It’s informative to study who’s backing mandatory NAIS, and who’s opposing it.
On the pro-regulation side, lobbying records and congressional testimony show, are McDonalds, the National Pork Producers Council, the National Milk Producer Federation, and some technology companies that likely hope to get in on the action of tracking all these animals.
On the anti-regulation side are hundreds of family farmers and ranchers who argue the mandate will crush them. If you are a corporate ranch, the costs and hassles of tracking each animal by RFID tags may be worth it in any event, while smaller outfits do better with cheaper, old-fashioned methods of tracking their herds. Think of Wal-Mart’s inventory control compared to a mom-n-pop corner store.
Separate from congressional discussions about mandating NAIS, the USDA has proposed a new uniform numbering system for the current voluntary NAIS. The public comments on this regulation reflect the small rancher outrage over the program. Nearly 5,000 comments have been filed, many by farmers, almost all negative, and mostly directed at NAIS itself rather than the numbering proposal.
In a New York Times op-ed this week, one family farmer described the burdens this law would impose. “Each time one of those animals is sold or dies, or is trucked to a slaughterhouse, we would have to notify the Agriculture Department. And there would be penalties if we failed to account for a lamb quietly stolen by a coyote, and medical bills if we were injured when trying to come between a protective sow and her piglets so we could tag them.”
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And in all these regulations, there’s another common thread. The biggest businesses in the regulated industries—often the businesses whose sloppiness lead to the safety scares in the first place—support the regulations. The big companies have the lobbyists to craft the fine print in the regulations, and they also have the economies of scale to bear the burdens.
Government regulation is usually billed as a check on big business by the people’s representatives. Looking closer, however, reveals that regulation is often a big-government power grab that crushes smaller businesses and protects the big guys.
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