Comment by ocdtrekkie

4 years ago

Allergy labeling is likely a bit like support for people with disabilities: We regulate because the market doesn't work in these cases. The number of people who require accommodations are smaller than the value to make accommodating their needs profitable, so we use regulate because it's the right thing to do.

9 comments

ocdtrekkie

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coryrc  4 years ago

The basis of the (edit: theoretical) free market is full information for all participants, which requiring more information on the label is helpful for. The problem here is they won't allow "may contain traces of X" as a valid acknowledgement, despite being easy to understand.

  • xyzzyz  4 years ago

    > The basis of the free market is full information for all participants,

    It’s not, and in fact it is opposite of truth. The reason, for example, why free market economy works better than centrally planned one, is precisely that obtaining full knowledge is impossible, so it is impossible to effectively centrally plan, whereas in market economy, each individual contributes their own private knowledge that is unavailable to other people, through participating in market and communicating it through price mechanism.

    See, for example, Thomas Sowell’s “Knowledge and Decisions”, which is precisely about this point, or for more classic reference, Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. Again, to reiterate, the entire point of market economy is that nobody has full knowledge.

  • KennyBlanken  4 years ago

    ...because the warning was not valid.

    It was being slapped on everything to a)be lazy about not actually having allergens get into food because b)it fooled consumers into thinking that the disclaimer meant they weren't liable for allergens in food.

rayiner  4 years ago

To be clear, we do it through the government because it’s otherwise inefficient: it imposes a bigger collective cost on society than the benefit to the individuals. Whether “it’s the right thing to do” is a moral construct. European countries, for example, have much narrower requirements for accommodation of people with disabilities than the ADA.