Tuesday’s Portland Daily Sun includes an impassioned plea for a less bureaucratic and litigious approach to regulating local food.
The number of laws, legislators and lawyers are symptomatic of an engorged and pervasive government. Laws both liberate and throttle the free market. They save lives as well as injure and kill people with the same thick rulebooks, red tape and bureaucratic hurdles. It’s often hard to know if something is a law is for the good of the community or for the good of a corporation. Rules regarding organic food are created in order to protect small farmers from the agri-industrial complex, but are in turn used to squash those same small farmers on technicalities and loose interpretations. Got Monsanto?
I loved it when ThinkGeek was sued by the National Pork Board.