Ask the “experts”? Update

Mother Jones has set up a Q&A forum with some “food reform experts” so I thought I’d break the mold of statist solutions and ask them how they see the eventual unintended consequences of their well meaning legislation.

How many of you acknowledge the eventual bad consequences of well meaning legislation? Current laws already make it difficult for direct marketers, the ethanol mandate was a debacle, monoculture is the outcome of subsidies, the USDA organic label was written by big ag. So many of solutions I read revolve around more rules, regulations and mandates. “Trust us”, you say, “we’re smarter meddlers.”
You can say that HR 875 won’t burden small producers, but experience shows us otherwise. You can say that NAIS won’t be a big deal, but we all know deep down it will be a bureaucratic nightmare, which only the Tysons of the world will be able to navigate.
We need more freedom, and more opportunities for entrepreneurship, not ‘guidelines’ and red tape.

You can follow the hopefully interesting replies, here.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten one meaningful reply from one of the panelists, the president of Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, appears to be your standard anti-capitalist lobbying group. I could be wrong of course, I have been before. Once.

My response to him is here.