Doug Wilson is a “Food Libertarian”. He explains why here.
He concedes some role for government to play referee. He assesses that government should make food producers liable for the harm they do, and this is right after he says that consumers ought to take their own risks.
I believe he is separating two different kinds of risk that don’t need to be separated. One is risk in food preparation and the other is risk in the food itself. He seems to think that risk in food preparation requires some sort of tort law, but for risks in the food itself like unpasteurized milk, “people know what they’re getting”. Actually, in either case they don’t know what they’re getting. Maybe unpasteurized milk will get you sick and maybe a particular restaurant will get you sick. Either way risks are being taken and risk reductions will cost the consumer whether it is from legislation or market demand.
I commented,
“Very good thinking, but I think you missed something.
I don't see any reason for government to play the referee. If the risk is already internalized in the price of the meal, then there is no reason to make the producer liable for damages. By adding in the price of liability to the price of risk, your making food too safe. You're in effect making consumers pay twice the premium for risk reductions than they demand.
It is unlike tort law because the damages are agreed to. The person who got sick agreed to getting sick because they agreed to bare the risk of getting sick. It has already been paid for. The price is right. With, say, pollution the externalized costs are on parties which did not consent.
It seems to me that if there is a market failure it is the other way around. Consumers respond irrationally when a few people dying from a gordita or there is a "scare" of some kind. Psychologists call it an availability heuristic. People overrate the odds of events they hear about frequently. Market forces respond to this with excessive safety standards. Producers are scared to death that they'll be the subject of the big news disaster story, even if the victims of such a story won the negative lottery.
So we're both food libertarians. You might like Tyler Cowen's book, An Economist gets Lunch.”
