Newly elected North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis made an interesting point about government regulations and the invisible hand of the free market.
Senator Says Restaurant Employees Shouldn’t Be Required to Wash Their Hands
Tillis’s point is if the government did not require restaurants to mandate hand washing after employee bathroom use then restaurants that did not require hand washing of their own accord would soon go out of business. This is because the public would reject any restaurant if it didn’t require its employees to wash their hands after doing their lavatory business. He is perhaps correct in this, though it assumes that the public would eventually be able to discover, or figure out on its own, that a restaurant did not require hand washing. Just because a sign was not posted in the bathroom would not necessarily mean that the restaurant owner didn’t require employees to wash. And a posted sign that required employee hand washing would not mean the decree is necessarily enforced by the management (though this could be a problem in the current legal regime anyway).
But the gap in the Senator’s thinking is this: if the goverment no longer required restaurant employees to wash their hands (the sign itself does not really make a difference), then some restaurants would become lax in employee hand washing (the punishment of fines being persuasive), thus leading to the increased chance of employee fecal matter making its way into customer entrees. This in turn would lead to the increased chance of disease. In the main Tillis is right, less laws would be better but his target is wrong. There should be less laws restricting individual freedom, and I would gladly vote for a politician who promised to remove as many laws as possible from the books that restrict the rights of the individual (and there are way too many). But when it comes to a public health issue, then there probably needs to be government regulation that could significantly decrease the chance of disease spreading in the community. If requiring restaurant employees to wash their hands increases the good of public health significantly, and it seemingly does, then the law is worth its muster (especially for the small price to business owners of posting signs in bathrooms and reminding/supervising employees to follow the rule). But when it doesn’t pass this test then it should be examined and perhaps fall aside. Tillis had a point, but he used a wrong example. Of courese, this won’t stop the media from having a field day making fun of him and missing any larger issue/point.
Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150204.htm
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