416. Responsibility

Food, Inc. is a documentary about the concentration of market power in the United States responsible for the sameness and mediocrity of our chain restaurants, radio stations ("chain radio stations" is very nearly redundant), newspapers, beer, and food suppliers.

Food, Inc. is better known as agitprop about food, but I think the "inc." part of the title has still-broader significance.  Among other things, the film describes the gigantic increase in food poisoning in America since the 1960s, an increase that has happened gradually enough that outbreaks and "meat recalls" no longer strike us as unusual.

When I was a kid, way back in the last century, I loved the (non-alcoholic) eggnog my mother made, with the shake of cinnamon on the froth.  Nowadays she'd be arrested for child abuse after my second trip to the ER with samonella poisoning.

Food poisoning is efficient, and not just in the sense documented by Food, Inc.: because the massive concentrations of livestock and raw food utilized by factory farming present wonderful opportunities for pathogens to thrive.

It's also efficient in the sense that it shifts the burden of ensuring food safety from the producer to the consumer.  Economic efficiency of the type first idealized and then fetishized by our judges (see post 414) is why we've gotten so used to reading food safety tips.  As the big four meatpackers consolidated their hold over the market, they were able to externalize a significant portion of the cost of food safety. 

The last pathogens will always be the hardest to eradicate, and the big meatpackers, like the big vegetable and fruit growers, have assigned that job to us.  They've deliberately - efficiently - made themselves less good at producing safe food.  Mediocrity is the only rational strategy, once one's market dominance is secure.

Food, Inc. depicts chicken farmers under the thumb of the big poultry packing companies.  And that's the half-hidden theme running through the series of four posts that started with post 413 and ends with this one.

Antitrust law was never about economics, as the arrogantly ignorant professor-judges claimed and may actually have believed.  (See post 414.)  Still less was it about economics as understood by lawyers and judges who couldn't work their way through an 8th grade algebra book with the help of a tutor.  Antitrust is all about power.

Market power, obviously, but also political power, as the Washington scenes of Food, Inc. make clear.  Unfortunately, that's the least interesting sequence of the movie, because it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know.

Attempting to regulate the meatpacking industry is as difficult as attempting to regulate financial markets (see post 415) for the same reason: because market concentration produces vast wealth, and vast wealth buys political influence.

The vast concentration of wealth was facilitated by our judges when they jumped on the fad of refusing to enforce antitrust law, relying on the studiedly unworldly theory that market concentration benefits consumers.  (See post 414.) 

The political clout of the big-asseted corporations was immeasurably helped by the Supreme Court's refusal to allow the American people to maintain democratic control over their own election laws, based on the justices' epically fatuous theory that because money talks, it's speech. 

The Supreme Court almost always rules in favor of itself.  Its members predictably vote for the result that concentrates the maximum power in themselves, in the federal courts, and in the judiciary generally (in order of priority).

Shooting down executive branch attempts to enforce laws against market concentration and manipulation, like shooting down legislative branch attempts to control corruption in elections, makes the judiciary more powerful directly, in a bwana-and-lion way. 

But it also has that effect indirectly, by weakening the other branches.  The Supreme Court benefits from a weakened Congress, as Stuart Taylor, Jr. points out.  De-legitimizing democracy is useful for those who would prefer what Taylor calls "judicial despotism." 

"Politics," "economics" and "law" aren't separate categories of life.  Their separation exists only in the abstract.  In the concrete they're all just ways of controlling the lives of ordinary people.  Saying that monopolistic and market-dominating corporations have political influence over Congress, a point made in Food, Inc., is only another way of saying that they have more power than individual members of Congress.

"Too big to fail" is just a modern term for the concentration of power in the hands of actors with no responsibility to the people whose lives they alter.  It's an acknowledgment that we're privatizing - "outsourcing" might be a better term - the right of self-government.

In a democratic nation, the opposite of "government" isn't freedom, regardless of what the bumper sticker says.  The opposite of democratic government is non-democratic government.  When economic power is so concentrated that economic actors exercise power over Congress, they have become part of our government: their actions govern the way we live our lives.

By manipulating the law to concentrate political power in their own hands, judges have succeeded in concentrating both economic and political power in the private organizations that control the details of our daily lives.

If we took our judicial system as seriously as it deserves, it wouldn't occur to anyone to question judges' responsibility for the planned mediocrity and increasingly-privatized government that has come to envelop the nation like Beijing air.

Comments

[Bracton]

Of course, the latest exhibit supporting the observation that "The Supreme Court... predictably vote[s] for the result that concentrates the maximum power in themselves, in the federal courts, and in the judiciary generally" is Hollingsworth v. Perry (Jan. 13, 2010).