The House of Representatives just passed a law that would make it illegal for people to slaughter dogs or cats for food. This presents us with an interesting puzzler: Which comes first, the law or the behavior itself?
As the Washington Examiner’s Pete Kasperowicz reported, the Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act passed Wednesday. (This was obviously much more urgent than agreeing upon the budget to keep the government running.) The practice is legal in 44 states, so why not ban it?
But there’s another question to consider: Is anyone actually doing the behavior the law prohibits? If they’re not, then we don’t need the law banning it. To be absurd for a moment, consider that we have no purple people, and no laws against being purple either. This is a trivial example of a much larger question. How much do laws change behavior? And how much do laws chase it? Solving that will tell us whether we need laws like this one at all.
For example, take laws banning discrimination against LGBT individuals. It’s absolutely true that decades ago there was significant, overt discrimination, which we see today as a very bad idea. But do we need laws against it? Absent the occasional wedding cake case, it’s socially entirely unacceptable to discriminate against the LGBT community today. That social mores have changed is evident in the very fact that laws against this kind of discrimination were passed. This brings us back to the question of whether we need these laws, or if societal change is sufficient in and of itself.
Purely as an example, this question could be applied to the matter of food adulteration. There’s not much of a business model in poisoning your customers, therefore we’d expect producers who wanted to survive not to do so. There’s historical experience to guide us here. In my native Britain, the first serious food purity laws were passed in the 1870s, a decade or two after the free market had solved the problem. A similar process occurred in the U.S. as well. Heinz and Campbell’s became significantly valuable brands because this new technology of canning was a hit or miss. Many people were poisoned, in fact — but those who got the technique right went on to become household names. Not poisoning people is what makes money, thus capitalists hungry for profit tend not to poison people.
There is a very different case to be made over America’s historic problems with race. The laws that were passed made it illegal to discriminate, but they were intended to override Jim Crow. Yes, perhaps the American experience is and was different, but there’s a case to be made (both Jim Buchanan and Gary Becker made it) that in the absence of laws enforcing moral conduct, the discrimination would have faded away anyway.
No, it’s not necessary to agree with any of these examples. But it is still an interesting question, and one that would be good to answer. How much are these laws, like the new legislation on dogs and cats, simply an encoding of what we’re all doing anyway, and how much are they the driver of the desired changes? If they just involve writing down what we all already do, then there’s not much of a point in having them, is there? So let’s not burden ourselves with the task of passing laws we don’t need, and save those resources purely for those we really do need. My own estimation is that we’ll end up with, perhaps, 5 percent of the laws we already have.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
