This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 28th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown, the new Food Safety Modernization Act under consideration,

as many people believing that Congress

is attempting to regulate potluck dinners, throttle organic farms, and farmers' markets.

But in the long run game between Congress and regulators of poorly written law is nothing new.

They sometimes redound to the benefit of members of Congress who wrote it.

And sometimes that's even when regulators do their best to solve an insoluble problem.

So says Peter Van Doren, Cato Institute Senior Fellow, and editor of Regulation magazine.

It is overreach politically.

I mean interestingly though from a scientific perspective

we all can contaminate ourselves through our own

mishandling of food. I mean of the chicken,

salmonella is really present in chicken and so in a church chicken dinner

the likelihood of salmonella contamination is clearly not zero and so from a

you know rationalist scientific perspective the the notion that corporations can poison you, but you can't poison yourself and your friends can't poison you is in fact not true.

Everybody can cause harm to everyone else in the food contamination sense.

So if we, from a logical point of view,

there's nothing inherently wrong with saying that mom

and grandma and the church social needs to be regulated

if that were the goal to make sure that no one ever gets sick from anyone's

mishandling of food.

But that's not what politics, I mean, that's not really what this is about.

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