vital democracy enhances liberty, regardless of a "free" market or market socialism. They only think otherwise via a distorted view of what liberty means.

[cm]

ndd: Enforcement and policing have a large economy-of-scale aspect. I myself, like I suspect pretty much every other individual, don't have a biochem lab on retainer to analyze all my food and toothpaste samples from the stores I frequent, and even if I had, the transaction costs would easily inflate my grocery bill by a factor of 10 or more. When I catch disease or perhaps merely digestive inconvenience from tainted food, I have practically no way of proving where it came from, even if I happen to know it, which in itself is unlikely enough.

This "ownership society do it yourself policing" is bullshit for the most part, I don't know how anybody can fall for it. Everybody can and should look out for themselves (and most are probably making their best effort of it), but that cannot adequately replace enforcement of the rules.

[James Killus]

"Come on people! You all need to read Russell Roberts’ thoughts at Café Hayek today. (5/22/07) You are aware that Krugman does stretch logic and overlook factoids on occasion, aren’t you?"

Main Entry: fac·toid
Pronunciation: 'fak-"toid
Function: noun
1 : an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print

Main Entry: stretch
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English strecchen, from Old English
transitive verb
7: to pull taut

Cafe Hayek, your Web source for invented facts and loose logic.

[henry hazlitt]

Is this blog dedicated to economics or partisan politics? krugmans article is simply risible. I mean does anyone honestly believe that the bush administration is ideologically committed to laissez faire capitalism? that the amount of regulation issued is a good metric to test whether the efficacy of government department has risen or declined? that because an industry group advocates regulation of said industry that is compelling evidence in its favour?

This just krugman doing what he has, sadly, been doing for the last seven years. Crudely fashioning every news story into something he can use to bludgeon bush with.

[anne]

Oh dear, poor dear, for I imagine there will enough of a sorry legacy of George Bush to bash for the next seven, count 'em, years. What is interesting to notice is that while Bush is the ultimate in conservatives, conservatives are increasingly intimidated by Bush. Dear conservatives.

[anne]

"I mean does anyone honestly believe that the Bush administration is ideologically committed to laissez faire capitalism?"

The ultimate cry of the terrified conservative, but, yes, the Bush administration as no other ever is ideologically committed to laissez faire, pardon my French, capitalism. (Imagine, and me not even knowing what risible means. Duh.)

[anne]

What pleases me ever so much is among all the other fears of conservatives, there is no fear more than Paul Krugman. Molly Ivins would be so proud.

[James Killus]

Ah yes, Conservativism cannot fail and if Bush has failed, it must be because he has failed Conservativism.

Note that the true meaning of laissez faire capitalism cannot be found in any dictionary. it means "That system which recognizes my own particular talents and greatness and rewards them with great wealth and status."

Some hold that it means a system of government that devotes its energies entirely to "proper" activities, by which they mean the police and military, but that is actually known as a military police state, and Mr. Bush has been really pushing for that one, so that can't be right, can it?

[calmo]

Too busy to comment let alone ponder what I throw down the cake-hole. Not cake, not very fresh, prolly not nutritious ...entirely forgettable which is a long ways from civilized, yes?
Consider Isabel's homemade mayo and that salad from maybe fresh greens in the backyard ...and most important of all, that meal that is shared with family or even better, other families in some sort of pot luck.
Tis a long way from the Drive Thru.
Ok, tomorrow I shall take the time to prepare and share.

[rapier]

Milt is justifiably famous for his work on monetarism. He is less famous for his abandonment of his life's work., somewhere around 1999. The monetary aggregates trended relentlessly higher after the 87 crash. and inflation as measured by CPI, with a thumb on the scale to be sure, was tame.

It became an embarrassment to Milt. Huge deficits and rampant monetary expansion were resulting in none of the things he has said they would so quietly he said in effect never mind.

There was rampant inflation going on in 1998 to 2000. Stocks and other financial assets were inflating madly. However it is verbotten to ever use the word inflation when it comes to the price of assets held by the wealty. 80% of all stocks are held by the top decile, approx.

No, assets don't inflate, their value increases, see how easy it is.

Later stocks tanked but real estate inflated wildly. Ooops, no, real estate 'values' rose.

[Dominik]

That's a silly argumentation. Every consumer is free to choose whether he eats US-chicken or chinese. If he thinks the controls in the US are better and the meat is saver, he will choose this one. If he's not, he won't.
There's truly no need to regulation, because even if there ar some hints of contaminated food from china, no one will eat these things anymore exept the ones that don't care about. and these people are free to choose as well. No need for paternalistic initiative at all.

[Ben]

Did you see where the Chinese FDA is so corrupt they're going to execute the head official?