California’s canned fruits, which means that consumers must
absorb these added costs in higher retail prices.
If they refuse to do so, fruit canning will decline in California as
the result of the economic disincentives of the marketplace. The
ultimate losers will be the growers with the loss of cannery sales for
their farm products, and cannery workers with the loss of job
opportunities.
Now, we all recognize that adjustments to the laws of supply
and demand are natural events of the marketplace. The question
that needs to be asked is: Should consumers, farmers, employees,
and manufacturers be subjected to destructive manipulation of
these economic laws simply because a government agency
capriciously concludes on its own initiative to enforce a non-
sensical, theoretically established standard of perfection, where
neither product safety nor wholesomeness is a factor?
Consider the broader implications of this experience, the truly
awful powers for destruction of our nation’s productive capabilities
that reside within a tunnel-visioned bureaucracy that functions
without effective overview and serves neither the master of
intellectual inquiry nor of the marketplace.
My concerns with this example of an expanding tyranny over
the enterprise of America, and thus over its people, are best
expressed by Plato’s ancient words:
The people always have some champion whom they set over
them and nurse into greatness.... This and no other is the
root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he
is a protector.
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