Comment by pdonis

How do you suppose the conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair wrote about, or those that produced superfund sites, came about? If you think it was a "free market" that did it, you are the one who doesn't know history.

The Chicago meat packing industry, for example, did much the same kind of bullying of their supply chains that Amazon and Walmart are now infamous for. And governments that were supposed to be preventing that sort of thing (since much of it was illegal even then--the tactics are basically the same ones organized crime has used for centuries, after all) did absolutely nothing to stop it. The Federal government finally stepping in and passing laws and regulations was not a case of government reining in a free market; it was a case of a bigger government stomping on a smaller government.

It did improve things, at least for a time, but what's the condition of the Chicago meat packing industry now? Or for that matter our food supply chain in general in the US, which has been regulated up one side and down the other for more than a century? We have beef full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops can't be grown profitably because the government doesn't subsidize them the same way, and a massive epidemic of obesity. So how is government regulation helping, exactly?