One of the things that we libertarians constantly get thrown in our face
as an example of how libertarian absolutely cannot work and
why we need government regulation and everything is a book by Upton Sinclair called
And this is being taught in schools as history, even though it's absolute fiction,
and I mean, it's just so ubiquitous, even 100 years later,
and it's like the quintessential example
of why we absolutely need government to, in this case, inspect meat,
and why we can't leave it to the free market.
And I've also talked about the problems this has been having during COVID,
because it's resulted in most of our meat coming from these big meat packers.
When they get COVID running through,
you know, they have to do all sorts of stuff to try and prevent the meat from being contaminated,
and that's resulted in a shortage of meat.
And I've also covered about how local farmers are trying to step forward and fill the shortage,
but they can't because they're not part of the USDA system,
so that's what it really does. It really just,
like all government regulations, it benefits the big guys and crowds out the little guys, so.
This is the Foundation for Economic Education here, Of Meat and Myth, from Lawrence Reed.
One of the greats, so.
He talks about advocates of the spontaneous order of freedom
and free markets are forever stomping out the fires of fallacious reasoning,
anti-capitalist bias, and twisted history.
It seems as soon as we put out one fire, opponents of the market manage to ignite, tempt others.
Ain't it the truth, ain't it the truth?
So...
Nearly 90 years ago, muckraking novelist—
that used to be a term, "muckraker," another term for people like Sinclair was "yellow journalist"—
today we just call it "the news media."
Because that's the norm today, so.
Muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book titled
which wove a tale of greed and abuse that reverberates to this day
as a powerful case against laissez-faire.
Sinclair's focus of scorn was the meatpacking industry.
The objective of his effort was government regulation.
The culmination of his work was the passage in 1906 of the famed Meat Inspection Act
enshrined in most history books as a sacred cow—excuse the pun—of the interventionist state.
While he mentions
it was intended to be a polemic, a diatribe, if you will,
and not a well-researched and dispassionate documentary.
Sinclair relied heavily on both his own imagination and on the hearsay of others.
He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed
the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packing houses,
nor to have verified them, nor to have derived them from any official records.
Sinclair hoped the book would ignite a powerful socialist movement on behalf of America's workers.
The public's attention was directed instead to his fewer than a dozen pages
of supposed descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking plants.
"I aimed at the public's heart," he later wrote, "and by accident, I hit it in the stomach."
So he then goes over how, um...
really, one of the things you'll get in the history book is that
Roosevelt was absolutely behind it.
Actually, Roosevelt wrote of Sinclair in a letter to William Allen White in 1906,
"I have utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful.
Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods.
For some of the remainder, there was only a basis of truth. "
And Sinclair's fellow writer and philosophical intimate Jack London
wrote this of
"Dear comrades: the book we have been waiting for these many years!
It will open countless ears that have been deaf to socialism.
It will make thousands of converts to our cause.
It depicts what our country really is,
the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery,
an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts."
And take notice and remember, comrades, this book is straight proletarian.
It is written by an intellectual proletarian for the proletarian.
It is to be published by a proletarian publishing house to be read by the proletariat.
What
The Jungle
Yeah, that's what we're dealing with.
The main thing people remember from it
is characters falling into meatpacking tanks and being ground up with animal parts,
then made into Durham's Pure Leaf Lard.
Historian Stuart H. Holbrook writes,
"The grunts, the groans, the agonized squeals of animals being butchered,
the rivers of blood, the steaming masses of intestines,
the various stenches were displayed, along with the corruption of government inspectors
and, of course, the countless greed of the meatpackers.'"
Wait, what?
Government inspectors?
I thought there weren't any!
I thought it was just hopping along like a free market!
And then Sinclair wrote this book and exposed everything that was going on,
and was like, "Oh, we need government inspection!" Nope.
Nope.
The inspectors Holbrook refers to as being mentioned in Sinclair's book
were among hundreds employed by federal, state, and local governments for more than a decade.
Indeed, Congressman E.D. Krumpacker of Indiana
noted in testimony before the House Agricultural Committee in June 1906
that not even one of those officials ever registered any complaint
or gave any public information with respect to the manner
of the slaughtering or preparation of meat or food products.
Now you can say,
"Well, obviously they were just being corrupt, they were being bribed," or whatever.
There's no evidence for that, by the way, but I mean, that's
the kind of thing they'll come back with. Well, okay.
But how do you solve the problem with more meat inspection?
If that's the problem, how is it the solution?
To Krumpacker and other contemporary skeptics,
either the government officials in Chicago were woefully derelict in their duty,
or the situation over there had been outrageously overstated to the country.
If the packing plants were as bad as alleged in
surely the government inspectors who never said so
must be judged as guilty of neglect as the packers were of abuse.
Some two million visitors came to tour
the stockyards and packing houses of Chicago every year.
Thousands of people worked both.
Why is it that it took a novel written by an anti-capitalist ideologue
who spent but a few weeks there to unveil the real conditions to the American public?
I mean, this is the question I have, that supposedly there's human meat and rat meat
being sold on the shelves, okay.
Test for it.
Buy some meat, test it."Oh, look, there's rat meat in there."
"Oh, look at that, there's human meat." No!
All these people that are falling into the machines and being made into lard,
they don't have widows who would testify,
"Yes, my husband went to work at the meatpacking plant one day and didn't come home"? Nothing!
No prosecutors seemed to be interested into what at the very least was negligent homicide.
Nothing, except a few pages of a fictitious novel. Give me a break.
All of the big Chicago Packers combined
accounted for less than 50% of the meat products produced in the United States;
few if any charges were ever made
against the sanitary conditions of the packing houses of other cities.
If the Chicago Packers were guilty of anything like
the terribly unsanitary conditions suggested by Sinclair,
wouldn't they be foolishly exposing themselves to devastating losses of market share?
Historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market
usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report
of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry.
Until they caught him at it one day.
That's a Tom Lehrer joke.
Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair's allegations,
some of which they labeled as, "...willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,
atrocious exaggeration, and not at all characteristic."
Indeed, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds report of the same year,
because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair.
It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had ANY experience in the meatpacking business,
and spent a grand total of two and one half weeks in the spring of 1906
investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report
with preconceived conclusions.
Gabrielle Colco, a socialist but nonetheless an historian with a respect for facts,
dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist
and assails Neill and Reynolds as two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats
who freely admitted they knew nothing of the meatpacking process.
Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago
with the intention of finding fault with industry practices
so as to get a new inspection law passed.
As popular myth would have it,
there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to
and the greedy meatpackers fought federal inspection all the way.
The truth is that not only did government inspection exist,
but meatpackers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it.
If that sounds surprising, you're not a regular to my channel, because you know why.
When that kind of regulation is passed, it's the big guys
that are actually advantaged by it because they're in a better position
to actually comply with the regulations because there's expenses involved,
there's additional expenses in the form of paperwork and personnel to deal with it,
a lot of things might have to be retooled and whatever.
And the little guy often really can't afford to do that, so...
When the sensational accusations of
foreign purchases of American meat were cut in half,
and the meatpackers looked for new regulations to give their markets a calming sense of security.
The only congressional hearings on what ultimately became the Meat Inspection Act of 1906
were held by Congressman James Wadsworth's Agricultural Committee between June 6 and 11.
A careful reading of the deliberations of the Wadsworth Committee
and the subsequent floor debate leads inexorably to one conclusion:
Knowing
bring smaller competitors under regulation,
and put a newly-laundered government stamp of approval on their products,
the major meatpackers strongly endorsed the proposed act
and only quibbled over who should pay for it.
Well, guess who did.
In the end, Americans got a new federal meat inspection law, the big packers got the taxpayers
to pick up the entire $3 million price tag for its implementation,
as well as new regulations on their smaller competitors,
and another myth entered the annals of anti-market dogma.
What is 3 million in today's money? Let me do a quick calculation.
So that would be 3 million, in 1906.
Okay, this inflation calculator only goes back to 1913.
But it probably wasn't too different, because you didn't really have
the serious continuous inflation until the Fed started in 1913.
Which is probably why this calculator doesn't go back any further, but
$3 million in 1913 was $76 million in 2019.
So yeah, taxpayers are on the hook for it, because of course they are.
Because they don't care.
To his credit, (this is something else they don't tell you)
Upton Sinclair actually opposed the law
because he saw it for what it really was—a boon for the big meatpackers.
Far from a crusading and objective truth-seeker,
Sinclair was a fool and a sucker who ended up being used by the very industry he hated.
Myths die hard, what you've just heard is not at all politically correct,
but defending the market from historical attack begins with explaining what really happened.
Those who persist in the shallow claim
that
because on inspection there seems to be an unpleasant odor hanging over it.
I see what you did there, Lawrence Reed.
But yeah, that's it. That's the truth behind
That is, that there is
You know, you've got a polemic based on exaggerated claims backed up by nothing,
and I'm just amazed at how many skeptics
just fall for it because I was trying to explain, I was like, okay, look,
where's—I've said this before, it's kind of ironic now—but where's the beef?
Where's the substance backing up the claims?
And it's just one more case where,
you know, even the skeptics just kind of go, "Oh, no!"
They just believe the government, they believe the myths,
and they believe what they were told in school.
You know, they're willing to question religion,
they're willing to question homeopathy or anything,
but when it comes to the omnipotent state,
nothing's gonna shift it. Well, hopefully this will. If you know someone
who's been pushing this, send them this video or send them the link to this FEE article
and lay down the truth, let them know what really happened,
and we'll see if we can put a stop to this.
And thank you so very much. Above all, if you want me to keep making these videos,
go to donate.bogosity.tv, and you can donate all the usual stuff—PayPal, cryptocurrency—
become a regular supporter on Patreon and SubscribeStar.
Thank you so very much. Something else you can really do is just spread the videos around.
That helps more than anything. I was looking on my analytics,
and almost all of my views are coming from people who are already subscribed to my channel.
Something like 20% are new people coming from the outside.
That should be a lot higher, except I'm not showing up in the searches and everything,
and they show me those statistics too. So a lot of those coming from the outside
aren't from people doing searches or looking in Related Videos,
but from people sharing the videos.
So please continue to do that everywhere you think people would be interested in this,
everywhere you think it's needed.
That would be so much appreciated.
Thank you so very much. Until next time, stay strong and be free.