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Comment on ?Labels, trademarks, and foodspin??Foodspin

The essay?Labels, trademarks, and foodspin? suggests that lousy food labeling be fixed by food labeling laws and their enforcement. This is a typical solution offered in United States culture, and it has its merits. When applied, it results in roughly the following: Obey this rule or there will be consequences when you disobey.

This approach suffers the following weaknesses: A rule breaker gets off scot-free if he, she, it does not get caught, is able to find a legal loophole, is able to exhaust an adversary by spending lots of money, or is not daunted by the legal consequences.

These weaknesses are economic. Money substitutes for good food or labels. You can get a good ?bottom line? by being a scofflaw. Some wealthy individuals are able to do any or all of these.

Corporations are often perfectly situated to do all of these. They avoid being ?caught? by hiding behind 800 phone numbers, setting up subsidiary corporations, etc. See the post, Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind. They can mount fine tuned and expensive legal defenses. Or they can just pay civil damages or a fine. Often paying the damages or fine leaves the culprit well off, because net profit exceeds the loss imposed by a fine or damages. Finally, one of many contradictions created by the inadequately examined rule that corporations are constitutional ?persons? is that a human can be sent to prison, but not a corporation! This is called ?cost/benefit analysis? in current legal and business jargon. Many people in US culture celebrate this state of affairs with one liners like ?more power to you!?

These observations point to another weakness of the legalistic approach: Rules function best when the great majority of people wish to follow them without focussing on the legal consequences.?Instead, they find themselves focussing on the factual consequences: I want not to injure people. I want to be safe. I do not want to provide bad food or misleading information.

Before saying more about this, I wish to emphasize that sharp-edged enforced rules are important. The Anglo-American tradition of formal due process in criminal law is a fine example. Rules against bribery, official misconduct and corruption are other examples. I?d add that stringent international rules against leaders who wage aggressive war are yet another. The point is that law ?n order does not do the trick. On the other hand, community mores reflected in law do get the job done. (Mores??the conventions that embody the fundamental values of a group.? Of course, social order needs strong enforceable rules that are firmly and consistently enforced.

The community compliance model is readily observed in many social situations. Sports rules, safety practices, health regulations, emergency procedures tend to be embraced by the great majority of people. ?No one? wants to cheat on these rules. (We can quickly see that ?no one? is figurative; most folks want the mores to succeed. There will always be cheaters.) In a past which I can recall, automobile safety and courtesy standards were generally embraced: Pass on the left not the right, don?t weave, stop at red lights. watch out for pedestrians, slow down in the rain, etc. Don?t read while driving was a no brainer. The first time I saw a freeway driver reading a newspaper, was floored! That was in the mid 1970s, perhaps! Naive? Maybe so.

In any case, general driver discourtesy in northern California is so prevalent, that it goes largely unnoticed. The examples can hardly be exhausted. California has a law against handheld cellphone use while driving. The law is a farce; the rule is routinely flouted. Talking on a cellphone?handheld or not?is as dangerous as drunk driving. This is now commonly know and understood. See, e.g., Dangerous as Drunken Driving. Weaving on freeways is routinely seen. Slaughter and injury on the road are appalling. CDC Motor Vehicle Safety. Safety rules really work when people have regard for others and try to be safe.

Food production, preparation, and labeling are the same. They work best when the people involved want them to accomplish their goals?to provide good reliable food and choices. However, money driven corpocracy directly undermines such an attitude. In an old-fashioned market with direct producer-user contact, more or less everyone wanted good things to happen. ?You will be pleased with my flour!? This approach still prevails at farmer?s markets today.

In general, the bottom line profit motive needs to be undermined and replaced with pride in product, in work, and reasonable compensation for a job done.

A recent conversation demonstrated how the profit only motive has replaced ?old fashioned? norms of pride in workmanship and reasonable compensation. I had asked a friend how a business software that generated an analysis of a whole range of production data worked. First, he said, it was not useful for companies with fewer than, say several hundred employees. Second, its real purpose was to show which classes of customers cost the least to serve. ?The customers who cost you close to nothing to serve, those are the ones you want to get in your pool.? That friend, by the way, is personally committed to the ?old fashioned? mores, just described. But he has little control over the bottom line practices of corpocracy.

?Old fashioned? professionals, engineers, doctors, lawyers, used to take main pride in doing a really good job. They?d get paid! Sometimes not, but that was part of the whole deal, too. Finally, they were willing to give service away, because, after all, they were able to support themselves. No, they didn?t have to join a service club to offer these community supports. Now, even things like law practice are monetized in exactly the way my friend described. ?Profit? and law practice do not go together. (Profit = compensation in excess of expense, including work, skilled or plain labor.) Reasonable compensation is consistent, though. Again, many ?old fashioned? professionals operate on these value, but they do not constitute the predominant forces today.

What is advocated here is community commitment, not ?voluntarism.? Community commitment recognizes and embraces ?we are all in it together.? Therefore, we need rules, enforcement, and vast community resources. A ??cops ?n robbers? approach is not effective by itself. One sees a community spirit like this in wartime armies and to some degree after California earthquakes.

With global climate change, the acceptance of ?we are in it together will become inevitable! No longer will humans be able to separate themselves from neighbors and their real concerns. Well, that is not automatically so. A tribal, gated community, spirit may predominate in which the well armed are willing to sacrifice the rest?until the species itself perishes.

Corpocracy substitutes dollars and numbers for genuine human and planetary needs. Prosperous Americans kid themselves when they believe that their children and grandchildren will be protected if only the get the best education and succeed in corpocratic society. The planet can not support ?me first.? ?SILICON LAW NOTES, VOL. 1, #2, July 13, 2012 (hca)

Source: http://anawalt.com/wordpress/?p=811

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