The Rats of El Toro
(posted by Angelica)
David Z of No Third Solutions wonders why, if I am such an adamant street-food libertarian, I won’t see the injustice of government oppression in general and let the scales fall from my big-fat statist eyes.
Well, we won’t have to go very far to find the answer. Let’s just stay within the food service industry. As I have stated in the street-food libertarian post, I love street food and I think loosely-regulated street food is just about always the very best kind and I oppose all but the most minimal regulation on hawkery. However, let me just tell you a little shaggy-dog story that illustrates why in general, I am definitely pro government-mandated health and sanitary regulations and inspections.
When I am not busy being a journalist or blogger, I tend bar just a couple of nights a week at a “Spanish” restaurant just a couple of blocks from my apartment here in Taipei. Let’s call it El Toro. Chef Charlie’s paella is inauthentic but delicious. The place is lacking in style. Old posters from the Spanish tourism bureau graces the walls spackled to look Mediterranean. But El Toro considered a genteel mid-range restaurant and people go there for first dates or for Mom’s birthday. That sort of thing.
The restaurant is also home to the feistiest, most brazen rats I have ever seen in my life. As soon as the chef goes home for the night, the kitchen is their playground. I have nicknamed the most humoungus rat of them all “Theodora”. I have seen Theodora galump up the stairs at last call while customers still lingered over their drinks.
The staff at the restaurant puts down glue boards and occasionally those will snare a young rat. But not the bigger ones. Not Theodora. “It’s no use going after her,” said Charlie, “she’s grandmother-grade.”
I’ve talked to the bar manager about professional pest control. He shrugged his shoulders. The owner thinks it cost too much to get the pest guys in, he said. He got an estimate — $4000 New Taiwan Dollars, or roughly $120 USD for every visit. It’s true prices are generally lower across the board here in Taiwan, especially for services, but keep in mind the average tab for two at El Toro could easily be $45 USD or more.
If there are restaurant health and sanitation inspectors in Taiwan, they’ve never made it out to El Toro. Because if she is faced with the prospect of getting shut down, or even an unfavorable rating that had to be prominently displayed, there is no way the owner would have baulked at paying $120 USD or many multiples of $120 USD to get the rats out.
Of course, I still eat at El Toro. I love Charlie’s garlic shrimp, and I’ll fight Theodora herself for the last morsel of his meatball abondigas. As with the street food I regularly eat, I know that I’m taking a risk and the tastiness is worth it. However, I feel bad for our customers who are under the illusion that just because they’re sipping red wine from a sparkling glass, there aren’t rats running through the kitchen. Moreover, it doesn’t have to be this way. With mandatory food safety inspections, El Toro will probably shape up rather than be shut down.
I suppose in theory there could be some third-party inspection firm who can certify the sanitary condition of restaurants. But in practice, this have not happened.
I have a simple rule of thumb for when government intervention is necessary — is it a pressing need that is not met by the market? In this case, the name of the market failure is asymmetrical information. With street food, those who indulge are under no illusion as to the risks they are taking and thus there is less asymmetrical information and less of a case for intervention.
Oh, and David. If you are ever in Taipei, swing by and I’ll see that you get a beer on the house.
Tags: asymmetrical information, critters, government mandates, regulation
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I have to say I’m a little confused. If the health conditions in Taiwan are so bad, then why do the people here live longer than in huge government countries such as the US? If you yourself think the rats are a serious health risk, then why do you write:
There are quite a few restaurants in the city without rat problems. You might have to pay a bit more, but they’re out there.
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Fascinating post. My issue is less one of asymmetrical information, however, than of proportionality. I dislike excessive govt regulation, and prefer to see business “regulated” via fear of tort suits, with one exception. Some damages are so grave a monetary punishment is insufficient.
For example, the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Suing afterseveral hundred young women have burned or jumped to their deaths is not an acceptable substitute for an enforced fire code that greatly reduces the likelihood of such incidences.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Mark,
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. If I did not work at El Toro, I would never know that there are rats back here. While it’s not the slickest place, it looked respectable enough.
I’m sure there are more expensive restaurants in the city with rat problems and less expensive restaurants without. We, the customers, don’t know. A shiny facade means nothing.
As for me still eating at El Toro, that’s a risk I choose to take with my eyes open and that’s fine. Not everybody is privileged with the same information, however.
As for people in Taiwan living longer, that’s totally irrelevant. You yourself pointed out a host of different reasons from high fructose corn syrup to obesity why those in the US are relatively short-lived when their high GDP is taken into account. In any case, I don’t think it’s because they have health inspectors.
Mona,
The problem leaving it up to torts in this situation is again, one of information asymmetry. Customer does not even know that there are rats at El Toro. How can they sue if they become ill later? Even if they tried, how can they prove cause and effect?
I think the problem is one of proportionality as well, but not the one you mentioned. I would like to think that the chance of someone, I don’t know, catching hantavirus and kicking the bucket due to El Toro food is small. However, what if they just get a little sick? They do not get sick enough to go through the legal process even if they could pinpoint El Toro as the culprit.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Angelica, if you know about the rats at El Toro, so does much of the community. When I lived in the East Village of Manhattan, there were two Chinese restaurants in my vicinity that were way cheap with great carry-out/delivery, but word was wide-spread that both places were cockroach infested filth-pens in their kitchens.
On rare occasion I still ordered food from one of them (hey, it was super good and cheap), but always knowing that the kitchen area was not up to code.
But actually, I do think that an absence of rat-infestation in a restaurant kitchen is a matter for regulation and not tort. Rats carry all manner of horrific diseases. Enough people may not “get the word,” be new arrivals to the neighborhood or whatever, that hordes of rats in a restaurant kitchen is a public health issue suitable for regulation. But these restaurants I refer to were in old buildings of the sort that attract rats/cockroaches; street vendors just do not.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:38 am
I should add: disease from rats may often prove fatal or severely debilitating. So on the proportionality scale, I just think it makes sense for people to be able to assume that a restaurant must meet the health code, rather than check out the reputed cleanliness of every restaurant they might wish to patronize.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Mona, I bet they don’t know about the rats. I didn’t before I started working there. The thing is, El Toro is not a neighborhood staple. It’s an occasional treat and our customers come from all over Taipei but they don’t come often.
And you’re right about street vendors. People blanche at hawkers. But at least everything they do is out in the open. Plus they only tend to sell a limited variety of food so there is less stuff left hanging around. So, while they are not the best when it comes to food sanitation, I bet more horrifying stuff goes on behind the scenes of actual restaurants.
March 5th, 2008 at 4:50 am
So, why do you still eat there?
March 5th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
I’m not the most risk-averse person is the short answer.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:07 am
There’s an obvious libertarian solution to the rat problem:
Pellet guns.
Then again, that giant rat might take advantage of the 2nd amendment and arm herself in response…
March 6th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Just one observation - perhaps the problem of assymetrical info. is itself the result of government intervention in the first place? Specifically, if people assume that any place that is open must have met government code, they will not demand other certifications before becoming a customer. Hence businesses have no incentive under current conditions to be ultra-transparent to their customers. This is true up and down the economic chain, not just in retail and restaurants.
I have no way of proving to any scientific standard, but my gut tells me that people would be a lot less willing to spend money in nameless, faceless corporate establishments if such establishments weren’t a) transparent and b) generally following the ethical beliefs of a given society. The “sellers’ would have a major incentive to market both their transparency and ethical behavior as a means of attracting customers from competitors. By creating an illusory (even absent corruption, code enforcement is often woefully underfunded) floor that ostensibly applies across the board, this incentive never gets off the ground - there is no incentive besides merely displaying your license.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Quasibill beat me to part of my comment. Information itself is a good, and part of the answer to information asymmetry is a market in information (e.g., Consumer Reports). In this specific case, third-party health and safety certification is a possible market good.
I know you mentioned this in the comments, Angelica, and pointed out the lack of such services in the existing market. But as quasibill suggests, the government’s activity in the area probably tends to crowd out competing alternatives.
But how’s this for an intermediate step toward less statism, while still addressing safety concerns (somebody on the Freedom Democrats blog suggested it): 1) no limit to the number of licenses based on restricting competing firms to what the market will bear, and 2) no licensing fee beyond the actual cost of administration.
That would, at least, remove much of the cartelizing effect of licensing.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that, once upon a time - a much more localized time, when people did have more extensive knowledge of local conditions - our society operated without health inspections by government agencies.
And it worked so well that…well, people demanded that the government start inspecting restaurants, and meat packing plants, and other food establishments. And in one of the astounding coincidences that seems to keep cropping up just for the purpose of screwing with libertarians, the rate of food-borne illness declined significantly.
Now, of course, there are all kinds of reasons why the regulatory regime wasn’t responsible for the improvements to human well-being that followed. There always are. Nonetheless, I have to conclude that the burden in on those who would do away with the inspections to demonstrate that there is something superior to take its place - and not vaporware, either.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Consumer Reports didn’t exist prior to the modern regulatory regime. I daresay that the modern consumer has more, not less, information available to him.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Angelica asks” However, what if they just get a little sick? They do not get sick enough to go through the legal process even if they could pinpoint El Toro as the culprit.
If they get just a “little sick,” that is de minimis, and not worth either a lawsuit *or* government regulation of the issue, which is quite expensive. If, on the other hand, rats in a restaurant kitchen can lead to serious and pervasive illness, and even death, that’s worth a lawsuit, or may cross the line of proportionality to justify regulation.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Joe, I have a question: if there is a regulatory function to be played, why must it be a governmental one? There are plenty of trade federations out there, shouldn’t the goal be to find a way to encourage their development to solve such problems? If the problem doesn’t involve guns or geography, why am I using both of those to solve it?
March 7th, 2008 at 9:12 am
In theory, Joel, I could imagine some other system working that way. Seen any? Any actual, existing non-governmental systems that work? That’s what I meant about “not vaporware” and “burden of proof.”
March 7th, 2008 at 9:15 am
shouldn’t the goal be to find a way to encourage their development to solve such problems
No. The goal should be to have a system of inspections that gives restauraneurs enough motive to keep the rats out of the kitchen and the raw meat away from the raw vegetables.
Do you know what “men with guns” can do that Consumer Reports can’t? Make the manager allow you to look at the kitchen.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
joe,
Back in the ’60s, Paul Goodman wrote something about the system preempting the alternatives, and then presenting itself as the only way of doing things. Your challenge, and placing of the burden of proof, to show existing instances of a voluntary alternative to state inspection reminded me of that.
The state has occupied the field and crowded out other alternatives. And given the tendency of the public to accept the way things are as the only normal system, and the tendency of the system’s educational and propaganda organs to reinforce and perpetuate that mindset, the “isness of things” becomes a barrier to any alternative.
It’s interesting, BTW, that you mention meat-packing plants. In fact, contrary to the official mythology of Upton Sinclair, it was the meat-packing industry that demanded the government start inspecting the plants.
There’s an excellent book on the subject by Gabriel Kolko, a New Left historian: The Triumph of Conservatism. Kolko argues that most of the Progressive Era regulatory regime was passed at the behest of the regulated industries. The corporate economy’s attempt at voluntary cartelization through the trusts had failed (the overleveraged and inefficient trusts began losing market share as soon as they were formed), and the regulatory state was an attempt to cartelize industry under government auspices.
In the case of meat inspection, the U.S. government imposed an inspection regime on those processing for export in the late 19th century. It did so under pressure from the big packers themselves, who had lost business in Europe over a tainted meat scare and wanted what amounted to a trade association code enforced by the government, with a government seal of approval as a marketing device. The problem is it didn’t apply to the (mostly small) packers that produced solely for the domestic market. The Meat Inspection Act under TR was passed under pressure from the big packers to apply the inspection regime across the board.
So the regulatory state, generally, often reflects the whole Baptists and bootleggers thing–with the progressive “Baptists” serving the interests of the corporate bootleggers.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Back in 2004 I posted something on rats in kitchens after reading a New Scientist article.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
joe,
Kevin has already pointed out that your version of history ain’t necessarily so, but I want to show how one of your arguments is worse than meaningless:
“well, people demanded that the government start inspecting restaurants, and meat packing plants, and other food establishments”
In 2004, the people demanded that George Bush be given 4 more years to implement his policies…
Also, know what men with guns can also do? For one example of this type of thinking gone wrong, check out Radley Balko’s reporting on “Rack ‘n Roll” Billiards. Note that when they couldn’t force this guy to sell to local gov’t cronies, they set the regulatory process against him.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I suppose there are two points here. Is the level of hygiene undesirable, is it a case of asymmetric information? And if not is the solution more/less/different regulation by the government.
Are we perhaps applying our alien standards to the local market? I am always mindful that when I was younger I was fairly fastidious about washing-up being spotless …etc. That was until I had to do it myself. Any estimate on what the increase in price would be in % terms for a rat-free zone of preparation, ceteris paribus?
Perhaps tacitly knowing about it, but not knowing the gory details is how people like it. An obvious parallel is eating meat, we just want the end product at a good price without too much to worry about.
That all said, clearly choice has diminished - whether to pay for no rats or not, and going way up market/eating at home/starving is not a proper choice - and it carries with it an unacceptable and costly to avoid hazard. On other issues the libertarian voice can be assertive and convincing, but tellingly here the market-only alternatives are only rather blushingly ventured. Perhaps it could be a case for minimal regulation?
Question though, are the toilets clean? I was always told one way to know (presumably this advice is for concerned tourists) is to use the toilet-cleanliness as a proxy for the mortality rate of eating at a restaurant. Not had that many opportunities to verify this however.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
quasibill,
Generic statements about the fact that government and democracy can be bad is an abdication of responsibility for working to make sure they are not.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Kevin Carson,
It’s rare for me to hear people talking about “the system” anymore. Most people with your level of political sophistication these days have ceased to believe that there is any such thing as a unified system of power that one can meaningfully speak of.
Your narrative oversimplified a more complicated history of competing interests pushing up against each other. The meat packers didn’t want inspections - they eventually supported a particular system of inspection as the least-bad alternative once they realized it was inevitable.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
joe: You have woefully failed to meet Kevin’s excellent points. What is wrong with a voluntary system, a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” that food vendors and restaurants could post on their products/doors only if they receive the certification?
Let’s say lawyers didn’t have to pass a bar exam, pay dues to their state bar, and otherwise join the guild that prevents paralegals and such from advising poor people how to draft a simple will, or file divorce papers. (And poor people cannot create organizations like one that used to exist in my city, called Pro Se Today, in which laymen collected their knowledge to tell other poor folks how to get a simple, uncontested divorce — they were shut down for “practicing law without a license.” Cui bono?)
Why not simply have lawyers volunteer for a difficult exam, and if they pass, they can advertise that fact? If I could afford it, that’s who I’d go to — the one with the seal of approval. Otherwise, if I’m not myself a lawyer and am poor, I’m stuck navigating a horribly complex court system by myself, and pissing off judges who hate ignorant folk who represent themselves and have no clue what they are doing.
The gate-keeping guild benefits; the regular folk lose.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
About 35 years ago, an entrepreneur named Roland de Noie started a small business named “Salvation Sandwiches” which sold pre-made sandwiches and baked goods to students at the University of Texas from five carts stationed at various high-traffic areas around the campus. The sandwiches were prepared in a small kitchen located in a rented building just off-campus.
Roland didn’t make a fortune from his business, but he made enough to keep himself in a small apartment and pay a dozen employees minimum wage. Things went reasonably well until 1978, when the company that stocked food-vending machines on campus as well as other places around town decided that Salvation Sandwiches was cutting into their business.
The vending company pressured the UT administration to ban food carts from campus property. Undaunted, de Noie moved the carts to city property on the campus periphery.
Not long afterward, the city government which had long ignored de Noie’s enterprise began harassing him with “health inspections” of his kitchen — even though no one ever reported being sickened after eating one of his sandwiches.
De Noie was able to meet cleanliness standards but there was one demand — that his kitchen install a 3-compartment, stainless-steel sink — that was simply beyond his means. (There wasn’t room for it in the small rented kitchen — installing the sink would have required extensive remodeling of the entire room.)
The city shut down Salvation Sandwiches, and de Noie as well as his employees were unemployed. UT students could no longer lunch on his sandwiches (which I recall were quite tasty and nutricious), having in many cases little choice but to eat the packaged, processed crap from vending machines.
De Noie never recovered from the lost battle, and shortly afterwards moved back to New York, where he ate a bullet.
I always think of Roland when I hear people talk about the virtues of health inspectors.
March 8th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Joe,
I don’t think interest group pluralism is very useful for describing the way the world works. The “interest groups” interlock in ways that were more accuratedly described by C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff. The competition, at best, occurs over secondary policy issues.
As for whether the meat packers lobbied for inspection, I quote from Kolko:
“Throughout the 1880’s the major European nations banned American meat, and the cost to the large American packers was enormous. These packers learned very early in the history of the industry that it was not to their profit to poison their customers, especially in a competitive market where the consumer could go elsewhere. For the European nation this meant turning to Argentine meat….
“…Congress … in August, 1890, responding to the pressure of the major packers, passed a law providing for the inspection of all meat intended for export.”
Triumph of Conservatism (The Free Press, 1963), pp. 98-100.
March 8th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Mona,
You raise another interesting point (although it has more to do with professional licensing than health inspection). Such regimes often adopt “safety” or “competency” requirements whose purpose seems to be more about raising the capitalization or expenditure required to enter the market (e.g., specific requirements for extremely expensive, industrial grade dishwashers, etc., that are probably written under the primary influence of currently licensed restaurants that just happen to have extremely expensive, industrial grade dishwashers).
Same goes for a liquor license. I’m guessing the entry barrier created by that license has a lot to do with the bar price of a shot of bourbon equaling the liquor store price of a half pint of the same liquor.
And in medical and dental services, you can’t pay for just the level of training required to perform the specific service you need, even if its entirely adequate. You can’t, in most states (as you mentioned), pay a dental assistant to clean your teeth unless she benefits (by osmosis) from the presence of a DD in the establishment–even if the dentist never actually sees you. Likewise independent practice by APNs and PAs. No matter how simple the procedure, and whether or not you ever actually have any contact with the MD or DD; your fee, thanks to the licensing cartel, must include the amortization cost of college, med school, and residency.
Murray Rothbard noted a similar effect of state life insurance regulations that required capitalization levels far above what purely actuarial considerations would require. The result was to limit competition to market entrants who could afford the unnecessary capitalization–and who were therefore able to extortionate premiums.
March 8th, 2008 at 3:42 am
joe,
So, just so we’re clear:
You’re fully aware of the rat problem at El Toro. You could just not eat there, but you choose to eat there anyway because you think the food’s good enough that it outweighs whatever risks you think the rat problem may pose to you.
You also could tell customers about the rat problem that you happen to know about, if you wanted to. You choose not to tell them because, for whatever reason, you don’t think it would be worth it to provide that information, even though you apparently think your customers would care about it.
In short, while you no doubt harbor some idle dislike for the situation, you manifestly don’t think it’s enough of a problem for you to stop eating there, nor enough of a problem for you to stick your neck out by giving customers the straight dope, or, as far as I can tell, to really inconvenience yourself in any way at all over this issue, either for your own sake or for others’.
On the other hand, even though you’re not willing to do anything personally about this putative problem through nonviolent means and on your own dime, you are willing to endorse a third party barging in to force the restaurateur to do what you want him to do (or else), because that course of action allows you to get your own way while forcing other people to bear the costs of your own hygienic preferences.
Have I got your position right, or is there something that I’m missing? If so, what?
If not, then I don’t understand how this is intended as an argument for the legitimacy or the desirability of State hygienic intervention. Rather, it sounds a lot like you started off presuming what you claimed to be proving.
March 8th, 2008 at 3:44 am
Sorry. That should have been addressed to Angelica. My bad.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:11 am
joe,
and ignoring the systemic problems inherent in a large, centralized democratic republic (ie, waiting for angels to come down and take charge) is just wilfull ignorance.
Now are you going to respond substantively?
March 8th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Joe,
“Working to make sure” that government is not abused by the powerful is an effort comparable to what the salmon undertake in swimming upstream, without anywhere near the reward for doing so.
The natural tendency of any large, hierarchical organization is to give the insiders running the machinery of the organization an advantage over the outsiders they’re theoretically responsible to, in setting the policies of the organization. Those on the inside will always have an advantage in time, energy, information, attention span, and agenda control over those on the outside.
The average person on the outside, of necessity, has a limited amount of attention or energy left over for monitoring the policies the organization makes, after he has attended to the primary concerns of dealing with his family, job, friends and neighbors. For those running the organization, on the other hand, the internal affairs of the organization ARE their career, the source of their bread and butter, and probably constitute a large part of their social network as well.
What’s more, those on the outside who do try to pay attention and exercise some control are likely to be sidetracked by a false image of reality which the large, centralized organizations themselves have played the dominant role in shaping.
Since the turn of the twentieth century, our perception of both the problems and the range of possible solutions has been shaped by the professional and managerial New Middle Class that runs the large organizations. The modern sciences of propaganda, mass advertising and public relations were invented by this New Middle Class as a way of “engineering consent”–securing public acceptance to the dominance of the managers running the large, centralized organizations, and to buy the stuff produced by those organizations. The average person’s view of what is both normal and possible is almost entirely shaped by this “matrix reality” created by the large organizations and their managers.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Angelica,
Asked why you continue to eat at a restaurant you know has rats, you say that you’re not the most risk averse person. Good for you! There’s too much fear, cowardice, and overblown risk assessment in the world. But shouldn’t others have that same choice of taking the risky choice? Rather than having the choice made for them by health inspectors closing down the restaurant? You make a better case for full disclosure, of which I’m generally in favor. But where does it stop? If a restaurant must disclose the presence of rats, must it disclose that the cook sneezed over the soup? Government regulation and control seems so much worse in the vast majority of cases than the problems it’s designed to fix, the risk of going that route just seems too great. But perhaps I’m just being too risk-averse?
March 9th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Whoa, Mama, This thread have kind of exploded since I checked it last.
@ Starchild,
I am indeed a very non risk-averse person. But I generally don’t base my political world view on my personal preferences. If so, I would argue for banning cars from city centers, a federal chocolate subsidy and crowning my schnauzer Dodo the Queen of Dogs.
@ radgeek,
Ah, personal responsibility. Such a favorite comeback for libertarians. I not really a big fan.
If I take personal responsibility for global warming, I greatly inconvenience myself. But it’s not like I get a free pass from an unpleasantly warm future because I did the right thing.
If I take personal responsibility for the Rats of El Toro, I lose my job and betray my loyalty to the staff there. And for what? If I’m vigilant enough about sounding the alarm, I can probably put El Toro out of business. But the customers are not going to be any better off because every nice-ish restaurant they go to have the potential to be a rat-infested dump just like El Toro.
Mike G,
Truth be told, the bogs are rather smelly at El Toro. Score one point for the theory.
Scott B,
As I mentioned in my street food libertarian post, I am definitely not a fan of the abuse of food safety regulation to put honest folks who harm no one in their pursuit to bring tasty food to people out of business. However, it’s a different story when lax sanitary conditions present a real and hidden risk, as it does with rat-infested kitchens.
@Joe/KevinC/Mona/quasibill
Mona’s and QC have got Kevin’s back so I’m certainly going to step in for Joe here.
Kevin and Co, your arguments can never be falsified until the day anarchist utopia comes if you maintain that the state system have to be abolished first before all these wonderful third-party certification providers spontaneously appear. And if the day of anarchist utopia ever comes, aren’t conversations like these rather obsolete?
As it is, third-party certification systems have certainly not appeared in Taiwan, where the regulation is certainly lax on this matter.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Angelica: Unlike Kevin, I am not an anarchist. However, nothing in his comments requires FIRST the abolition of state mechanisms for certification.
Indeed, the private Underwriters Laboratories (some of whose work, but not all, is state-appproved), has long been providing or withholding its endorsement on various systems and widgets. For example, when my adult son was thinking of purchasing a turkey fryer — and knowing that they are renowned for causing fires — he considered the only one such product that carried the UL endorsement.
It can be done. Why not start something like that in your locale? Could be bucks in it.
March 9th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
@Scott, presumably you acknowledge the logical fallacy, extrapolating a pattern from that one incident. Everyone realises that inspection can be and has been bad. The question is surely if it can be better than nothing (in a reasonably sustainable/non-corruptible way).
@Kevin,
“The average person on the outside, of necessity, has a limited amount of attention or energy left over for monitoring the policies the organization makes”
Definitely true, but in this case (laissez-faire health inspection) how is it substantively different to the problem of checking up on the independent certifiers? Which, if there is a viable market for it at all, could end up being a natural monopoly and so worse than a government monopoly.
Isn’t there a danger of placing too much importance on the system itself and too little on the participants? Lazy/incompetent consumers create markets full of hazards and drive out the better sellers, but similarly politically inactive/ignorant populations lead to bad governance.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:12 am
Angelica,
Actually, although some of the market anarchists commenting here may think it’s necessary to abolish the state first and then find out whether my arguments work, I don’t. I tend to view abolition of the state as a gradual process of dissolving the government into society, and at the same time building counter-institutions within the existing society. That means decentralizing state functions to the smallest possible local units, placing them under direct democratic control, and gradually removing their coercive powers one bit at a time until they take on the character of cooperatives.
As Mona says, it’s not necessary to implement these ideas on an all-or-nothing basis, or to destroy the state all at once to do it. I mentioned one possible step in the right direction up-thread somewhere: to strip licensing and safety regulations down to the essentials of actual safety, while removing all the cartelizing powers to restrict the number of competitors and raise the cost of entry.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:19 am
Mike G.,
This may be seem like an odd thing for an anarchist to say, but it’s all about human nature. The institutions must be designed in accordance with human nature in order to be effectively. And we’re essentially primates, wired to function in primary social groups of at most a few dozen. Any organization large enough to be governed on the representative principle, and to ahve a permanent staff of insiders, will succumb to the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
The only real solution is to decentralize as much decision-maknig power as possible to direct democracies, so that the self-managed cooperatives and neighborhood governments ARE part of the several dozen members of the individual’s “hunter-gather group.”
Attempting to forestall the iron law of oligarchy by creating and sustaining prolonge attention and enthusiasm, is a lot like attempts to promote green consumer behavior by appealing to social consciousness when energy consumption and waste are actively subsidized by the government.
It’s a lot better to work with human nature than to swim upstream.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:43 am
Not sure if this is of interest to anyone, but all counties in the USA are required to post their Health and Sanitation inspections as public record. Some counties make it harder to find than others. But in Contra Costa County (California-San Francisco Bay Area), you can access the Facilities closure list quite easily. The following entry is a place that I ate at regularly for lunch over the past 10 years. Please note that the presence of rodents doesn’t necessarily require the facility to close (altho I think El Toro’s problems with Rattus norvegicus are orders of magnitude greater- and would count as an “infestation”). Thus while we eat with confidence in our “inspected” restaurants, the reality is that we may indeed be sitting down to the table with more company than we expected.
http://www.decadeonline.com/insp.phtml?agency=ccc&record_id=PR0007927
March 13th, 2008 at 3:37 am
@ Joe
Even though I’m pretty sure he’s checked out of this thread at the very least:
In theory, Joel, I could imagine some other system working that way. Seen any? Any actual, existing non-governmental systems that work? That’s what I meant about “not vaporware” and “burden of proof.”
The burden of proof was on you once I mentioned that the problem didn’t relate to the use of guns or geography, yet you want to use an organization whose existence is predicated on those very two things. Asking me to qualify it is a little like asking me to qualify why we shouldn’t dig ditches with a gallon of milk: it just doesn’t make sense to, even though I’m sure there’s probably a way of doing it somehow.
“Do you know what “men with guns” can do that Consumer Reports can’t? Make the manager allow you to look at the kitchen.”
Know what men with guns won’t do? They won’t have a negotiated contract with the owner’s suppliers that they use as leverage to do what you’re saying. Know why they won’t? Because they have a gun and get to make the rules. After all, if that option is available to you, why would you bother thinking of any other one?
Also I think I phrased it as “trade federation” I meant to say “industrial federation” as in “agro-industrial” so sorry if there was any confusion.
@ Mike G
“Lazy/incompetent consumers create markets full of hazards and drive out the better sellers, but similarly politically inactive/ignorant populations lead to bad governance.”
But you overlook the factors of cultural conditioning. From childhood we have decisions taken away from us. We’re removed from so many decisions in the workplace, school, the street, and (possibly) our apartments/rented homes. Almost every conceivable area of our lives from childhood has someone coming in giving us our decision. Eventually, yeah, people will become apathetic about important decisions. As an extreme but apropos example: a female childhood rape victim will inevitably allow men to dominate her life, because she’s likely been conditioned to build her life and worldview as such.
@Angelica
“Kevin and Co, your arguments can never be falsified until the day anarchist utopia comes if you maintain that the state system have to be abolished first before all these wonderful third-party certification providers spontaneously appear.”
I’ll assume I’m part of the “Co.” Gradualism is the name of the game. Take for instance:
1) Mutualizing Consumer Utilities
Ending welfare for the poor when they’re ready
2) Cooperative Charter Schools
3) Starting worker co-op businesses
4) Ending (or at least minimizing) childhood violence
5) Rooting out and stopping corporate welfare
6) Preventing regulation creep, suggesting voluntary alternatives
7) Encouraging entrepreneurship as a social service.
9) Lowering trade barriers fairly.
All of those can be achieved independently of one another, and if we’re able to just do about half of them I do believe we would see a fundamental shift in the mental dynamic. A generation or two living under such conditions, wouldn’t shrink away as quickly (if at all) from industry regulations being pushed off to NGOs. From there, why not start talking about why we need laws based on arbitrary authority?
March 13th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Oh and as for the “seen any?” on joe’s reply…hmm, I’m going to think on this a while…I think I’m stumped on this one…yeah that’s a toughie…oh wait, how about the computer software you’re typing into that runs on an operating system that follows voluntary industry standards, running atop hardware likely (if you’re not on a mac) only functioning because of compliance to voluntary industry standards, that transmits a standardized signal across a standardized cable, formatting the electronic message in a standardized way, the message itself containing another standardized message containing the addressing information to route it across a massive and heavily standardized system that interconnects the entire friggin’ world, travelling to theartofthepossible.net’s webserver which then interprets an even higher level standardized message processes what your computer is asking it to do, and returns another standardized message in return, going over the entire standardized infrastructure yet again in the same way, and is interpreted by your web browser strictly according to industry standards.
Each standardization is specified by autonomous industry bodies, you’re free to write code that doesn’t comply, or build hardware that doesn’t, but the internet is under no obligation to compensate for it, it just won’t work and that’ll just have to be your problem. I left out probably most of the points of standardization. There are actually industry standards that come into play and have to be met before any of the aforemention process can take place. All voluntary, and all done by people inside their own industry or in related industries. There is no governing body even, which is what I was suggesting before, that it just be moved to something voluntary.
yet, the internet machine, it trucks on…somehow…in fact we have a huge problem now of running out of address space.
….and yes, I AM this wordy at parties.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:55 am
oh and as cool as that smiley is, that is actually supposed to be numero 8.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:55 am
It’s pleasing to see the discusion here on such a cordial level. I get so tired of opinionated people bickering on the internet…
I’d like to say that I’d follow Kevin’s line on this, where some anarchists would press the magic button without hesitation. I’ve had difficulties with some libertarians when discussing the practical effects of say, suddenly legalising all firearms in the UK. I don’t think this would make a huge amount of sense in the current context, but that isn’t because I think people are unfit to manage firearms responsibly.
In another sense, you could say I see government as we know it as gradually crumbling away under its own weight, and the sooner people find alternatives the better, to avoid a crisis “headless chicken” problem.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
@Nathan
well in my own defense a lot of my posts there are sarcastic and it’s hard to not come off as at least a little abrasive when you’re conveying the message in text and are fundamentally disagreeing with the other person..
March 13th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
… the undead thread.
Kevin,
Doesn’t saying we are just primates do human achievement a bit of a disservice. Isn’t civilisation - or however we want to term modern life as we know it - largely founded on overcoming our biological limitations, what we naturally are. Including the way we organise ourselves.
You say some true things, but I wouldn’t be comfortable coming to the conclusions without first addressing the problems they pose. The organisational ideal you speak of is fundamentally conflicted with economies of scale. Are we to forego certain efficiencies? For example how would car production work at anything like the same efficiency if the companies weren’t allowed more than a few dozen people?
This is by no means aimed at you, but wouldn’t political discussion be much more efficient if people were to habitually ‘cut to the chase’, acknowledged the things that conflict with their positions and deal with them directly? Idealism … sigh.
Joel,
“4) Ending (or at least minimizing) childhood violence”.
Sorry, I had to pick up on this perfidious* entry into your list. Is childhood violence, or even an apathy towards it a facet of any current major political system or the alternatives people are discussing here? At the very least this deserves an explanation of how it is going to be achieved (particularly whilst reducing laws) better than the competition. How the social services contribute to the problem? I don’t want to sound sarcastic, but is it the government monopoly on helping children crowding out the competition? Or perhaps its monopoly on violence is preventing vigilante action from sorting it out. No child left behind? Count me in.
*I don’t think it is too strong a word
“But you overlook the factors of cultural conditioning.”
No denying there is social conditioning. I do think you are probably oversimplifying it. In any case it does make for a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I suppose the best solution is to do what we can to decondition ourselves and others. I have yet to be convinced that once the state is dissolved we would default to the well conditioned individuals required for governmentless existence.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Michael G.,
I don’t think we’re “just” primates. But we *are* primates, and being really smart ones just means we have broader parameters in developing those innate primate tendencies.
I’m pretty much a skeptic when it comes to economy of scale. If you’re interested enough to bother, you can go to the org theory project at my blog and read Ch. 1 to get some idea why.
The shorter version: economies of scale taper off at levels far, far below what people like Schumpeter and Galbraith claimed for them. Present organizational size has a lot more to do with government subsidies to centralization that make large, inefficient organizations artificially competitive. And much of what large organizations are “better” or more “efficient” at is defined by the needs of those organizations in the first place.
Cars are a case in point: they’re a solution to a problem posed by the automobile-highway complex. My guess is that in an economy without subsidies to centralization and large scale, with most production in small factories for local markets, most people would live within walking, bike or streetcar distance of where they worked or shopped. Electrical vehicles would meet the transportation and hauling needs of truck farmers and others outside the major population centers. The economic need for heavy engine block internal combustion vehicles on the current Detroit model would be almost nil (but Henry Ford’s first Model T factory produced light IC vehicles with a capitalization of around $400,000, in today’s dollars).
March 13th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
@Mike G
“Is childhood violence, or even an apathy towards it a facet of any current major political system or the alternatives people are discussing here? At the very least this deserves an explanation of how it is going to be achieved (particularly whilst reducing laws) better than the competition. How the social services contribute to the problem?”
It is a facet in that people get a really warped view of human nature when they look around and see large groups of anti-social people. I want to reduce violence or the threat of it, by asking everyone to sort their problems out by working together in a positive sense. The monopoly on violence isn’t my concern; it’s the entire industry I hate.
If you’re easily characterized by anti-social tendency, you can’t work within the system, so you end up poor. You live in poor neighborhoods with many other antisocial people. Following all that, you have every incentive for crime, so your anti-social tendencies increase. Crime begets violence. Violence deadens empathy. So you act on the previous incentives to make the problem even worse. The state needs a worldview to justify itself, and so it has to hammer down the line that this is just human nature, nothing to see here, move along.
The solution would be to encourage the growth and promotion of the services that already exist for helping mothers escape domestic violence, getting kids therapy early on, etc. These programs exist, so that’s not too radical I think. It’s just I feel it’s an undervalued way of that kid growing up and becoming a well-adjusted producing adult.
Social hand-outs do contribute to the problem, because I want the poor people to be happy through productivity rather than creating a dependency on me. When people in an area make good (legally) it’s usually because they worked within the system and can serve as a role model. Basically: give them the power to be self-actualizing producers. Hand-outs can go away and doesn’t make them free, which is a disservice to them when governments do go away (which they all do eventually.) All in all though, this is low on my priorities.
As far as reducing laws is concerned, I’m not so much interested in reducing laws as much as giving people a choice on whether or not to be regulated, and how much. Less regulation needed the better obviously, but that’s the natural outcome of being about to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. This is good for the poor because the ones who can more easily afford to comply are those who don’t need to make as much money on each transaction to turn a profit, meaning big business. I’m not against regulation, just unneeded regulation that no one cares enough about to pay for. I don’t like rat hair in my food, and I’ll pay to make it not happen.
“I have yet to be convinced that once the state is dissolved we would default to the well conditioned individuals required for governmentless existence.”
Well actually it’s insanely counterproductive to be antisocial, so empathy is good, but anti-sociability is a handicap on wealth accumulation. If we all trade each other’s labor then by and large we’re going to benefit more by the other members’ ability to be productive people and their willingness to trade with us. What I’m suggesting is that merely protecting property rights and withholding goods/services is enough to enforce most any law that is actually going to be followed in the first place. This is universally true with industry regulations, where the idea is the violator stands to gain financially from their actions. That’s because if we just collectively decide to make it not worth their while, they’ll do as we ask.
Also, I have to ask, what was your meaning behind using “perfidious” to describe that item? I don’t quite know what to read of that one. So if you could help.
March 14th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Mike G:
So, Mike, if you’ve “yet to be convinced” that enough people could become “well conditioned” enough to govern their own affairs without intervention from the government, then why are you convinced that enough people can become “well conditioned” enough to run a government, which requires not only governing their own affairs well, but also governing the affairs of millions of complete strangers? Governments are, after all, made of people, and if you think that people are basically unfit to run their own lives, then it seems like the worst thing you could do would be to put such paragons of folly and vice in charge of other people’s lives, too.
Of course, you might instead claim that a most people aren’t equipped with the wisdom or virtue necessary to govern their own affairs, but that a select few people do have it, and have enough of it to successfully govern others, too. But if such philosopher-kings exist, then it’s up to you to figure out how you will ever find them and what sort of political process could ensure that the people who get into power are members of the select few rather than the multitude that you consider to be so ill-conditioned for self-government. But what would that be? By heredity? Conquest? Election? Self-selection? If the first two, then certainly neither heredity nor fighting it out (which are by far the most common means, for the vast bulk of known human history, by which these questions have been decided) provides any guarantee whatever that the wise and temperate will tend to win out in either the genetic lottery, or in armed combat, over the careless, ignorant, or brutal. If the third, then you are just proposing that the select few are to be picked out and installed by the multitude. But then why should people who are (on your view) incapable of self-government be capable of correctly picking out those who are capable of governing them? Or, in the fourth option, if the select few are to be picked out and installed by predecessors who are also part of the select few, then you face a regress; for how did we go about finding and installing those predecessors?
If you want to try and use general folly, ignorance, or vice as an argument against anarchy, then you take on the burden of showing how you could successfully find and organize enough people who avoid that general condition in order to constitute a government and maintain it over long periods of time. Until you give some concrete idea of how to do that, proposing to solve the problem with government is hard to distinguish from proposing to put out a fire by pouring some cool, fresh gasoline on it.
Angelica:
My point actually doesn’t have very much to do with “personal responsibility.” It has to do with the priorities that you’re expressing in your action, and with some basic considerations of fairness.
You evidently don’t think that the problem is important enough to stop you from eating at El Toro. That’s fine; as I see it, that’s your business, and if don’t consider it a big enough deal to affect your eating choices, I’m not about to butt in and try to tell you that you should. But if you’re fine with eating there, under those conditions, then why oughtn’t other people be able to eat there, too, under those conditions?
If the argument is that other people should be able to, if they know what they’re getting into, but currently they don’t know what they’re getting into, because only the boss and the employees know about the situation, then that response only seems to relocate the problem. Firstly, an argument like that doesn’t actually justify having the government threaten restaurateurs with being fined or shut down over their rat problems. At most it would justify having the government publish the information about the rat problem, and then allowing customers to make their own decisions once they have been given the opportunity to find out about it.
But, secondly, it also seems obvious, from your actions, that you don’t consider the rat problem at El Toro, or the problem of customers not knowing about the rats, to be a very serious problem, anyway. If you did believe that your customers’ health or well-being was likely to be put at a serious risk, then what excuse would you have for not telling them about the danger? (So you’d lose your job. Better to risk that than to conceal information and gamble with other people’s health.) If, on the other hand, you don’t believe that there’s a serious enough issue here to justify you putting yourself out in any way to protect others from it, then what makes you think it’s a serious enough issue to justify calling in the government to force other people to pick up costs that you don’t see as worth taking on? The issue here isn’t so much with personal responsibility; it has to do with the mismatch between your explicit claims about the importance of the problem, and the real-life priorities that seem to be revealed in your chosen course of (in)action.
As for what would happen if El Toro got put out of business over the rat problem, have you considered that if restaurants started getting put out of business by conscientious private individuals who exposed rat problems, then remaining restaurants might have a pretty strong motivation to clean out any rat problems they may have before the same thing happens to them?
March 20th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article The Rats of El Toro, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I think a new spam filter is in order, I don’t think we’ll be able to avoid a captcha