Jun 05, 2011 11:37
22 people are dead and hundreds are hospitalized because an inexpensive food safety technology, first developed sixty years ago and repeatedly proven safe, is discouraged to the point of near-prohibition by government regulations in the EU.
In a sane world, people would point to the massive public health benefits of universal government-mandated food irradiation as one of the arguments against letting the free market have free run to make its own decisions. In this one, it's a great "government failure" counterexample to people who talk about "market failure".