The Question of Regulation

In the week that I finished all 1,069 pages of Atlas Shrugged, how curious that we would sit next to a flaming Libertarian at a friend’s 60th birthday party last night. I thought he and my husband might break out into a fist fight at one point, as I sat back and listened to the modern interpretation of what I had just read.

Ayn Rand is revered by any Libertarian who knows his stuff. These people turn to her writing as if it were their Bible. The tome I just read depicted the end of society as we know it under increasing government intervention.

Last night I pretty much agreed with Mr. Libertarian that unions were the downfall of the US auto industry. My husband, however, recounted horror stories of his father working on the Ford assembly line in the days before the unions.

Mr. Libertarian claimed that sweat shops were not nearly as bad as they had been depicted and that most people only worked in such conditions for a short time (and so therefore they were OK???)

We moved on to discuss the meat industry. Whereas most Americans would credit Upton Sinclair for initiating government regulation, Mr. Libertarian was dead set against any form of government inspection.

Then today I read the story on the front page of the NYT about the 22-year-old woman who was paralyzed by an extreme encounter with E. coli, the result of a bad burger. And I say, “But I thought we had initiated inspections to catch this stuff before it ends up in people’s stomachs.”

It would appear the inspections simply can’t deal with the enormity of the problem in today’s meat processing industry. I was revolted to read that:

-- Meat producers use a combination of sources to cut their costs by as much as 25%.
-- Fatty trimmings are treated with ammonia to kill bacteria.
-- Carcasses are washed with hot water and lactic acid before sending them to the cutting floor.
-- The low-grade ingredients come from parts of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli.
-- Many suppliers will sell their meat to a processor only if testing for E. coli is done on the FINAL product, so as to avoid being blamed if and when contamination occurs.

It made me suspicious of most commercially processed ground meat. It reinforced my commitment to buy meat from Polyface.

Meanwhile a beautiful young woman’s life is wrecked by a tainted hamburger. And as many as 940 have been sickened by this particular episode of E. coli. Cargill, the processor, is bracing for the inevitable law suits. But the odds are that another company will be the culprit in the near future.

Here’s a place where I definitely differ with the Libertarians, who would get rid of all forms of government regulation. I, on the other hand, would push for sweeping changes in the meat industry to significantly reduce if not altogether eliminate the chance for contamination and infection. I will support inspections every step of the way, but only if they work to eliminate the problem.

It would seem we have created a monster that even extreme measures are failing to bring under control.