This is the problem with democracy (and politics in general); the incentive to take popular but ineffective initiatives is much greater than the incentive to take unpopular, but effective ones. Appearance is all that matters.

Great post!

Hi Francis–

Great comment!

Best–

MRE

Well, in the old days of enforcement focus, a large portion of my agency’s workers went out, looked at stuff, and levied fines when they found people in violation. If you make the fines big enough, you provide what economists would call an incentive for folks to come in line.

Under the current regime, the compliance assistance focus, it works more like this. You are in violation of a federal statute. So, you come forward to the government, and the staff works as a consultant to help bring you into line with what you’re mandated to be in line with. It’s a kindler, gentler form of enforcement, without any kind of incentive, other than you get a lot of free consulting on how to do what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place.

I do not work at Ag or HHS, but they have experienced the same shift in focus from enforcement to assistance. Assistance is a nice story but it cannot really provide the incentive to fly right without a strong enforcement arm.

The thing that Eric Schlosser is talking about would be a good step in the right direction, however, it would fall under the Executive Branch and therefore be focused, incorrectly, on assistance.

On the “Let the states look at it.” The states were producing wide variety in quality in education before NCLB. And by wide, I mean huge. Now, I have lived in places with fairly agressive state governments (New York, California) and with fairly sad state governments (from a social services standpoint, Texas and Missouri). The gap is enormous and hard to see until you move. If I were a Missourian again, I would definitely NOT want my state involved and would definitely prefer the Feds to handle it (from an efficacy perspective). If I were back to being a Californian, vice versa.

Centralization isn’t the solution without a shift in the perspective of what constitutes an effective federal government. The current perspective is clearly not functional.

Hi Max–

Thanks for the long comment.

I don’t know that I necessarily agree that assistance is less worthy than enforcement. It’s the old debate about what’s better: the carrot or the stick. Since the government exists to ‘serve’ us, it would seem to me that we would be better served by being helped than by being fined. In both cases the harmful action, whether it be food contamination, improper slaughtering techniques, whatever, has already taken place. It can’t be undone, so the best strategy is to prevent its happening in the future. How can we best do this? By levying a fine or by offering assistance to meet compliance. In my opinion the latter strategy works the best. Probably the best strategy is assistance first, then a fine if there is no change.

I can assure you from first hand experience that not all agencies of the federal government have adopted the assistance-mode.  The FTC is all about enforcement.  They don’t have an assistance bone in their corpus.

I’m sure that the federal government can come up with better ways to do things than can some states, but I still believe that the best way to govern is at the state level with federal oversight.  If I live in Missouri and don’t like the way things are going I can relatively easily move to Arkansas or Nevada or wherever it is that I think things are better.  If I don’t like what’s happening at the federal level, what are my choices?  Immigration, which is a damn site less easily accomplished than moving to another state.  And state rules and regs are much more easily changed than federal rules and regs.

Cheers–

MRE

The thing is, when we say all bureaucracies are inefficient from the start, it’s too simplistic–we stop ourselves from investigating those systems in other states–or countries for that matter, that we could duplicate.

Agreed!

MRE

Michael Pollan has it right when it comes to buying local. It comes to much the same thing as having redundant systems.

I don’t mind federal regulations. What I do mind is centralization–it’s cumbersome, expensive, slow. In this age of the internet, we should be able to allow each state to develop their own methods to address any and all federal regulations, since regulations would be known and understandable instantly by internet–for the public,the legislatures,the lawyers(!)–any and all who need to know. The idea of transparency, that corporations and politicians would find it more difficult to take advantage of the public,is something we as citizens really need to develop using the internet. Anybody who’s been following the Congressional scandals know how much harder it is nowadays to hide from the public.

Get rid of the FDA and USDA as the actual regulators and let each state legislature come up with substitutions most convenient and servicible to the citizens of each state. This is what we already do with school systems since before No Child Left Behind. It should be very obvious that the needs of a state like Montana are very different from the much more populous California. And each state should have at least one of its own USDA slaughterhouses, financed according to the convenience of that state, with a mixture of private,state, and federal funds determined by that state. For instance, Nevada might want to put several slaughterhouses by the CA-NV border to take advantage of the bigger CA population.

“States’ Rights” is usually code for something very unfortunate. How much better it would be if it stood for immediate response and flexibility because we handed operations over to each state, the way it should always have been.

Hi LC–

In my opinion your suggestions would be a step in the right direction.  I’m not sure that state bureaucracies wouldn’t be too large to keep from screwing things up.

Cheers–

MRE

I actually do distrust the food supply for many reasons, but my answer is to buy mostly locally grown meat, eggs, milk and vegetables.

Hi Kristn–

I think your choice is the optimal one.  If everyone bought local it would be easy to track down the source of any contamination (which would affect only a relatively few people) instead of this Taco Bell nightmare that’s going on right now.  Last I read, it turns out it wasn’t the green onions.

Cheers–

MRE

To make a bureaucracy “effective” it will be necessary to further centralize. How does this make us more secure from bioterroism? It doesn’t. Thousands of small producers scattered across the entire continent would be impossible to compromise to any degree that would threaten the health of more than a few. With 13 plants supplying 300 million people, 20+ million could be hit from just one plant. Simple contamination would be easily isolated if all of the affected individuals could be traced back to one local source. Let me guess each of the 13 plants are independantly owned thus creating “competition”, right?

Taco Bell, “in an abundance of caution” eliminated green onions from all 5,000+ restaurants and changed it’s produce supplier even though the onions were cleared! This “logic” is insane. It also further favors consolidation. It takes big bucks to lose an account like that and makes the supplier vulnerable to takeover, at pennies on the dollar.

Hi George–

Great comment! You’ve hit the nail precisely on the head.

Thanks for writing.

MRE