Agribusiness, the USDA, and Regulatory Cartels
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008I’ve argued in the past that a central function of the regulatory state is to restrain product feature and price competition between firms. Any state regulation which uniformly regulates some feature (like quality or safety), across an industry, will have the primary effect of removing that feature as an issue for cost competition between the firms in the industry. According to Butler Shaffer, in Calculated Chaos (San Francisco: Alchemy Books, 1985), “wage, working condition, or product standards” serve mainly to “universalize cost factors and thus restrict price competition.”