Decriminalization of Caesar salad good news for lovers of liberty

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 24, 1998 | by Ralph R. Reiland

California recently decriminalized the sale of Caesar salad -- and not a moment too soon, declared the Libertarian Party. "When you outlaw Caesar salad, only outlaws will eat Caesar salad" noted Bill Winter, the party's director of communications.

Passing a health law last year that banned the sale of any food that includes raw eggs, California made selling Caesar salad a crime. Outraged fans of the popular salad pushed legislators to cancel the criminal status of Caesar salad -- and presumably end, said the Libertarians, what might have become "a flourishing black market in contraband romaine lettuce, raw eggs and Parmesan cheese."

"We have to compliment California legislators for their rare display of good sense, although we're a bit surprised they were courageous enough to toss the Caesar salad law entirely," Winter acknowledged.

"Libertarians," he explained, had expected politicians to take a more limited approach, perhaps (a) legalizing "only medical Caesar salad," whereby people with a vitamin deficiency might get a doctor's permission to buy a small amount of Caesar salad for their own personal use, (b) launching an anti-Caesar salad TV blitz, maybe with a commercial showing a raw egg in a frying pan with the warning, "This is your brain on Caesar salad," (c) allowing only adults the right to buy Caesar salad, on the grounds that it might be an adolescent's gateway-salad to stronger stuff, like three-bean or macaroni salad or (d) implementing a five-day waiting period for Caesar salad, so the bureaucrats could do a medical background check for raw-egg allergies.

Winter, expressing delight with the unexpected victory over the "Just-Say-No-to-Caesar-Salad" lobby, said the repeal is a win for the American way of life. "We support the constitutional right of every American to keep and bear a Caesar salad -- or, rather, to eat and buy a Caesar salad," Winter proclaimed. All joking aside, it's a setback for those political eggheads who think they have the right to micromanage every aspect of our lives -- down to the type of salad we buy. Hopefully, politicians will learn to just lettuce alone.

Overall, that micromanaging -- i.e., the government poking its nose into every part of our lives -- comes at a grand price. Just the cost of complying with federal regulations, estimates the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University, will total $677 billion this year. That's an average of about $7,000 per family, nearly one-fifth of the typical family's annual after-tax income.

That $7,000 doesn't include another $17.2 billion that we'll pay this year to administer the federal regulatory apparatus, Washington's 53 major regulatory agencies with some 126,000 employees. In addition, the $7,000 doesn't count any of the regulatory costs, both in terms of compliance and administration, that are mandated by state and local agencies.

For America's small- and medium-sized companies, the nation's key job producers, the cost of complying with regulations consumes a much higher share of sales revenue than in larger enterprises. In manufacturing, for instance, the yearly cost per worker of complying with Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules is twice as high in companies with 500 employees than in firms with 5,000 employees. On legal costs, too, the National Labor Relations Board reports a similar gap, with companies of 100 workers paying more than double the amount per employee in legal expenses than firms with 1,000 workers. Overall, the annual regulatory price for companies with less than 500 workers averages $5,298 per employee, reports Hopkins, some 78 percent higher than companies with more than 500 workers. In light of this growing burden of government red tape, especially for smaller firms, it's not surprising that a recent Arthur Anderson survey of America's mid-sized companies reports that more than half of these firms now identify government regulations as their primary business hurdle.

"The natural progress of things" warned Thomas Jefferson, "is for liberty to yield and governments to gain ground." Today, a kid opening a lemonade stand in Boston must by law get permission from five different government agencies and pay $335 in fees and licenses. The city also requires the budding entrepreneur to comply with dozens of complex food and building ordinances and carry $500,000 in liability insurance.

It was in that same town's harbor, of course, that 60 American hotheads, dressed as phony Indians, ignited the American Revolution. The trigger for the Boston Tea Party was Britain's tax of three pence on a pound of tea -- the equivalent of three cents on 200 tea bags. Fighting mad and willing to go to war with the world's leading power at the time, these American rebels were objecting to taxation without representation. They should be made now about taxation with representation.

Ralph R. Reiland, owner of Amels Restaurant in Pittsburgh, is associate professor of economics at Robert Morris College. His e-mail address is rrreiland@aol.com.