This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 28, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Does FDA regulation dull the senses of consumers? Is it possible, as the FDA promises to assure a safe and of The best consumer is a suspicious consumer and food safety regulations cost you in more ways than you know.

The view that ordinary people have that regulation is an answer for any problem that they have in the health and safety area

why I want to I want to try to convince them that they're somewhat misguided in in that belief.

The first point I'd like to make is that because people have

fears about risk, politicians try to answer those fears by saying we'll regulate a market and ensure you against safety risk

occurring from that market.

The problem is that government over promises and given the unwillingness of taxpayers to actually pay for the kind of random

sampling that would have to occur. I mean given how much food is produced and how much is

important and if we it's instructive to read actually articles on how few inspectors the

Agriculture Department and the FDA have and the left points out that they're underfunded and don't have enough

inspectors to actually do a good job and the left is correct it's true but that's a

chronic problem instead of that a problem and instead of the answer to that being we could add more money to the budget and somehow

solve the problem.

If you do the math, you'd find out you can't have enough inspectors to actually adequately provide assurances

of the sort that many voters want. And so politicians face a conundrum which is

what are we going to do and so what they do is

pass laws that say we're going to regulate and then they underfund the agency

that actually engages in the enforcement. But there's a clear indication that many consumers are willing to pay additional prices

to have a much better assurance that what they're eating is quality, that it's not genetically

modified, that it doesn't fall into these range of bad categories as far as they're concerned.

Exactly.

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