Government forcing random small-time businesses to handle extreme edge cases is pretty evil to me.
My initial feeling is that it could protect small and local businesses and possibly encourage investments from large nationals who would find it less expensive to pay others to produce certain products.
I'm not sure whether 17% of child food allergies counts as an edge case? Food allergies are serious stuff.
First, it doesn't give any indication of the percentage of children with food allergies. Is it also about 20% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 4% of children)? Or is it more like 4% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 0.8% of children)?
Second, it doesn't say anything about the severity of the allergy. My brother-in-law has a severe, anaphylactic allergy to peanuts. Traces of peanut in anything he eats could kill him. On the other hand, I have a close friend with an allergy to tree nuts...that makes his throat kinda itchy for a while if he eats too many.
Yes, we need to be mindful of food allergies, and properly label foods for them. But that doesn't mean we should be using incomplete or misleading statistics to inform our decisions about how prevalent serious problems with certain foods could be.
> Using survey responses from 78 851 individuals, an estimated 0.49% (95% CI, 0.40%-0.58%) of the US population reported a current sesame allergy, whereas 0.23% (95% CI, 0.19%-0.28%) met symptom-report criteria for convincing IgE-mediated allergy. An additional 0.11% (95% CI, 0.08%-0.16%) had a sesame allergy reported as physician diagnosed but did not report reactions fulfilling survey-specified convincing reaction symptoms. Among individuals with convincing IgE-mediated sesame allergy, an estimated 23.6% (95% CI, 16.9%-32.0%) to 37.2% (95% CI, 29.2%-45.9%) had previously experienced a severe sesame-allergic reaction, depending on the definition used, and 81.6% (95% CI, 71.0%-88.9%) of patients with convincing sesame allergy had at least 1 additional convincing food allergy. Roughly one-third of patients with convincing sesame allergy (33.7%; 95% CI, 26.3%-42.0%) reported previous epinephrine use for sesame allergy treatment.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Because today's small businesses can become tomorrow's large businesses. Each new rule is a barrier to entry. Here, for example, zero-contamination rules for sesame would make it impossible for a small business to make both sesame-containing and sesame-free products unless they can afford an entirely separate production line or long deep-cleaning periods between runs. Large business, large enough to have simultaneous production lines, can rearrange production more easily to avoid disruption.
With a large-enough regulatory fortress, incumbent businesses protect themselves from competition, losing that very "progress" that you champion.
To explain barriers to entry, consider that right now you can choose between an iOS phone and an Android phone and nothing else. Try to imagine how much it would cost to write a 3rd OS and kickstart a useful app store (you'd have to bribe devs to port their stuff, and not even that worked for Microsoft).
That is an extreme barrier to entry.
If you're not careful, you'll end up with one or two options for everything.
- Govt subsidizes new businesses with capital/staff/what-have-you so they can comply
- ...and to steal a libertarian arg against welfare: charitably-minded private citizens could do the same :)
- We can just deal with a higher threshold starting businesses... like honestly what _is_ the proper threshold here? Are we even optimal now? Lots fail and ruin peoples lives, when honestly maybe it's better for those same people to go work at a successful business as a manager.