A very sense-making post on production and regulation

[feuervogel]

from legionseagle:

As I indicated in yesterday's post, with reference to claims of immortality conveyed by tripe-eating, self-regulation is a frankly terrible way to run anything consumer-facing. Actually, the market's a pretty terrible way to run anything consumer-facing in general because of the inbalance in both market power and market knowledge as between producer and consumer. I mean, I bet you wouldn't have known unless I'd told you yesterday that the tripe producing process required a "vessel for removing fat from fur taken from cowheels." And I bet knowing it didn't make you any more willing to buy tripe, did it? Or, for that matter, neats-foot oil.*

Furthermore, after the event regulation, better known as "waiting until people start getting mad-cow disease and then letting them sue the producers" is absolutely hopeless as a regulatory mechanism, because the mechanism of enforcement is one-to-one, meaning that less-than-ethical suppliers become engaged in a numbers game of betting whether a) they'll be sued at all; b) whether they can out-blink anyone proceeding against them.

Also, since the abolition of trial by combat, the principle way for a tort law judgement to be expressed is in terms of financial reparation; that is, I can't step in and sue a corned beef provider who's caused a typhoid epidemic in Scotland by cooling the cans of corned beef in a Uruguayan river consisting predominantly of raw sewage** for the costs of a new cooling mechanism or even an upstream sewage treatment works, but only for the direct financial loss to me of losing my granny to typhoid. And for as long as the were-gild on dead Scottish grannies is lower than the construction costs of hygienic cooling plants for corned beef works, then the corned beef producer will stick with the old "dip it in the shit" tried and tested cooling method. And even if a court gets sufficiently pissed off with Fray Bentos the hypothetical corned beef company in question and awards punitive damages against them all this is likely to do is to allow me to buy a large non-sunken yacht, christen it The Typhoid Mary and steam off into the sunset with my granny's ashes built into the bulkhead.

Go read the rest.