In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times (which is unfortunately behind the Times paywall), noted economist and op-ed page columnist Paul Krugman blames the forces of deregulation (led by the late Milton Friedman) for our new "fear of eating" brought on by the rash of foodborne illness in this country.
Krugman argues that although those who blame globalization, corporations, and the Bush administration certainly have a point, the real culprits are who historian Rick Perlstein calls "'E.coli conservatives': idealogues who won't accept even the most compelling case for government regulation."
Krugman: "That's why I blame the food safety crisis on 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 and ineffective drugs? 'It's in the the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,' he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would have 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."
As Krugman and everyone else who has studied the subject knows, not all markets self-correct, and industries are rarely able to police themselves, and food safety is clearly an example of the failure of self-policing, as Marian Burros pointed out in a recent Times story.
My brother, who's pretty clearheaded on these kinds of issues and who actually studied at the University of Chicago under Friedman and some of his colleagues, said the following when I asked him for his comment on the piece: "Krugman was generally correct but partisan and nasty. Friedman is especially beloved by some Republicans and clearly wrong on safety regulation, but there is no shortage of examples of Democratic laxness or sweetheart regulation. Even without Friedman's special ideological commitment, the combination of costs of surveillance and industry political influence has meant that much regulation under both Democrats and Republicans has depended on voluntary compliance and been affected by special interests."
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