Everyone heard the same tale in high school history class: the meat-packing industry took advantage of poor people by selling them phony meat products because they only care about profit. Convential wisdom holds that Uptain Sinclair's book The Jungle exposed the meat-packing industry and caused a public uproar which led to the Pure Food and Drug Act as well as the Meat Inspection Act. This sounds very suspicious to me. What's the real story here?
Obviously these people were content enough with the product they were sold, else they would not have bought it. Anyone know where I can find some reading material on this subject?
Nearly ninety years ago, muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book titled The Jungle which wove a tale of greed and abuse that reverberates to this day as a powerful case against laissez faire. Sinclair’s focus of scorn was the meatpacking industry. The objective of his effort was government regulation. The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the famed Meat Inspection Act, enshrined in most history books as a sacred cow (excuse the pun) of the interventionist state.
Were Sinclair’s allegations of a corrupt industry foisting unhealthy products on an unsuspecting public really true? And if so, should the free market stand forever indicted and convicted as a result? A response from advocates of freedom is long overdue. Here’s a healthy start.
The Jungle was, first and foremost, a novel. It was intended to be a polemic—a diatribe, if you will and not a well-researched and dispassionate documentary. Sinclair relied heavily on both his own imagination and on the hearsay of others. He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packinghouses, nor to have verified them, nor to have derived them from any official records.
Food inspection can be a service provided by the market.
Woods and DiLorenzo worked on topics like this in historical books. The basic idea is that established industry tends to be the instigator of the phony campaigns to create tertiary intervention. It does things like imposed fixed costs, creating an economy of scale in paperwork, and prohibiting practices other than the ones used by them (i.e. prohibiting innovation that they didn't initiate).
Good info, Gero. That's what I'm looking for. I know this falls right into Tom Woods's court, I just wasn't sure if he had written about it and where to find it.
Also, read Triumph of Conservatism, that book tells the tale of how meatpackers, in order to compete in foreign markets, established the meat regulations to 1) qualify to sell in the regulated european market, 2) eliminate new competitors here.
Tellingly, the congress and president were totally not worried about meat quality but explicitly argued over how to increase the power of meatpackers.