WAUKEGAN, IL

By A.B. Dada
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Slashdot had an article today titled FDA Set to Approve Products from Cloned Cows, to which I replied with the post I’m Excited:

I’m excited.

More producing products (cows, in this case) mean more supply of the products I use (cream, cheese and other high fat-low carb dairy products). More supply means lower prices. Lower prices means more business opportunities, which means a stronger economic outlook for those who can’t afford the high barrier to entry created by the high cost to breed cattle.

I’m sure there are some health concerns (my wife prefers organic, I prefer mass produced for my daily consumption), but I’m not sure that the concerns are valid. I travel the globe and specifically like to visit previously poor countries (Ethiopia, Uganda, India, etc) and what I see is people who have better lives because of the ability to purchase their needs cheaper. If the health concern is a higher rate of disease that might knock 5 years off your life expectancy, but being able to eat or clothe yourself or keep your body mass consistant will add 20 years, this sounds like a net benefit. Beyond the health concerns, though, we also can see that cheaper dairy might mean more business opportunities in the previously poor areas — and this also increases the standard of living and life expectancy of the person willing to get involved in the new marketplace.

I absolutely, positively do NOT want government requirements for labeling. If I am concerned with labeling, I will call the manufacturer of the product and ASK. I already do it because I don’t consume trans fats (except for naturally occuring ones in beef). The government was “supposed” to regulate trans fat labels, but they haven’t. Many items say 0 trans fats but contain a significant amount below 1 gram, and your government allows it to be labeled 0 grams. Nice. That’s government at its finest. When I see 0 grams of trans fats, I will call the manufacturer and ask them to confirm the fact that there are zero, and most of the time they’ll say “there’s a negligible amount” which is the equivalent of saying “yeah, they’re in there.” No thanks.

Forcing companies to label properly does NOT work. “Organic” means nothing, “0 trans fats” means nothing, “low sugar” means nothing, “whole grains” means nothing. If you’re worried, contact the company directly and figure it out on your own.

Cloned animals seems good to me — if I can get marbled beef at a discount, I’ll be happy. If beef jerky comes down even 20% in price, I’ll be happy. If creams and cheeses can be made at the same quality for a lower price, I’ll be happy. All of these items keep me healthy, slim and energized, and the cost savings means I can eat more — making myself even healthier.

Discuss this article at the slashdot site, or at the anarcho-capitalism forum.

Laws are titled to make voters think the laws do something. Laws are written with some intensions that can be described as “good for society,” but all laws have loopholes. A law against murder doesn’t say “Don’t kill anyone,” instead it makes specific descriptions and we have a mess of legal issues when one person kills another.

Chicago created such a law in order to combat the unintended consequences of federal actions. The Federal government made it easy to get money cheaply, and the regulatory boards changed policies to let banks give that money away easily. This meant that people who shouldn’t own a home were able to get approved — the banks don’t care anyway since they had the federal regulatory recommendations to blame if things went south. And south they went. Now the South Side of Chicago is seeing more foreclosures, defaults, and condemned/abandoned homes — people who couldn’t pay the mortgage surely didn’t pay for maintenance and a clean home. Chicago tried to fix the Fed’s errors by creating a law preventing people from getting a mortgage — even if they were able to pay it.

The Chicago Sun Times has a nice run down of this law in an article titled Mortgage law socks home sales. Some realtors are blaming the law for the 45% drop in homes bought on the South Side in just one month. Painful, but the drop is a combination of oversupply of homes, and undersupply of easy credit, and a laws preventing one person from transacting with another.

What’s the point of all these messes? Originally, government likes to get people easy money — in creates easy voters. When the people fail, they don’t blame the government for their standards, they blame the banks, their employers, their neighbors, their family and even God for not “blessing them.” Common sense tells me that the only person to blame is yourself — especially if you’re entering an agreement that you can only HOPE to meet, rather than being able to meet it in full today.

Government giveth by taking away from others, then they taketh away from you. Don’t sign the dotted line — all that legal garbage on the pages before it was written to avoid the laws for the powerful party, and stick the less powerful party with the bill.

Discuss this article at the anarcho-capitalism forum.