Comment by sedivy94
4 years ago
Article mentions this “violates the spirit of the law”. If anything, this is exactly the spirit of the law, as written.
Do legislators run simulations on possible downstream effects of laws or…? My impression is that occurrences like this one are not uncommon.
> spirit of the law
> as written.
I'm not sure you understand what the "spirit of a law" means. It has very little to do with the written wording.
In tabletop RPG circles, there's a very clear distinction between "rules as written" and "rules as intended" (because basically zero tabletop RPGs of nontrivial size can avoid having some rules that fail to properly convey their intent in their plain wording).
It's clear that, by this law "as intended"—ie, the spirit of the law—foods that didn't already contain sesame would be carefully separated from chances of sesame contamination.
You are, however, absolutely correct that "as written", it strongly encourages the behavior being seen.
I’m not sure that follows. “This law makes ‘no sesame’ products a lot more expensive. We are <shocked pikachu.png> that producers stopped making as many ‘no sesame’ products in response to reduced consumer demand for those now more expensive products.”
The spirit of the law could be deduced as “if your product claims to contain no sesame, this law ensures that is true, even in trace amounts”. That spirit is being upheld.
No, the intent of the law was to make it easier for people (and parents of people) with sesame allergies to find and select foods to eat. By incentivizing manufacturers to add sesame to everything, the unintended consequence is to make their lives much harder.
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Do you believe that advocates of the law would have ceased to advocate for it in the counterfactual case that there was no effect on expense? If you don't believe that, then you cannot believe that the spirit of the law was to make "no sesame" products more expensive.
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How can they? There is no way to know what a certain knob will do N-levels down the line. They're essentially "playing" against the collective brain and will power of millions of smart and motivated individuals, and all the money behind the huge corporations that play in that space, so how can they. It's impossible and a losing battle.
Look at incentives you have created in the impacted industries, and think about what the new optimal strategy is from a cost/profit perspective. That is what behavior will converge to, and is a central concern for any good policy maker.