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Comment by tc | Hacker News Reader

If you've never come across it before, you should really read Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to Do is Illegal," a farmer's perspective on how regulations crowd out local and organic farmers, destroy farming communities, favor industrialized monoculture-based agriculture, and generally make life less pleasant:

http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Salatin_Sept03.pdf

He also has a book:

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/...

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This is a good article, and the consensus among food writers, reporters, scholars and enthusiasts is clearly that much of western food/agri regulation is wrongheaded (note that even "enlightened" continental Europe retains some of the US's signature bonehead moves, like bans on young raw milk cheese).

That fact does not, however, indict the whole concept of regulation. Nobody is making a case for why yard sales should sell recalled or contaminated toys.

It does indict the idea that we can just wave regulation at a problem and solve it.

Think I'm making a strawman? Oh, how I wish I was. A challenge for you, the reader: Over the next month, keep track of how many times someone calls for "more regulation" in some form, without putting one word into actually saying what that regulation might actually be, which would certainly be the bare-minimum requirement for examining it for second-order effects or other problems. Once you start looking for this, you see it's not the exception, it's the norm... and the laws we get out of Congress certainly reflect this.

It's transparently irrational to call for "more regulation" with no further elaboration, but it happens all the damn time.

It's funny that you'd talk about "straw men" in this response, which addresses neither a call for more regulation nor an plea for regulation in the abstract.

Nope. I jumped in. But it's as generally related to the topic as your reply, which was about as direct a reaction to tc's post as mine is to yours.

A lengthy section of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php) is devoted to Joel Salatin and his farm, as well.

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