This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 20th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown, as the pandemic took hold distilleries shifted production from

whiskeys to hand sanitizer.

For their good deed, those producers got a big fat thank you in the form of a massive bill

from the feds.

Daniel Dew of the Pacific Legal Foundation details why the FDA did what it did

and what it means for the separation of powers at the federal level.

In the early part of 2020 I lived in Louisville, Kentucky and we were all, you know, as the pandemic was taking hold and you saw a lot of these really good sort of feel good news pieces about local people either you know manufacturing masks ramping up

production companies moving their production from one product to

another and distilleries of course we in Kentucky were very proud to

know that distilleries were when we knew very little about how this virus was transmitted, distilleries have said we're moving into hand sanitizer.

We're going to be doing hand sanitizer.

And we know, we in Kentucky thought, well, that's wonderful, that they're reorienting their production

to create this product that people really, really want.

There was a very short supply. And so to you, Daniel do, I ask, what happened next?

So the federal government waited until the very end of 2020 and they sent them a big fat thank you in the

form of a $14,000 fee.

Basically, they said because you're making hand sanitizer now,

you qualify for under some FDA regulation.

Now you're subject to this $14,000 fee. Oh and by the way we realize

that it's December 28th 29th but if you don't get rid of every single bottle of hand sanitizer that you have in storage,

you're going to be subject to the same penalty next year. So we had around 600 distilleries in the country who were staring

...