Reason missed the key point. Well over half of US infant formula is paid for by welfare programs. Those have per-state monopolies awarded by competitive bidding. So it's not an ordinary consumer product.[1]
There's a case to be made about fine-tuning things in some ways as the article suggests, but it's still gross to frame this under the "government is bad" banner as Reason does.
This concern is especially relevant in the baby formula space, where Nestle killed thousands of babies by pushing their mothers off breast milk onto unreliably supplied formula.
Sure it would. If baby formula were unregulated the price would be lower - this is obvious on its face. It would also (probably) be riskier, and the trade-off might not be worth it, but it would be cheaper.
We systematically underestimate how much poverty is worsened by regulation that increase the prices and/or reduces the availability of goods. The left has finally gotten religion here on housing ("YIMBY" just means "deregulate construction in order to drive down prices") so maybe there's hope.
This isn’t obvious at all. One steady state condition that occurs without regulation is a predatory monopoly and price gouging.
And we aren’t even talking about fraudulent or harmful products reaching the market.
No regulation just leads to a mafia state. Nobody wants it.
Their good government policy would be to give the poor families money. This would have the great side effect of getting rid of the idiotic state by state monopolies but the justification is the same as every other tied benefit. This is stupid. Give people the money and let them decide what to spend it on. They have the information and motivation.
I guess you could argue that if formula wasn't an option then mothers would _have_ to breastfeed but then they couldn't work.
My point is that formula is a very attractive option for women so it's not like Nestle is holding a gun to their head. It's just a product they know people will buy.
I may not be representing it that well but if anything because I'm trying to carefully control my tone and am downplaying the harm knowingly caused.
There are lot of different pressures on people and a lot of reasons why they might choose not to breastfeed but the nestle thing is not really that and is as clear cut evil as it gets really go check it out.
Also, women who stay with baby for few months or weeks arw no rarity - and breastfeeding is significantly easier in that setup. Not everyone can or find it comfortable, but it is not that much PITA in median.
That said, I was also amazed at how reasonably-priced formula is here. I had other issues and ended up supplementing for awhile, and it really wouldn’t have been that big a deal - about 2-3 EUR/day using Hipp (midrange) powder if we’d had to feed it exclusively.
This is not quite true. There are plenty of libertarian thinkers that would be perfectly happy just cutting checks to poor people and letting them procure what the need.
Rather unscientific heavy breathing about heavy metals, since some level must exist in all foods. Matt even links to a mommyhood101.com article in the above, which I guess is the secondary source for his opinion?
The question is: what are reasonable limits to exposure for babies? For example, what are the EU limits for baby formula?
Here is the original “paper”: https://www.healthybabyfood.org/sites/healthybabyfoods.org/f...
Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF) paid laboratories to measure amounts, but superficially their analysis looks rather poor I think. Any good links to scientific critiques of their analysis?
Maybe the question I'd ask is "if you sample milk from 100 different human volunteers, what fraction of the samples also contain detectable levels of arsenic, cadmium, lead and/or mercury?"
I do think that doing analysis of household chemicals and publishing the results is a great idea. A consumer-testing company did some great ad-hoc analysis of sunscreens and found higher-than-acceptable levels of benzene, leading to widespread recalls, which I thought was awesome: https://www.valisure.com/valisure-newsroom/valisure-detects-.... Still confused about how they plan to make money from this (maybe they could lobby the government to mandate that labs like theirs must do testing on certain consumer products?). Also still confused about this led to regulatory action against them: https://www.consumerreports.org/product-safety/valisure-foun....
Some people in this space publish consumer advisory articles saying "we measured <X> in <Y> and found some <X>" and don't list a safe PPM, or their reasoning, and it's very tough to know what to do with this information. There's often extraordinarily little evidence about how much <X> is bad for you and sometimes we only get the evidence years after people have had hunches that it's not so good. (trans fats? https://www.vox.com/2015/6/17/8793937/why-fda-banned-trans-f... )
So it's tough to know what to do when the pesticide-in-food people publish an analysis which "does not incorporate risk assessment into the calculations. All pesticides are weighted equally, and we do not factor in the levels deemed acceptable by the EPA." (https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary.php).
I guess this is one reason to have a doctor and a pediatrician you trust -- because part of their job is to sift through the latest available information and have reasonable heuristics about safety and risks.
> Even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect IQ, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement. [1]
Human milk contains varying amounts relative to the producer's diet and exposure. It seems that the mean is in line with the formula's on Healthy Babies Bright Future's report on page 23. The upper range is concerning, especially considering that those impacted are already most likely to be in an environment with high heavy metal exposure.
> The World Health Organization (WHO) has indicated that the mean and range of these toxic metals detected in breast milk around the world are: Pb (Lead) 5.0 ppb (0.0-41.1 ppb), Hg (Mercury) 2.7 ppb (0.64-257.1 ppb), and Cd (Cadmium) 0.1 ppb (0.1-3.8 ppb) [2]
My pediatrician minimized my concerns about heavy metal exposure through food until after the Congressional oversight hearing and encouraged me to avoid use of rice cereal. The information was out there, but she was following AAP recommendations on diet.
I was really grateful for the publication by Healthy Babies Bright Futures. In the beginning, I was buying organic and newer brands, but realized Gerber generally had lower heavy metal concentrations in their samples when compared to competitors.
1. https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/lead-exposure/
2. https://jpnim.com/index.php/jpnim/article/download/040223/31....
There is a whole bunch of stuff that has changed over time -- for example the fairly recent view that evidence now weakly supports swim lessons at a young age to prevent drowning -- and I really don't know how to keep up with this, other than by talking to a bunch of friends who are MDs and tracking their own choices vs. the data I see.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/7/246.16a
It's technically allowed to have some other cost-containment structure than a single-winner contract, but there a bunch of criteria that I don't fully understand that make it sound like it's effectively impossible to actually do.
> "State agencies must support all waiver requests with documentation in the form of a State Plan amendment as required under § 246.4(a)(14)(x) and may submit such requests only in either of the following circumstances:
> ...
> The single-supplier competitive system would be inconsistent with the efficient or effective operation of the program. Examples of justifications FNS will not accept for a waiver, include, but are not limited to: preservation of participant preference for otherwise nutritionally equivalent infant formulas; maintenance of health care professionals' prerogatives to prescribe otherwise nutritionally equivalent infant formulas for non-medical reasons; potential loss of free or otherwise discounted materials to WIC clinics and other health care facilities; potential inability of a manufacturer selected in accordance with applicable State procurement procedures to supply contractually-specified amounts of infant formula; and the possibility of interrupted infant formula supplies to retail outlets as a consequence of entering into a contract with a single manufacturer."
So, you have to able to make a case that a single-winner contract won't work in your case, but you can't use the argument that a single bidder makes the whole system brittle if the single winner becomes unable to produce product. Wild.
I don't see any mention of breach of contract penalties if the supplier can't keep up with demand. Not sure if that means it's left to the discretion of the participating states.
I was wondering what legislation created this regulation, and it looks like it dates back to the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, though perhaps it's been amended since. It looks like the concept of "single source" contracts was there from the beginning.
https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/CNA_1966_1...
That's sort of okay as long as Nissan can keep up with demand (not everyone wants a Leaf but at least one cheap EV is on the market), but let's say they're hit with a supply chain issue and can't get a critical part. Other manufacturer might be able to step in, but they're not participating in the EV rebate program so customers have to pay full price. And in this alternate reality those manufacturers probably don't make cheap or even mid-range EVs anyways because it's not profitable -- they can't compete with Nissan because they're at a $7500 price disadvantage, so they focus on selling cars for rich people. The Tesla Model S might exist, but the Model 3 probably wouldn't. A system of artificial and completely unnecessary monopoly would stop a whole competitive industry from forming.
Is it corruption?
Just look at the sister thread 'why didn't government stockpile my freemarket products for me'
You break it you bought it.