California closes a yogurt business
14th June 2011
Homa Dashtaki was eager to demonstrate that her yogurt was safe and healthful, but complying with California regulations turned out to be not so easy. In fact, authorities told her that she would face possible prosecution unless she established a “Grade A dairy facility” employing processes more commonly found in factories. A highlight: she’d have to install a pasteurizer even though she made her yogurt from milk that was already pasteurized. What’s more, California law makes it illegal to pasteurize milk twice, so there went any hope of continuing her straightforward way of obtaining milk, namely bringing it home from a fancy grocery store.
One of the chief means that nanny states use to destroy businesses too small to employ lobbyists in favor of businesses big enough to employ lobbyists is to require processes and equipment that only big businesses can afford. The Federal government rings the changes on this by requiring levels of benefits and paperwork base-touching that only big businesses can afford. Your tax dollars at work, although not for you.
Although a small artisan cheese sector struggles to get by, the California dairy market generally is dominated by mass-market producers selling blandly standardized wares. And you can see how that winds up happening.
Come to Texas, which is creating jobs (not destroying them, as California persists in doing). A lot of people are.
June 14th, 2011 at 05:05
Regulations, including those delegated by Congress to the executive branch, have mostly been written and enforced by goo-goo (good government) types to manage business and the economy. Until now the abuses have been similar to the case you cite and caused by regulatory capture: lobbyists and bribes. Under Obama the regulations (note: not laws) will be used by politicians to serve their personal wealth, personal power, and the power of the ideologies to which they subscribe. Welcome to the end of America, which slit its own throat by delegating powers to unelectable, unaccountable bureaucrats. And there is nothing anyone can do about it, because the only solution is to abolish whole agencies and to restore law-making authority to Congress, which has not exercised such authority for generations (70+ years and counting). This is the age of Augustus, who we have yet to met, but the Congress and People are no longer capable of self-government and wish neither the responsibility or freedom.