Pre-Sliced Bread Was Once Banned in the United States (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Pre-Sliced Bread Was Once Banned in the United States (2010)

todayifoundout.com

47 pointsTomte44 comments

That same Secretary of Agriculture was also responsible for one of the more surprising cases I remember from law school.

Question: Does the Constitution's interstate commerce clause give Congress the power to regulate how much wheat a farmer can grow for his own consumption, if it's never sold to anyone else and never crosses state lines?

The district court said no. The Supreme Court said yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

Is it surprising though? Your consumption is an important part of any market. By removing your demand from the market, you're affecting it and the price of wheat or whatever good. At an individual level, it probably won't change the scale much, but if enough people do produce only for self-consumption, it can have large enough effects on the market that there shouldn't really be any question that it falls under commerce. The question should rather be whether to regulate the market for wheat at all and what incentives/consequences that might have.

It seems to me that, using this line of reasoning, one could justify classifying any action as interstate commerce.

Right. Under this classification, my choice to make my own bread rather than buy it at the store, or my choice not to eat bread at all, is interstate commerce.

Based on your super-simplified classification, sure.

Based on the actual reasoning of the SCOTUS in Wickard, you would be quite wrong.

You could actually. Which is why I think it's really the wrong point to argue about. Almost everything we do is in some way involved with the market and has market effects.

Yes. Your consumption is only part of the market if you interact with the "market". The trend of forced market interaction is personally annonying.

No, your decision not to consume from the market is itself an action on the market. There's nothing forced about it. It's just a natural way of how things work, and it's an important aspect to consider when writing policy or regulation.

It seems to me that the Interstate Commerce Clause has pretty much sidestepped a large portion of the rest of the Constitution of the US.

Exactly, the federal government is supposed to have enumerated powers. That is why prohibition required an amendment, after the commerce clause we didn't need any amendments for the war on drugs.

Drugs are made in one state. Sold in another.

That is quite literally within the original Constitutional scope of the interstate commerce clause. No amendment needed...

Prohibition required an amendment because at the time most alcohol was brewed/distilled/whatever locally and sold locally, so the amount of interstate alcohol commerce was limited and would not have survived constitutional review. (Now, most alcohol is made in a few states and sold nationally, so the interstate commerce clause would apply as a matter of original scope.)

Marijuana the #1 drug in the drug war can be and is grown everywhere.

Pretty much. Federally illegal drug (can't be sold interstate) being produced and consumed personally on someone's property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

What utter bullshit.

Tax man: Why you do not pay taxes from this grow operation of yours?

Grow man: This is personal use only!

Tax man: Nuh uh!

This case wasn't about taxes, it was about controlling wheat supply in order to stabilize the national wheat price during the Great Depression.

What you're saying is correct, however, my point is that, intended or not, one part of government is giving power to another part of government.

Interesting. He was growing wheat to feed animals. The court decided that him withdrawing from the interstate wheat market was equivalent to him participating in the interstate wheat market. Because in both cases you are affecting the interstate market.

Doesn’t make much sense to me.

If they had said, he’s selling the animals made from wheat across state lines, so the production is regulable, that would at least give me an idea of what kinds of activity are not regulable.

But as it stands, it seems like as long as there is one supply chain that crosses state lines, anyone engaging in any of the same activities are subject to federal oversight. Even if they are operating distinctly from that supply chain, and distributing only within state lines.

Seems impossibly broad to me.

But maybe I’m misunderstanding and it was selling the animals across state lines that triggered the federal jurisdiction.

You're not misunderstanding it - it was a giant power grab, and the federal government can say anything that affects interstate commerce is within their purview.

its a cornerstone of the deug war

The point was to give the federal government nearly unlimited power. Seems to have worked so far, too. :(

You're misunderstanding it.

The part everyone leaves out when they complain about this case is that he was also growing wheat to sell across state lines. The wheat he was feeding to his animals was in addition to that wheat, and the combination of the two amounts put him over the wheat restrictions.

(Note: there is some argument over whether the farmer sold any wheat inter-state in the particular year at issue. That is irrelevant, since he definitely participated in interstate commerce with the same farm in prior and following years, so the activity itself was treated as an interstate commercial activity. If he had always just stuck to just growing his own wheat for private (non-commercial) use, the wheat controls would not have applied.

There is an entire string of SCOTUS cases limiting future cases on precisely those grounds--that purely intra-state commercial activities doesn't give rise to federal jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause. The key is that the contemplated commercial activity must (a) be primarily local in nature and (b) not actually cross state lines.

Thank you! I thought I must be missing something.

As others have noted, this seems like a bit of a stretch and a power-grab. Have there been any attempts, successful or otherwise, to claw-back the Federal power by the interpretation of the interstate commerce clause?

As far as I'm aware, every time it's made it to the SCOTUS, they've held in favor of the federal government.

You would be quite wrong. The Rehnquist court began moving back in the other direction of limiting the commerce clause, and generally subsequent courts have continued this trend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause#The_Rehnquist_...

In this case, I'm quite happy to be wrong. Thank you.

You could say the same about a state or municipality not having a sales tax: it has has an effect on interstate commerce, ergo the federal government is allowed to force each state or municipality to have a sales tax of some kind.

(Or, I’m totally misinterpreting this).

You're misinterpreting it.

A sales tax is a purely local tax--an item must be purchased in person so the transaction is always local.

A use tax is a interstate tax, and applies where the good is purchased in one state but brought into another. For online sales, where the purchase is treated as occurring in the location of the buyer, it is technically a "use" tax that applies (because the item is sold in one state but actually shipped to another state), which is why the federal government can theoretically pass a national "sales" tax law for internet commerce and why states can't impose a sales tax on items sold online directly to out-of-state customers.

Yes, it's complicated, especially since most sales and use tax laws generally use the term "sales" tax to refer to what is actually a "use" tax.

Interestingly, so was yellow-colored margarine.

"Oleomargarine", as they used to call it, is an off-white color. To make it more appealing to butter users, oleo manufacturers added yellow coloring, until the butter lobby appealed. I believe this regulation was overturned in the late 1960s.

So they sold the coloring separately, in a small packet, and the user could mix it in.

Wow, I didn't know that, thanks! I love pop culture trivia like that.

If only the downsides of all regulations were so transparent and causally obvious to the public.

Yeah. There was one recently around Domino's and accessibility that made me cringe so hard. But the general sentiment from HN seemed to be in favor of a new regulation to mandate all websites implement accessibility. Scary.

This? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20589788#20597127 - "Domino’s asks SCOTUS to shut down a lawsuit requiring its website be accessible (theverge.com)".

The consensus as I read it was accessibility should be such that no one is disadvantaged by disabilities unnecessarily and that means that they should make online discounts accessible to all by making their website accessible [according to WCAG standards].

In the UK this is required by the Disability Discrimination Act, companies have to make "reasonable" adjustments to enable access (where reasonable is inter alia a function of the costs and business size too).

I understand that USA have a DDA too with a very similar requirement and so it appears that no new legislation is required to get Domino's to act, just a court order or someone at Domino's deciding they care about accessibility.

Have fun making the "unnecessarily" argument to a judge when you do your startup.

It takes a rare degree of micromanaging to run a $10b startup (for an appropriate comparison to Domino's) and worry when it's sued for some accessibility issue.

Okay. What's the boundary between those that have the right to not spend money implementing accessiblity in their website and those that don't have that right? Seriously, what's the boundary? What is the fundamental ethical reasoning that got you there?

It's not a boundary of "fundamental ethical reasoning". It's a balance of societal desire and available resources.

If your startup has assessed the question of accessibility, documented it, not actively worked against accessibility, done whatever internal leads consider reasonable within its cost constraints (eg, where costs allow asking/employing experts), then you're on track.

Same goes for having a store with a step at the front.

If you're making millions in revenue [through your website] but won't create an accessible colour scheme, or provide Aria tags, skip links, image descriptions, and such that are pretty much standard boilerplate nowadays then you deserve to be hauled up on it, IMO.

This reminds me of the situation where video games now require that if you add text chat to a game, then you also need to add voice-to-text and text-to-voice to accommodate people with disabilities. Then you need to also test it with a bunch of people that suffer from these disabilities. There are some exceptions, but you need to at least document that you assessed whether you can afford to add this feature or not before release. [0]

Accessibility is important, but things like this can easily overstep their bounds to the degree that it can stifle competition. It would've made far more sense to work towards some unified OS features that would allow for such functionality, instead of putting the burden onto the application developer.

[0] https://www.3playmedia.com/2019/03/18/the-cvaa-video-game-ac...

Those OS features do largely exist (speech to text slightly less so) and are readily available for developers to interact with, often worked into the framework of choice already.

Except Electron, where you get to reimplement everything.

My takeaway thought from the article was that "pre-sliced" != "long-life"

I'd always assumed that pre-sliced came along after long-life/'functional' bread came along. Quite appreciated the fact that the pre-slicing originally had an impact on it going stale (but then this opens up the question around why slicing was considered a chore.. few seconds with a decent knife?)

If my friends and family are any measure, a household with a nice sharp knife is not in the majority. The number of squished flat rolls is astounding. Grating your own cheese is also just as easy, but most people cant be arsed to do that either.

I don’t think it’s “can’t be arsed” so much as, for a lot of people, it’s not even on the radar.

Growing up, cooking was basically throwing some meat on the grill or in the coven and steaming some veggies. Maybe some pre-mix rice, instant potatoes, etc. Throw on some name-brand sauce, Heinz or some BBQ sauce. Christmas and Thanksgiving you might get fancier, from-scratch stuffing, gravy, and some baked goods.

That’s how I learned to cook Which is to say I really didn’t know how to in any meaningful sense. About a year ago I binged one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows, and at the same time some friends started a routine Sunday dinner. Those two inspired and clicked the idea in my head that this is something I could do, that it’s not reserved for trained chefs and people who spent their childhoods in the kitchen.

Shitty food culture focused on convenience is a big culprit. Friction and fear mean people don’t branch out, sticking with what they know.

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