[sunpar]

I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well. Told another way, a firm in the marketplace for pasta found that a competitor was out of regulation with their product, and they found a person in congress who could press a slow-moving and ineffective agency to do better at doing their job: enforcing said regulations.

That's exactly what you want your elected representatives to do: listen to their constituents and act accordingly to ensure a fair outcome according to the law. Note that no laws were changed in this to favor one company over another, if anything the previous state was one in which the company in question was profiting from shipping out-of-regulation product, perhaps at decreased cost compared to in-compliance firms.

The rule itself can be debated, but in general I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law. It's exact, it's measurable, and it's achievable by all. Fair and equal enforcement should make it a good regulation.

If you say "well you don't need this law, it's over-regulation", that's a good argument -- I'm not sure I have an opinion on that. On one hand, I think Standard of Identification make a lot of sense, but I also know that drawing the lines can be a very delicate art form (what makes a pasta noodle vs. a ramen noodle? What makes champagne vs. sparkling wine? And so on)

Edit: Also, I think a lot of this could be dealt with better by an FDA that has a good communication arm. "We found this company to not be compliance with existing law and took it off the shelves" sounds a lot better than having the company get to print saying "Seems like a hold up by the FDA"

[kqvamxurcagg]

Not sure how much experience you have working with business or government but what you'll find is that large corporates will have 'access' to regulators and legislators who can legislate or enforce on their behalf. The senior people will know each other and get things moving.

Medium sized businesses (up to $100m revenues) will find it very difficult even getting a response. Even getting their attention is a competitive advantage for large corporates.

So when you read a story and think things 'worked quite well'. It's just an example of selectively applying laws & regulations, which were only introduced to keep out competition and protect entrenched interests. That's why large corporates love regulations, it protects their entire business model and imposes significant costs on new entrants.

[throwaway0a5e]

What do you think "access" looks like?

There is no "big pasta". There's like a handful of companies[1] that make it all. I'm sure the execs all own yachts but if you were to compare executive fleet displacement it's more of a Venezuelan navy than a French navy. They can't just call up their lobbyist who's already scheduled to golf with a congressman every other weekend and tell them to bring it up on their next trip. Only the Googles and the Exxons of the world have that kind of access.

What really happens is the some company notices that "hey, those other people are doing X and they're not supposed to, I'm losing money because of it. Then they call up the congressman in their district and say "I employ people in your district and pay taxes and I am getting screwed because morons who you have oversight over are not doing their jobs, make them do their goddamn jobs" but in nicer words and with situation specific details. And then the congressman's aid writes an email to someone that explains the situation and asks the relevant people to please take a look at it again.

The law might be stupid and the complaint might be petty but it's better than living in a world where state and federal legislators don't try and solve their constituents problems with government. For every stupid pasta beef there's a dozen more legitimate complaints that cross the desk of whichever staffer is doing constituent relations. My point is that the process of getting "access" to one's congressman is not really as nefarious as people make it out to be.

>Medium sized businesses (up to $100m revenues) will find it very difficult even getting a response. Even getting their attention is a competitive advantage for large corporate.

This hasn't been my experience but I suspect that it's going to depend a lot on the political optics of the specific industry relative to the representative.

[1] Check out this handy list and research the companies if you don't believe me. https://ilovepasta.org/membership/membership-directory/ Many are owned by larger brands but they are not particularly big businesses themselves. These are on the order of The Office sized companies.

[sunpar]

I think it's obviously true that monied interests will have greater access to regulators and corporations than smaller operations do. We should seek to limit that advantage when possible, but it's doubtful that we can ever truly eliminate it.

Speaking specifically about this case though, it doesn't seem like a big business tossing its weight around, but some large multinational businesses working within existing regulatory and bureaucratic systems to ensure their competitors are not unfairly gaining by flouting the law.

It is akin to an auto company finding another company has saved money by not complying with emissions standards.

[dcolkitt]

> I find that a law specifying in exact numbers what a product should contain in order to qualify for a label to be a very good law.

Good in theory. But it's also likely to slow down innovation or even kill it in its tracks. Maybe a producer wants to mix up the ingredients because they're making a substandard product. But maybe they discovered a way to deliver higher quality or lower price with an iteration on the original. In the long run, consumers will mostly discover the shitty products and stop buying them anyway.

For example if such a law was in place for desktop computers, it almost assuredly would have required x86-compatible CPUs. It's highly unlikely that Apple would made the investment to produce the incredible gains in the M1, if it was forced to market the MacBook Air as "not legally a laptop"

[saagarjha]

It’s a notebook computer, duh

[asveikau]

I am generally a pro regulation type of person, but the article suggests the regulation was meant to block Asian noodles and favor European ones. So whether or not De Cecco bucatini needs the extra few milligrams of iron, while still satisfying EU health requirements, is a relevant question.

[throwaway2245]

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well.

Having clear [communication of] regulations that food importers could understand, and expect to be enforced in a consistent way that didn't require a lobbying arm, would work a lot better.

[fennecfoxen]

> I actually think most of the governmental functions in this article worked quite well.

Permit me indulge in a minor rant. Not against you, just generally.

A specialty pasta manufacturer in Italy (home of pasta, but what do they know?) can no longer export a specialty pasta (which they sell legally in Italy), because it's marginally under-enriched by US government standards for pasta, and so the consumers in the US, who specifically seek out their favorite food, must go without, and this is ... the system working as intended, indeed, working quite well!

> If you say "well you don't need this law, it's over-regulation", that's a good argument

Ah. The thing is it's not a specific piece of legislation, it's one of those regulations the FDA itself came up with to begin with (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21 Chapter 1 Subchapter B Section 139.115, if I'm reading it right).

So then, aside from the fact that it's bullshit to begin with, and no one is changing the bullshit, and that everyone is expected to accept the other 114-plus sections times the 138-or-more parts of Subchapter B times all the twenty-plus other titles, and whatever minutiae they may demand... and that broadly we are all expected take this class of thing as simply as The Way Things Are, a perfectly natural consequence of doing business in our world that we dare not question, well, then -- yes, aside from all that, you're quite right, everything is working quite well!

And yet somehow I feel things are broken, and moreover, that if you say something about it, you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

[sunpar]

>you'll find a dozen people to complain that you're nothing but an eeeevil capitalist who would poison our oceans and black out our skies just to make an extra $3.50 in pocket change, if not simply out of spite generally.

I wouldn't be one of those people, trust me. I won't go into what my line of work is, but suffice to say I may actually be one of those evil capitalists.

I DO think this is one of those cost-of-doing-business type of things when it comes to international trade. I think most consumers appreciate that when they go and buy something that labels itself "pasta", it conforms to some standard that we can agree is reasonable. Otherwise, you'll likely have someone who stuffs ramen noodles into a pasta package and sells it to some suckers. And now we all have to always know which are the "real" pasta brands and which are the fakes(yes, that might be easy enough to do, but it's the overall cognitive load of having to do that with every product that should concern us). That's just an example, but that's why the regulations exist.

And you can't just say "well they sell this in Italy, and that's the home of pasta, so c'mon man this can't be right", because Italy I'm sure has like 3x more regulations around pasta selling (a cursory google search shows this is likely true), and any change they make to their regulation will keep in mind the interests of their consumers and their producers. They will not be thinking of American interests when making those regulations.

Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that this one company that was recently restricted for not being in compliance is NOT the only manufacturer of Bucatini, and in fact may not be the largest or best manufacturer either. It's just one company that returned the reporter's calls and had an answer for them.