deregulation Archives - Prindle Institute

September 25, 2019December 14, 2022

Incentive, Risk, and Oversight in the Pork Industry

photograph of butcher instruction manual with images of different cuts of meat of pig

On September 17th, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced an updated rule set for pork industry regulators; in addition to removing restrictions on production line speed limits, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) will soon allow swine slaughterhouses to hire their own process control inspectors to maintain food safety and humane handling standards instead of relying on monitors. Critics argue that this move is an unconstitutional abuse of power that will likely lead to less secure operations, thereby increasing the risk to animals, workers, and consumers.

Under the current system, hog slaughterhouses are allowed to slaughter a maximum of 1,106 animals per hour (1 pig roughly every 3.5 seconds) and must operate under the watch of multiple FSIS employees. These inspectors review each animal at several points in the killing and disassembly process, ensuring their proper handling, and removing creatures or carcasses from the line that appear to be sickly or otherwise problematic. Notably, these monitors have the authority to both slow down and stop the production line in the interest of preserving sanitary conditions.

But under the New Swine Slaughter Inspection System (NSIS), the limit on per-hour animal slaughter will be removed and pork producers will be allowed to hire employees of their own to replace FSIS inspectors, thereby allowing the FSIS to reassign its monitors elsewhere. Proponents of the move suggest that this deregulation will promote efficiency without increasing overall risk. As Casey Gallimore, a director with the North American Meat Institute (a trade organization supporting pork and other meat producers) explains, the industry’s new hires will be highly trained and FSIS inspectors will still have a presence inside farming operations; whereas a plant might have once had seven government monitors on its production line, “There’s still going to be three on-line [FSIS] inspectors there all of the time.”

Overall, industry groups estimate that, under these new rules, as much as 40% of the federal workforce dedicated to watching over the pork industry will be replaced by pork industry employees. Given that a 2013 audit of FSIS policies indicated that their current implementation was already failing to meet expectations for worker safety and food sanitation, it is unclear how reducing the number of FSIS employees will improve this poor record.

For critics, removing speed limits drastically increases the risk to slaughterhouse employees and introducing corporate loyalty into the monitoring equation further threatens to dilute the effectiveness of already-flimsy federal regulations on slaughterhouse management. Because industry employees will remain beholden to their corporate bosses (at the very least, to the degree that those bosses sign their paychecks), they will have fewer incentives to make decisions that could feasibly impact profitability – particularly slowing or stopping the production line.

According to Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (which represents at least 30,000 employees of the pork industry), “Increasing pork-plant line speeds is a reckless corporate giveaway that would put thousands of workers in harm’s way as they are forced to meet impossible demands.” The FSIS argues that available public data suggests that faster line speeds don’t threaten worker safety; currently, though, there is no national database specifically designed to track packing house injuries and accidents.

It might be the case that industry officials will be able to consistently promote the safety and security of the employees under their care, but a concern reflected by Socrates gives us cause to be skeptical. In Book III of The Republic, Plato has Socrates discuss the nature of the ruling guardian class in his idealized city; often called “philosopher-kings,” Socrates insists that, because the guardians are both naturally inclined to be virtuous individuals, and because they have been carefully trained within a structured society designed to promote their inborn goodness, then the guardians do not, themselves, need guardians of their own – indeed, one of Socrates’ interlocutors even jokes “that a guardian should require another guardian to take care of him is ridiculous indeed.” Centuries before Juvenal asked “But who is to guard the guards themselves?,” Plato argued that the best guards would not actually need guarding at all.

Later philosophers would lack Plato’s optimism; ethicists would construct normative systems with plenty of rules to advise the less virtuous, constitution writers would build layers of checks and balances into divided branches of government, and policy makers would indeed insist on impartiality as a necessary condition for truly effective monitoring. Unless the pork industry can provide us some reason to think that the NSIS inspectors they’ll soon be hiring have been “framed differently by God…in the composition of these [God] has mingled gold” (who have, furthermore, cultivated that virtue over a lifetime of study and practice), we have good reason to be skeptical that they do not, themselves, need watching.

For what it’s worth, Socrates also thought that the guardians should not be allowed to own private property, but that might really be asking too much of the pork industry.

August 20, 2019December 14, 2022

The Endangered ‘Endangered Species Act’

close-up photograph of black-footed ferret

On August 12th, officials in the Trump Administration announced a set of deregulatory measures aimed at loosening the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Signed into law by President Nixon in 1973, the ESA not only prohibits the sale and/or transportation of species on the ‘endangered’ list kept by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but also requires all federal agencies to coordinate their activities with the FWS and other regulatory commissions “to ensure that actions they authorize, fund, or carry out are not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any listed species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of designated critical habitat of such species.” While the ESA currently protects over 1600 plant and animal species, and has been credited with preventing the extinction of the American bald eagle, the California condor, the humpback whale, the black-footed ferret, and the grizzly bear (among others), the roll-backs proposed by the White House may soon prevent the ESA from being applied in a manner that is, at all, effective.

Although the measures have been marketed as “improvements to the implementing regulations” that will help to “increase transparency and effectiveness and bring the administration of the Act into the 21st century,” conservationists have pointed out three key areas of concern. Firstly, new species that will henceforth be added to the ‘threatened’ list (one step down from ‘endangered’ status) will no longer be automatically given the same protections given to species already on the endangered list. Until now, the difference between ‘threatened’ and ‘endangered’ status was essentially just a way to indicate the species population without implying a difference of response, but this weakening will now allow for a difference in behavior. Instead, ‘threatened’ species will not warrant the same level of heightened concern. While Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt defended this move on the grounds of promoting efficiency, explaining that “[a]n effectively administered Act ensures more resources can go where they will do the most good: on-the-ground conservation,” the proposed amendments to the ESA do not include any additional protections requiring would-be funding for ‘threatened’ species to be diverted to ‘endangered’ species. In practice, it seems far more likely that ‘threatened’ species will not be taken as seriously as they currently are – which will inevitably lead to more of them eventually making their way onto the ‘endangered’ list.

Opponents of the ESA argue, however, that the ‘endangered’ list has been padded with faulty data. Robert Gordon, a senior official in the Interior department, has argued that much of the ESA has been “federally funded fiction” that wrongly listed species as ‘endangered,’ despite their actual numbers in the wild. In a 2018 report, Gordon argued that 18 of the 40 species heralded as having “recovered” as a result of the ESA were never actually endangered to begin with and that it is simply impossible for the ESA to accomplish its stated goals. Some might argue that these numbers indicate the pressing import of conservation measures, rather than a mandate to loosen them.

A second concern about the Trump Administration’s roll-backs surrounds the ambiguity of the phrase, “foreseeable future.” At present, the ESA defines an ‘endangered species’ as one “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” whereas a ‘threatened species’ is one that “is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future.” Whereas, historically, “foreseeable future” has been interpreted in broad terms, the new guidelines explicitly indicate that, “The term foreseeable future extends only so far into the future as the Services can reasonably determine that both the future threats and the species’ responses to those threats are likely…. The Services need not identify the foreseeable future in terms of a specific period of time.” By requiring these assessments to be made on a “case-by-case basis” for each species, the administration not only casts doubt on its concerns for administrative efficiency, but subtly allows regulators to potentially ignore the far-reaching effects of systemic issues related to global climate change.

Finally, and perhaps most notably, the proposed changes to the ESA delete the phrase “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination” from the Act’s implementation guidelines when considering whether to add a new species to the protected list, effectively allowing human business interests to be weighed on equal footing with the concerns of the endangered forms of life the ESA is designed to protect. Although it adds some language that sounds like a buffer for animal-welfare concerns (in that said economic information can be considered “as long as such information does not influence the listing determination” of a species), it seems like a strange move to explicitly weaken the Act while at the same time applying apparent, though less strict, reinforcement elsewhere. This is especially true given Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’ comments about how “[t]he revisions finalized with this rulemaking fit squarely within the President’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.” The corporate preference evident in the final draft of the ESA edits lays bare its essence as a public relations patina, instead of the substantive wall of protection for endangered species it was designed to be.

Such a PR move is necessary; a poll from July of last year indicated that four out of five Americans support the Endangered Species Act and only one out of ten oppose it. Despite rampant disagreement about the existential threat of climate change, Americans are unified in their support of preserving animal species. Nevertheless, as Brett Hartl, government-affairs director for the Washington D.C.-based Center for Biological Diversity, said “These changes tip the scales way in favour of industry. They threaten to undermine the last 40 years of progress.” It is not hard to imagine how interests of particular creatures or species – whether in the foreseeable future or beyond – could be discounted when weighed against the possibility of increased profits for larger corporations.

Which means, these deregulatory measures from the Trump Administration are not only concerning in their implications for the government’s continued preference for short-term financial gains over long-term existential stability in the face of climate change, but they pose significant risks for the communities of currently-living creatures threatened and endangered by the actions of human agents. As Christine Korsgaard explains in her recent book Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, groups of creatures have value for at least two reasons: firstly, because every individual creature in the species (every token of the type) has particular interests that matter (8.7.1). But secondly, and more broadly, a collection of agents with individual goods of their own constitutes a community that has a shared good of its own (11.6.4). Korsgaard uses the example of a public park with a baseball diamond or an open-air theater as an “essentially shared good” – as something that not only happens to be good for individuals with different-but-overlapping interests, but as something which is only good insofar as it allows for the community to participate in something together (like a baseball game or the performance of a play). Applying this concept to habitats and animal communities, Korsgaard says, “When a species of animals becomes extinct in a given area because of human activities, it is a sure sign that we have been harmful to the point of fatal to those animals’ communities.”

What this means, then, is that even if we grant that the economic interests of corporations and business owners are worth measuring against the interests of wildlife and ecosystems, we are obligated to consider both of Korsgaard’s levels in our calculations. It is not simply a matter of measuring a concern for a small set of animals against the financial interests of a multinational conglomerate, but rather the collective interest of the species against the collective interest of the corporation – a comparison which may threaten to actually come down in favor of the plants and animals on the FWA’s list (provided that existential concerns outweigh simple profits).

A number of state attorneys general (including those from California and Maine), as well as environmental groups, have already promised to challenge the Trump Administration’s revisions to the ESA in court. Time will tell whose interests will ultimately win out.

September 5, 2017December 14, 2022

Less Healthcare, Less Regulation: Is Donald Trump Killing People?

Follow liberals and anti-Trump conservatives on Twitter and you will often see the accusation that Donald Trump is killing people. For example, here are some recent tweets from three Trump critics:

Pepin Lachance @PepinLachance: @foxand friends @realDonaldTrump GOP and Trump undermining the healthcare of US citizens. They should be ashamed. People will die due to republicans they are killing us.

Gia Sonata @RedGia: @GeorgeTakei @sherrilee7 Oh – Trump is killing people. Slowly. With TrumpCare. Deregulation. FLINT still doesn’t have clean water. “Killing me softly w/his song”

Josh B @joshious: @SenDeanHeller @BillCassidy @LindseyGrahamSC Nevadans will hold you accountable for killing thousands of people and raising healthcare costs for all if you don’t vote NO on Trumpcare!

Repealing Obamacare would certainly lead to deaths. Twenty to 30 million people would lose their health insurance under the various repeal-and-replace bills that were considered by Congress in July. Loss of health insurance would mean less healthcare, and less healthcare would mean more deaths. But we could just say Trump will be letting people die, if he fulfills his pledge to end Obamacare. Should we go further and say he’ll be killing people?

Continue reading “Less Healthcare, Less Regulation: Is Donald Trump Killing People?”

April 12, 2016December 14, 2022

Freedom and the 2016 Electoral Season

‘Tis the season for politics, once again, in the United States of America. And while some surprising new topics, like the size of candidates’ hands, have cropped up in this cycle, some of the mainstays of American political rhetoric are also at the rendez-vous.

Take Donald Trump, for instance.

In January, one of his campaign rallies featured the following performance:

While it features somewhat dated nationalist lyrics (including verses like “Come on boys, take them down!”), slightly updated for promoting Mr. Trump’s bid in the 2016 presidential contest, it also highlights a theme that is about as central to American political rhetoric as apple pie is to American cooking: freedom.

Whether freedom has been invoked as an empty rhetorical trope, as in this case, or whether it has been used more substantitvely, it has so completely permeated electoral discourse as to become inescapable.

Whether they have talked about government regulation, trade, national security, tax reform, education, abortion, or immigration, freedom has been Republican candidates’ preferred frame of reference.

Meanwhile, on the left of the political spectrum, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been quite as single-minded. While Clinton has spent a great deal of her time trying to square away her commitments to free trade and to an equalitarian progressive politics, Sanders has explained his commitment to democratic socialism as meaning “that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.” “True freedom” according to Sanders, “does not occur without economic security. People are not free, they are not truly free, when they are unable to feed their family.”

And yet, these invocations are largely based on outdated conceptions of what freedom is. The idea at the back of Sanders’ viewpoint, that economic independence is the necessary precondition for democratic citizenship harks back to Thomas Jefferson’s glorification of the yeoman farmer, as historian Eric Foner was already noting in his book, The History of American Freedom. And as sociologists have been observing since the 1950s, such an ideal of economic independence is woefully inadequate to the corporate economy in which we live.

But it is just as true that the thesis that deregulation of international trade or of the labor market will result in greater individual freedom is based on the idea, first defended by classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, that government power threatens individual liberty. Mill’s disciples in the twentieth century, intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, argued that the crux of liberal freedom consists in the absence of coercion of the individual, either by private monopolies or by government power, so that the smaller the size of the government is and the less active it is in citizens’ lives, the greater will their freedom be.

But as early as the 1960s, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram actually found, in a series of now famous experiments, that most people do not need to be coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, including engaging in actions which they are convinced will most likely result in the death of an innocent person: they will do these things of their own free will – a situation that suggests that “free will” and freedom may not be the same things after all.

In fact, a growing body of evidence has been produced in the human sciences over the past 40 years that suggests that the notion of a free-willing individual, who can make decisions independently of social and cultural contexts is a figment of our imagination. What this research reveals is that it is not the absence of context that enables individuals to act freely (whether it be the absence of a monopoly or the absence of a state bureaucracy), but on the contrary the presence of one.

This scientific research reveals several very surprising things about human nature that directly contradict the vision of human beings as rational, egoistic individuals, driven by an unquenchable lust for pleasure, money, or power, which we inherited from classical liberalism. The most recent of the great apes, it turns out, is a hypersocial being, whose subjective experience of the world is profoundly shaped by its empathetic openness to others, an openness that is not premised on any sort of fundamental or primitive goodness, but rather on the evolutionary mechanics of communication. Social psychologists, for instance, have discovered that in order to understand what someone else is saying we have to imitate the motion of their vocal chords (though in a much reduced fashion). We have to, in other words, become them. Neuroscientists have also found a specific type of neuron which corresponds to this process in the brain itself, the so-called “mirror neuron.”

Our identities, and therefore our desires, are profoundly affected by our cultural, social, and political contexts. To be free thus necessitates participating in the formation of the communicational contexts that affects and form us all. Freedom requires not only the freedom of expression cherished by classical liberals, but a certain freedom of connection – the power to shape the contexts in which this free expression happens. The freedom of choice advocated by classical liberals and their twentieth century followers confuses the fruit of freedom, the will, with its root. Likewise, those social liberals and socialists who emphasize economic independence while ignoring the other complex dimensions and processes involved in the creation of a free personality seem to be missing a significant component of the reality of the process of freedom.

This conception of freedom, if we examine it closely, suggests that democracy is not just a matter of elections or of constitutional rights (though it undoubtedly includes those concerns). Nor is the issue that of how “big” government bureaucracy will be. More fundamentally, political freedom consists in individuals and communities having the power to mutually affect each other and form each other. Democracy, understood from this perspective becomes a way of life rather than a formal mode of government, one that has consequences not only for the way in which ownership of the media of mass communication is organized for instance (a frequent complaint of the Sanders campaign is that this ownership structure is creating a bias in its coverage of politics), but also for every aspect of our lives, from the workplace to the bedroom, its fundamental principle being “equality of participation.” The aim of a “politics of freedom” in this context would be neither decreased regulation of the economy or increased government intervention but the creation of increased opportunities for participation by all members of society in both economic and political decision-making, regardless of their wealth or income level. Beyond the public funding of elections, one might imagine this agenda including decreased mediation of the mechanisms of political representation. Currently, for instance, the average ratio of representatives to represented in the US House of Representatives is something like 1: 290,000, making it extremely difficult for any but the most powerful interests to gain a hearing, regardless of the way elections are funded. And yet, there seem to be few technical impediments to cutting that ratio in half for instance. Any number of other reforms could be proposed that would enable greater citizen participation in the polity, from making congressional office-holders into recallable delegates in order to increase accountability, to instituting worker and consumer co-management councils in private corporations, legally entitled to raise concerns about the social and environmental consequences of business policies (corporations being legal entities to begin with, there seems to be little weight in the argument that this would be “undue government interference”).

Now, wouldn’t the transformation of everyday life from the standpoint of such a principle of “equality of participation” be the basis for a genuine “political revolution”?