Wednesday, November 17, 2010
4loko ban
Interesting example of federalism working as it should.
The beverage is clearly dangerous even though it's made of ordinary components. Alcohol alone is self-limiting for most people. By the time you've consumed enough to go berserk, you're either asleep or dead. But the 4loko combination removes the natural feedback loop (another of those broken circles that bedevil our times) thus guaranteeing wildness. And the company has been marketing the product toward likely berserkers, thus making its claims of ignorance absurd.
For example, this year Spokane has suffered a dramatic sequence of berserk driving. Every two weeks or so, a young dickhead zooms off a curve and smashes into a house or power pole at 100 MPH. Previously this happened twice a year, not twice a month. Several of these crashes were known to involve 4loko.
After a whole party of college kids got close to death, Wash gov Gregoire decided to ban the product. A similar event happened in North Carolina.
Now the manufacturer has decided to alter the product, before the FDA gets around to acting.
If the states had behaved as usual, waiting for the Feds to act, the manufacturer would undoubtedly have been able to play money games with Congress and FDA. Many more youngsters would have caused damage and death.
= = = = =
The important point about federalism, or any kind of decentralized control: When all power is in one place, it's dead easy for corporations to corrupt the power. When the power is more evenly distributed among thousands of localities, a national-level corporation has to work very hard, and spend vastly more money, to corrupt every one of the local governments.
It's certainly true that local businesses (eg casinos) can corrupt local governments, but those forms of corruption are limited to one area, which makes them easier to spot and easier to escape. ¶ 5:26 PM
The beverage is clearly dangerous even though it's made of ordinary components. Alcohol alone is self-limiting for most people. By the time you've consumed enough to go berserk, you're either asleep or dead. But the 4loko combination removes the natural feedback loop (another of those broken circles that bedevil our times) thus guaranteeing wildness. And the company has been marketing the product toward likely berserkers, thus making its claims of ignorance absurd.
For example, this year Spokane has suffered a dramatic sequence of berserk driving. Every two weeks or so, a young dickhead zooms off a curve and smashes into a house or power pole at 100 MPH. Previously this happened twice a year, not twice a month. Several of these crashes were known to involve 4loko.
After a whole party of college kids got close to death, Wash gov Gregoire decided to ban the product. A similar event happened in North Carolina.
Now the manufacturer has decided to alter the product, before the FDA gets around to acting.
If the states had behaved as usual, waiting for the Feds to act, the manufacturer would undoubtedly have been able to play money games with Congress and FDA. Many more youngsters would have caused damage and death.
= = = = =
The important point about federalism, or any kind of decentralized control: When all power is in one place, it's dead easy for corporations to corrupt the power. When the power is more evenly distributed among thousands of localities, a national-level corporation has to work very hard, and spend vastly more money, to corrupt every one of the local governments.
It's certainly true that local businesses (eg casinos) can corrupt local governments, but those forms of corruption are limited to one area, which makes them easier to spot and easier to escape. ¶ 5:26 PM
