I’m all in favor of throwing the book at anyone and everyone remotely responsible for feeding dangerously unsafe food to kids and other consumers. I’m also perfectly willing to admit than I think the government has a role in assuring food safety (the Constitution does say we need a government to “promote the general Welfare” and food safety seems like it fits that bill). But, I am getting a little sick of this chorus about how the Peanut Corporation of America’s malfeasance proves that Bush was evil, regulations are great, and we need so many more of them.

From what I understand so far, the CEO of PCA is a criminal who deliberately sought to circumvent the rules in order to sell tainted peanut butter. His company is bankrupt and going out of business and he may see jail time.

I wish he’d been caught sooner, but that hardly sounds like he’s getting away scot-free.

If we need more food inspectors, great, let’s have more food inspectors. I can think of tens of thousands of government workers I’d fire in order to create plenty of space on the payroll for more FDA cops. But what system do these people think they can create that will protect against individual bad actors like this, always and everywhere? Heavy state intervention hasn’t prevented Chinese companies from poisoning people (and they punish bad managers with a bullet to the back of the head). France still puts a little antifreeze in its wine from time to time.

Again, I’m not arguing for laissez-faire here, but by my very sketchy math, this country enjoys something like nearly a billion meals or snacks a day. And horrible cases like this are extreme statistical outliers. It just strikes me that the effort to politicize this episode smacks of almost ghoulish opportunism.

Update: From a reader:

Jonah,
Just trying to see if I win a prize for being the first to e-mail that the Constitution’s preamble (“promote the general welfare”) doesn’t give Congress (or the federal government) any power over food safety. The justification for federal (as opposed to state) laws is the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: “The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” Do I win, and how many e-mails did you get within the first five minutes?

You win access to the express line when we finally kill all the lawyers!

Just kidding. Fair point, though I was simply making a philosophical point rather than a legal/constitutional one.