China’s poor regulations: China has a bad reputation for unsafe products including food. Why is that? Because they don’t have good regulations or good enforcement.

Next question. Why doesn’t China have good regulation? Because Chinese business does not want government regulation, and ordinary people are not free to organize protests in China.

America’s good regulations:  Business in the US is similar to business in China. No business wants to be regulated (although they do want their competitors regulated to keep the up the reputation of their industry). But in the US, we citizens still have some say, and so we have laws (regulations) that keep us pretty safe from dangerous business practices. We should congratulate ourselves for this.

Regulating the Jungle.  As Reagan said: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ And so the government spent some time terrifying the Chicago slaughter houses after Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906. The result is we have much safer food. And just four months ago the CDC tracked down the 26-state outbreak of antibiotic resistant Salmonela and knocked on the door of Cargill, which then recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey.  And that’s why our food is some of the safest in the world. Or from a conservative viewpoint, those are the so-called job-killing regulations that make food cost so much and terrify us.

Why regulations don’t kill jobs

Businesses don’t make dangerous products because they want to kill us. They just do it because it’s cheaper to make bad products. And it’s mainly cheaper because it takes less work to make a bad product. So when regulations force a safer product, it almost always requires more workers to make it. Regulations usually do make things cost more — you get what you pay for. But they do not cause unemployment. This is just a propaganda from businessmen like the Koch brothers who don’t like to be fined for oil spills and what not.