Maybe I'm an asshole sometimes and legal restraint is what keeps me from mounting a bunch of microwave oven magnetrons on a tower and killing the 2.4GHz ISM band for miles in any direction, or re-tuning my FM transmitter to step all over the aviation band just for the lulz.

I can grow my own food. I can share it with my neighbors. In Ohio, at least, I can sell a ton of produce every day to random strangers at any price that we find to be mutually acceptable, and I can do this without any licensing, inspection, or sales tax burden.

But I don't grow much of my own food; I never wanted to grow up to be a farmer.

I mostly consume products of industrialized agriculture. The USDA, FDA, and FTC help to ensure that the national brands I buy from the grocery store contain what they say they do, and that they're safe to consume, and that I get something close to the amount of it that is printed on the label.

When I buy a 5-pound bag of wheat flour from the grocery store today it weighs in at right around 5 pounds and is made from wheat. Yeah, there's some stragglers from other plants in the process and a completely non-zero number of insect parts and stuff, but it's not like there's a special department that grows bugs just to throw them into the mix. The goal is to simply produce and deliver wheat flour.

There was a time when adulteration and substitution of food was common and deliberate. We used to bulk up flour using cheap minerals that we'd dig out of the ground that had zero nutrition, such as gypsum. This kind of thing serves as proof that companies are assholes when left to their own devices.

I guess we could go back to letting them do just fucking-whatever again, but do you really want to have to analyze all of the food that you buy in order to gain knowledge of what's actually in there? (How else would you be able to make an informed purchasing decision?)

Anyway, that sounds like a ton of work compared to paying a little extra to have other people do it for me, whereby I can just read the ingredients label and know with pretty good surety what's inside the bag.

I live in a society. I make money doing things that I'm good at doing, and I use this money to pay people to do stuff that they're good at doing -- and to make sure that they're doing it right.

> Maybe I'm an asshole sometimes and legal restraint is what keeps me from mounting a bunch of microwave oven magnetrons on a tower ...

That would be illegal regardless? Please note my earlier up front acknowledgement that these areas of society do indeed appear to require some amount of regulation. I never presented an argument for a laissez-faire approach.

> I can grow my own food. I can share it with my neighbors. In Ohio, at least, I can sell a ton of produce every day to random strangers ...

If you look into it more deeply I believe you will find that your mileage varies in some surprising and offensive ways.

> The USDA, FDA, and FTC help to ensure that the national brands I buy from the grocery store contain what they say they do, and that they're safe to consume ...

Certainly they do. (I never disputed the need for this BTW. In fact I explicitly acknowledged it. Are you sure you're actually responding to what I wrote? Like at all?) Although since you brought it up I'll point out that they also fail in a number of ways. Consider for example the long standing failure of the FDA to competently audit the composition of "supplements". Or recall that time that the consumers bringing a lawsuit for false advertising over "real juice" lost. If you simply ignore all the gaps then sure it can be made to look like we do a great job in the US.

> I guess we could go back to letting them do just fucking-whatever again ...

Yeah nowhere did I suggest that. The opinion that regulation of the commercial food supply is necessary and the opinion that the FDA as it currently stands is a flaming pile of shit aren't mutually exclusive.