> When the Food Safety Authority showed up at the market and started issuing fines for lead adulteration, it stopped being a savvy business move to add lead. Purchasers who were accustomed to unnatural lead-colored turmeric learned how to recognize non-adulterated turmeric. And so lead went from ubiquitous to nearly nonexistent in the space of just a few years.
Change always takes time. India is a large, diverse developing country with many different language groups and wide disparities in living standards. Many people still don’t have access to basic sanitation. Controversies like this are a universal experience in human development. The government’s role is to step in here; casting people as monstrous misses the broader context in my opinion.
Look how long it took for people in the Western world to unanimously accept that vaccines do indeed work and to comply with national immunization programs to protect those with compromised immune systems on whom the vaccines won't work.
I don’t think the smallpox vaccine for instance was particularly controversial?
There were already several states in Europe which required compulsory vaccination before 1810 a few decades after it was developed. I think it seemed like a no-brainer to most at least slightly educated people in the 19th century (after all everyone back then had grown up seeing loads of people around them dying from all kinds of nowadays easily preventable diseases).
Smallpox vaccines were quite controversial at the time and opponents went for much the same disinformation tactics as with the covid vaccines. For example, rumors that cow heads would start sprouting from your body were published (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/07/3755986...) in popular media. There were also Church leaders saying that it was immoral to intervene in God's will in this way: if He decided you should get smallpox then that was your fate.
It's not so far from people fearing that COVID vaccines were full of microchips to control your brains, or that it was all a mass sterilization campaign organized by the deep state or whatever.
I've never met a libertarian who believed in the right to secretly adulterate product with undetectable slow acting poison customers don't know about or understand.
It's on the level of "you made a choice, alone, purely for the benefit of your family, not much socialist nanny state going on now."
There's plenty to discuss and even argue about across ideological lines. Unless it's straw-men all the way down when there becomes no point, which seems a shame to me.
Maybe next time phrase the thing more along the lines of:
"How do libertarians view such market regulation success?"
> I've never met a libertarian who believed in the right to secretly adulterate product
Yes but they are not necessarily able to clearly explain how can that be prevented from happening without the ‘nanny state’. Which I assume what the comment above was implying, instead of explicitly supporting poisoning food.
There's a discussion to be had there but I say, now explicitly, that it is pointless in this kind of bad faith context. Frame your incredulity as a question.
How can this be prevented without a nanny state?
Libertarians in general, do not believe in the legalisation of violence which is orthogonal to the nanny state. Same as if someone were to randomly put arsenic in your food. That understood how do you deal with it? It's your right to knowingly consume poison in full knowledge of what it is and what it does to you OR you are prevented from doing so because, when you have full knowledge, you will make the wrong decision deciding arsenic is tastier or whatever. Noting also there exist compromises between those two (eg you can do whatever to yourself, but it's made harder - with differing views on how good or bad such policy is). All of those /can/ prevent _unwitting_ lead poisoning. Which polict is best, according to what criteria and at what necessary cost in trade off is something on which reasonable people can disagree, and can be discussed productively and in good faith.
To be fair I've never heard anyone claim that 100% prevention is even possible.
Even the most ardent libertarian at most believes that maybe 90% of the population can be 'protected' by various, non-govermental, systems to a sufficient degree, but there will always be some fraction, in this case tumeric eaters, that slowly get lead poisoned regardless.
