Problems are for Solving

FDA Faulted for Stance on Chemical in Plastics - washingtonpost.com
The FDA’s position on BPA has been controversial because it contradicted more than 100 studies, as well as a finding by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, that there was “some concern” that BPA may affect the brain and behavioral development in fetuses, infants and small children, thePostsaid.

Relying on the government for protection puts us at risk. It invariably becomes politicized. As the quote above points out, the FDA (your watchdog!) approved something more than a hundred studies said was a bad idea.

Private consumer protection is a better option. The FDA has no profits at stake when their advice is wrong, and there is no one to watch the watchdog when that watchdog is the government.

Will U.S. Taxpayers Need A Bailout?, Declan McCullagh Says Plan To Partially Nationalize U.S. Banks Has Many Potential Perils - CBS News
The almost-nationalization will happen even if, as the Wall Street Journal
delicately put it it, bank executives and shareholders are “unhappy” and oppose the idea.

This invites micromanaging from Washington, D.C. Members of Congress will have a strong incentive to demand preferential treatment for borrowers in their home districts or among politically-favored constituencies. Politicians who are members of the committees overseeing the Treasury Department’s budget will enjoy outsize influence. So will Treasury and other regulators that banks must please to stay in business.

A new column at CBSNews.com called Other People’s Money, of which this is the first installment, just got added to my reading list.

Looks like it will be informative to those who want to see the government spending less money, rather than more.

Dry-Cleaning Economics in One Lesson| The Foundation for Economic Education: The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty
Another day, another news story about economic wackiness. Gas prices rise, the dollar sinks, and stores are limiting rice sales. What could be next? Clothes hangers.

Yes, clothes hangers. Marie Sledge, co-owner of Rome (Georgia) Cleaners, states, “Hangers last year at this time were $28 a box, where now they are $56.” News reports indicate that cleaners in Springfield, Missouri; Birmingham, Alabama; and Harlem are also encountering doubling hanger prices. In response, many cleaners are posting signs in their shops encouraging customers to return used hangers.

Hangers can’t, even if combined with government subsidies, be converted into biofuels. So what is causing the rapid increase in hanger prices? Government, of course, though in this case it’s the trade bureaucrats at the Department of Commerce rather than the folks behind other debacles in the news these days.

In a March 19 news release the Department of Commerce “announced its affirmative preliminary determination in the antidumping duty investigation on imports of steel wire garment hangers from the People’s Republic of China.” Translation: The government will now impose tariffs on hangers imported from China. The tariffs vary by supplier, ranging from a lightly starched 33 percent to a truly stiff 221 percent. With hanger prices potentially tripling because of tariffs, it’s easy to understand the disruption facing dry cleaners.

As one who uses dry-cleaners a lot, I found this examination of how unintended consequences of government action affects our day to day out-of-pocket outlays. Enjoy!

Health: Better Safe Than Sorry - US News and World Report
Andrew Stout’s farm in Carnation, Wash., is one of the most successful small organic farms in the country. Each week, Full Circle Farm delivers fresh lettuce, green peas, spring garlic, and spinach to 17 farmers’ markets in the Seattle area, as well as to dozens of restaurants and retailers, including Whole Foods Market. Some 2,400 boxes of produce a week go out to families who have bought a share in the farm’s riches. His customers are counting on getting freshness and taste-and also on Stout’s care when it comes to hygiene. “Bacteria exists everywhere,” he says. So he keeps the manure pile away from the packing shed, tests the water used to irrigate and wash vegetables, and keeps an eye on his workers to be sure they wash their hands. “I’m a food provider,” he says. “You want to do the absolute best that you can.”

The rapidly growing passion for locally grown produce from farmers like Stout and his wife, Wendy Munroe, is one sign of just how nervous Americans have become about the state of food on their plate.

Holy Cow! Whole Foods Linked to E. coli Outbreak - The Checkout
Whole Foods initiated the recall after Massachusetts health officials investigating a cluster of E. coli illnesses discovered all seven victims had bought meat at Whole Foods. The chain pulled ground beef from some of its stores on Wednesday. The Nebraska Beef recall was announced late Friday night.

The first article I linked to above is one I read about a year ago while in Arizona visiting my parents, the second is one I saw on my Google homepage this morning.

Food. It’s the stuff we take in that God has designed to give us energy, life, health, and enjoyment. Certainly God could have designed a “more efficient” way for us to get our calories in, but food was given for enjoyment, for feasting. And we miss it when we fast–turning us back to Him.

But food lately has become a knotty issue, as these two articles point out. Food can be dangerous. It can give death almost as easily as it brings life, because it can carry with it many dangerous things that exist in our world since the fall. Most people in our nation look for the FDA and the USDA to guard the quality and safety of the food supply. But can they? I mean, short of inspecting every single food item before it hits your grocery store, is that even possible? And what would that do to the tax cost of food? And is it even their job?

The first article talks about a growing movement of buying food that is local. Food that you know where it came from. Certainly that doesn’t eliminate safety concerns, but doesn’t it make them smaller than a federal agency ever could? In the old days people would buy meat from a butcher that they knew, who bought the meat directly from a farmer that they probably knew as well. The grocer? He carried vegetables and such from local farmers also. And so on.

Do you know where your food comes from? Have you ever asked they guy at the meat counter where those chickens were raised and what they were fed? He probably doesn’t know. (As an aside, I have had conversations with people at both Alwan and Sons and Pottstown Deli locally and I got an answer, and usually it was someplace I could find out more about if I wanted to.)

If you don’t know where your food comes from, you are at risk. Maybe not huge risk, but since the largest organic food vendor (Whole Foods Market) in the United States just had meat issues, I don’t think you can even say that buying organic makes you safer.

But if you grow your own veggies or get them from a friend or neighbor or a local farmer–they’re likely to be safer, and at least you can ask more questions about what they grew near, what fertilizer was used, etc. And if you take responsibility for your consumption purchases, you will always be better off in the long run, and safer. We buy most of our meat directly from local farmers and prefer veggies from the same, when we can get them. (Here’s a link to a video of a chicken plucker that we got to help with, and help a farmer, who gave us a sizeable chicken for our work).

And you just might help a local business thrive instead of a big box.

So if you don’t know where your food came from, think about it, and consider changing that. If you do–good job!

I’m sure I’ll have more to write on this later, but be careful what you eat, especially if you have no idea where it’s been.

State Policy Network | Blog
“How can people believe they are free when something as intimate as childbirth is so heavily controlled by the corporate state?” Gregory asks. “Of course, we need freedom for families to make their choice among hospitals and home birth options. For a case for home birth, and against the establishment that embraces a program of processing women in labor as fast as it can through the systematic reliance on the pitocin-epidural-cesarean process, see the great documentary, The Business of Being Born.

“The artificial process of bringing on contractions, then giving pain relief, then bringing on more contractions, then resorting to cesareans when things don’t go as smoothly and quickly as desired, reminds me of the spiral of interventionism Mises described,” Gregory adds.

Another example of the nanny state and corporate welfare. Don’t let people do anything they want to if you can find another, more expensive, more highly regulated way.

My friends who have had home births (as have we) should know that the laws are in part guided by medical professionals who lobby for stricter regulations in order to protect their market share.

Pushing Help on Flood Victims (Cato-at-liberty)
Libertarians often talk about the possibility of private charity picking up the slack for reduced government welfare. Statists scoff at such notions, pointing to the weakness of local community and cultural institutions today. The charge rings true, but the reason, if this is the case, is not that the American character is weak and that it casually ceded responsibility to government. It’s because government largesse is an insidious, attacking organism that goes right for the fibers and joints of civil society to draw down their strength and make them arthritic.

I found this quote to be quite insightful. I believe that more private charity is necessary, and here is one reason why it doesn’t exist. The government will spend your money before a charitable organization has time to jump in, all too often.

So if we are to be salt and light, and to move true charity into our communities, we’re going to have to be aggressive, bold, quick, and competitive. We’ll have to find ways to get ahead of jimmy gummint in the race to do good, so that true good will actually be done.

Ok. So I got four comments on a post that I just threw together without really thinking about it. That’s more than I’ve gotten on a single post in quite some time. Which means people are reading and thinking (or at least a few of them) and so I’ll write about that.

If you didn’t read the other post or the comments under it the link is right there. What I’m about to say has its jumping off point in what the two posts (and underlying comments) by Josh Gibbs that Seth linked to. I used to read Gibbs but stopped because I was skipping more posts than I was reading, but these two were pretty good, or at least thought provoking.

Some of what I’m going to write on this topic is in the “thinking out loud” category. I realize that it’s dangerous to think out loud walking around a room of people who kind of know you—and that doing the same thing on a blog that can be accessed from anywhere in the world but Tibet is another level of insanity altogether. But then maybe I’ll start a controversy and become famous. Not likely—but I might attract more than the current seven loyal readers.

It is somewhat ironic that I write this on tax day. I filed my taxes quite some time ago, but today is the day that many are rushing off to the post office to mail tax forms and extension forms. It is in this realm of taxes that some of the controversy surrounding poverty happens. At the outset of this discussion of poverty I want to make it very clear that I completely oppose any helping of the poor through dollars taken from taxpayers at the point of a gun. All government run poverty “helps” do just that—and while I’m going to talk a lot in this series (oh no! It’s over now) about all the things that need to be done in ministering to the poor in Jesus’ Name it is Christians who are supposed to do this, and with our own resources, not those that the government has taken from others.

I have been looking at this issue from one perspective of economics for quite some time, and have not found a lot out there that I agree with. It seems like somebody decided that there are two ways to look at the poor, and we have to simplify it down to those. There are those who think we should take money from the rich to help them (I’ll call these the Christian Robin Hoods) and those who just assume that you’re poor because you’re lazy or a drunk. There are varying grades of these two views, but there are very few in between.

As you read what I’ll write, you’ll know that I am decidedly in between. Here are some guiding questions as I get started:

1. Who are the poor? Defining who is poor and who is rich is controversial and difficult at best. Who is objectively poor and who is objectively rich? I have some thoughts on that but it’ll be a post in itself.
2. What is our responsibility? And how do we carry that out? And by whom? Is it enough to give lots of money to the local rescue mission? Should the rescue mission even exist? Is it OK to give a drunk money? Methodologies abound. I will make a distinction between methods and methodologies (principles that guide the methods). Of the former there are many right ways, of the latter the principles ought to be the same.
3. What are the goals? Is the goal that the poor become rich? Or that they are less poor?
4. Why is this a big issue of disagreement? Why can’t we agree that helping the poor is important and figure out how best to do it and go out and do it?
5. What are charity and justice? What do they look like in our current society? What might they look like in a non-capitalist society?

There may be more, but these are questions that can guide any discussion that takes place here and on other blogs that might throw stones this way. I’ll have more later.

The Gospel Coalition | Vision
We cannot look at the poor and the oppressed and callously call them to pull themselves out of their own difficulty. Jesus did not treat us that way.

I read a blog each day (or most days) called Of First Importance which mostly has quotes that remind me of the centrality of Jesus and His Gospel to my life. These are short reminders each day, and on many days I need them. Today there was a quote from this Gospel Coalition vision statement, including the quote above.

I have added some emphasis to the quote and I haven’t at all digested its context, but this quote struck me this morning because it’s something I’ve been thinking about in another context.

How should Christians, being like Christ, respond to poverty? This quote makes me wonder if our response needs to have in its context symbolism of what and how Jesus has done for us.

Lord willing I’ll have more thoughts on this later–no time this morning to expound. I wanted to put this here though so others can remind me later, and so I’ll remember to go back and look at this whole vision statement.

I recently wrote about a letter coming out (at a cost of 42 million taxpayer dollars) to tell us about a check that might be coming.

I have in front of me a copy of that letter.

First, it’s confusing as to who is getting what. Not surprising to you, I’m sure. The really great part is the last paragraph:

All individuals receiving payments will receive a notice and additional information shortly before the payment is made.

So, at great taxpayer expense, there will be another letter later that will actually tell people about the money that will actually coming after the letter.

Oh I feel so much better.

Dear Taxpayer: This letter cost you $42 million - USATODAY.com
At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.

The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.

It’s not enough that they’re printing money out of thin air, a hidden tax that few even notice (inflation). It’s not enough that they’re trying to put a band-aid on an economy that can only be propped up so long. Nope. The federal government has to spend an additional $42M to send a letter telling us that they’re sending a check later. Why? So we can feel good about all the government we’re getting.

Maybe we’ll get the letter in time for Tax Freedom Day.

HatTip: Foundation for Economic Education