hey girl, good lookin’ burger. you know you didn’t build that…
Well, actually that’s true, and not just because she’s the waitress, not the cook. The meat was delivered to the restaurant probably by a unionized trucking company, using public roads and bridges which taxes pay for. It was probably delivered frozen which means that the refrigerated truck it was delivered in would have had to pass government inspection to insure proper insulation and that toxic chemicals weren’t leaking into the food and, of course, that the burger was properly packaged so that the consumer could be assured that the meat wasn’t crawling with harmful parasites and bacteria. Same goes for any processing the meat went through before being shipped. Not to mention that the farm where the cow was raised would have also been subsidized and inspected by the government.
We can play this game all day, but you know as well as I where we’ll end up: Our way of life is possible because we have government intervention in the market. It may not always be good, it may not always be efficient, but neither is it never good or never efficient. This rhetoric about government regulation holding business owners back ignores what it actually does: Protects American consumers and that’s what the government is supposed to do: Protect Americans. It protects us from military threats, criminal threats, environmental threats and predatory businesses who would instantly serve up a spoiled or twice-frozen burger if it weren’t for government regulators keeping our farms, delivery systems and restaurants clean and safe.
