Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
In a Pickle Over Regulations
On my first trip to DC, an immigrant cabbie pointed out buildings to college-aged me. As he highlighted the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and every other building I already knew, we drove by an imposing monolith near the mall. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, that’s the Department of Agriculture,” he said.
As it turned out, it was just the south building of the USDA, the largest office building in the world until the Pentagon was built. Next door is the USDA’s massive Jamie L. Whitten Building, which covers four acres by itself. What on earth do they do in there? I wondered.
Well, now I know. Over the weekend, I read just one of their regulations — 23 pages dedicated to pickles. Your tax dollars paid bureaucrats to mandate that a “small gherkin” must be less than 2.4 cm in diameter, whereas a “large gherkin” can have a diameter of up to 2.7 cm.
After countless meetings with experts, the feds determined that a “Nubbin is a misshapen pickle that is not cylindrical in form, is short and stubby, or is not well developed.” They even include helpful diagrams illustrating allowable pickle curvature:
All of this silliness is just a tiny part of the gargantuan CFR:
The Code of Federal Regulations comprises every rule and reg ever concocted by the federal government, from soup (9 CFR 319.720) to nuts (21 CFR 164.110). And despite being incredibly important to businesses big and small, it doesn’t make for very enjoyable reading.
As of 2015, the CFR was a whopping 178,277 pages. That’s about 150 times the length of the Bible. If it was compiled into one volume, the book would be nearly 60 feet thick.
And while some of the CFR focuses on important issues like aviation and medicine, much of it covers everyday minutiae.
The first seven years of the Obama Administration added 18,731 pages to the CFR — a 12.4 percent increase. This despite his annual State of the Union promises to cut unnecessary red tape.
So, the next time you hear big-government advocates insist that DC is stripped to the bone and there’s not a dime that can be cut from the budget, reflect upon the humble pickle.
Or, to use the government’s definition, reflect upon the humble “product prepared entirely or predominantly from cucumbers (Cucumis sativus L). Clean, sound ingredients are used that may or may not have been previously subjected to fermentation and curing in a salt brine. The product is prepared and preserved through natural or controlled fermentation or by direct addition of vinegar to an equilibrated pH of 4.6 or below. The equilibrated pH value must be maintained for the storage life of the product. The product may be further preserved by pasteurization with heat, or refrigeration and may contain other vegetables, nutritive sweeteners, seasonings, flavorings, spices, and other ingredients permissible under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The product is packed in commercially suitable containers to assure preservation.”
Published in Law
In devil’s advocate mode, I should point out that this happens all the time. Every federal agency and bureau fills the Federal Register with a stream of Notices that they are thinking about rolling out new regulations, on account of how they decided that the old regulations needed tweaking for some reason. They cite the law under which the regulation falls, and cite some reason or other for adding to the regulations.
Of course, the only readers of the Federal Register are lobbyists, congressional staffers, and miscellaneous hangers-on in Washington. Most Americans are oblivious to this process. Americans who belong to professional associations or trade associations or other special interest groups will occasionally get an alert from their policy wonks, and only a handful of them will ever return comments during the official comment period. Rulemaking continues apace.
Which is a good thing for the monster agricultural firms that corrupt politicians like Bob Dole (The Senator from Archer Daniels Midland) and, what is far worse, try to foist Jeb Bush on us. Your efficient agricultural commodity marketplace is what made Trump necessary.
There is a joke told mostly by USDA employees about a USDA employee coming to work to find his co- worker cleaning out his desk while crying. When asked what the problem was he said his farmer died and the USDA didn’t have enough to go around as it was so he was fired.
This reminds me of the other two planks in my political platform in addition to have high schoolers read the Fed Reg for a month, which involves funding trips for Americans to come to DC and:
(1) walk through the halls of any of the Departments and ask questions of the occupants about what they do. Having myself wandered the halls of the Department of Interior, Energy, Labor and EPA I think they would find the experience “empowering” or, perhaps more accurately “enraging” .
(2) bus tours from the Mall area to the Nationals ballpark so they can observe the incredible prosperity and all the new construction going on as Washington grows at their expense. They would also get a handout listing the highest income counties in the US so they could see that 7 of the top 12 are in the DC metro area. Actually, let’s go big time and just do a video of the tour for national broadcast.
One of my previous bosses still likes to tell that story. (Doing science at a land grant university, it’s hard at that level to have no involvement with the USDA.)
I’ve heard some background on explanations of Jesus cleansing the temple that suggest this was something abused by those in power at the time.
Temple authorities had to approve the animals for the sacrifices, so a racket was formed with some local producers. People would come into town and have their animal rejected. They could buy unblemished animals from the local providers at higher prices.
That’s because it is. Israel was a theocracy at the time.
Exactly. The need for lambs year-round for Temple sacrifices was big agri-business for small towns near Jerusalem. That is why there were shepherds tending flocks at night in Bethlehem in December.
Remember the Disciples being awed by the fabulous Temple? The Temple and Temple Court had been expanded in one of Herod the Great’s building projects, and had only been completed when Jesus was a teenager. It was highly irregular; there was no Prophet of G-d to tell Herod to enlarge the Temple. He did it to win back some favor from the Sanhedrin who had been offended by some of his shenanigans. It made more room for the moneychangers. A pilgrim from some foreign land would need ready cash in order to buy a lamb for sacrifice. They got fleeced both by the sellers of lambs and by the moneychangers.
MjBubba,
Notifications of hearings etc, and comments for or against a law are typically worthless, unless there is a process where the agency if forced to rigorously consider the consequences of the proposed law.
Right now, that almost never happens. These processes are almost always show trials. These agency reviews, CBO reviews and things like EIRs are generally total crap with an agenda. That is why notifications alone don’t work.
At the heart of the matter is a Supreme Court along with the rest of the Judiciary that invents a concept like the General Welfare Clause and then uses it only in very biased way to push a one sided progressive agenda. That is the real problem.
There has to be real pushback against the ingrained tendencies of the Judiciary to scam the whole process and the only individual with the power and duty to do that in our Constitutional scheme is probably the President.
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”That is commonly referred to as the Take Care clause. However, since Marbury vs Madison, no President that I am aware of has really taken care to see that the Constitution is faithfully executed. There’s the rub.
It’s the President’s job to defend the Constitution against fabricated out of whole cloth decisions that shred the Constitution , yet no modern President has done so.
The Framers never meant that the Supreme Court would be the Supreme final Arbiter in Constitutional disputes, but the Supreme Court has grabbed that power and has used it ruthlessly to shred the very Constitution that they allege they and only they have the power to interpret.
Agreed. The fact that they are common does not mean that they are effective.
Yeah, it is good to have standards of identity. And it would be better for them to be developed organically from below instead of handed down from above (where I do not mean organic as in organic food) but in practice I suppose that would mean they would be developed crony capitalist style, by the best-capitalized private firms in order to use the authority of the government to keep the entrepreneurs out.
And one place where you need standards of identity for food products is when companies are vying for government contracts; otherwise the low-bid contractors can provide shoddy goods. This happened already during George Washington’s Indian wars of the late 1780s and 1790s, until Anthony Wayne reformed the procurement process.
A defining experience in law school was coming across an argument about the definition of “peanut butter,” as there was no definition (based on ingredients and their relative concentrations) that could cover both of the two major brands on the market. Of course each of the major producers was pushing for a definition that would push its competitor off the market.
I remember thinking at the time, “People have been buying peanut butter for decades. Many people have a preference for a brand, so the brand is key for the consumer. Peanut butter is not particularly expensive, so it’s not like people will be out their life’s savings if they buy a jar of peanut butter that they don’t like because it’s the wrong kind of peanut butter. Let people try different brands and decide which they prefer. It appears that a lot of government regulation is unnecessary and a waste of resources.”
My conclusion has not changed in the 40 years since coming across the peanut butter regulation debate.