Sensible of the Dangers

The law as written, I suspect, is competent to deal with restaurants that follow unsafe food handling practices without the addition of some regulatory regime or another.  After all, it must be illegal to poison someone.  The purpose of the regulation of food handling is, of course, to limit the instances food borne illness as are the regulations that one or more employees are aware of the best practices in food handling.  It might even have been in the interests of already existing restaurants that these standards be rigidly enforced because they bolster  restaurants' reputation as healthy food providers.  Its true, as well, that forcing new entrants into the restaurant market to build safe and clean kitchens increases the cost of opening the business; consequently you could, if you squinted, make the regulations out to be designed by an association of already existing restaurants to limit competition and not protect consumers. But who, other than an ideologue, wants to squint that hard.

Let's say you read an article about fraud committed on consumers based on the use of fake addresses, inflated prices, and other skulduggery.  Would your first reaction be to call the practices "an innovative business model." Would you assert in the face of evidence to the contrary that the problem is limited to "simply lying" about where your shop is. Is that lie so simple?  Surely, the existence of a shop means all kinds of things to a consumer, local, a place were I can go to to complain, under the jurisdiction of my law enforcement agencies, etc.  Indeed, the lie is central to the business "innovative practice."  Surely, you would want to include the price gauging and other corrupt practices in your account.  If you didn't it might almost seem that you sought to minimize the damage done to the consumer because it conflicted with your ideologically driven conceptualization of the free market. And, relatedly, isn't the conclusion that

[i]t’s almost as if the locksmithing industry is trying to leverage some legitimate complaints into a tool they can use to stifle competition! 

Is only coherent if you leave out the point that the stifled competitors are the kind innovative businessmen and women whose practices more easily enable fraud?

Trade associations, regulatory regimes, and the state's criminal sanction of corrupt practices are different things and need to be thought about differently. So, for example, the fact that funeral homes have a lock on the coffin business strikes me as wrong and silly; however, regulating the construction of coffins strikes me as sensible and including in those regulations some minimum standard of woodworking competence and related requirements strikes me as equally sensible.  The independent creation of a United Association of Coffin Makers which disciplines its members, in terms of training and quality of output, is fine by me. The legitimacy, illegitimacy, or silliness of what happens next depends on what happens next.

 This 

 bit of counter-contrarianism to some of this blog’s recent content, let me say that one thing emerges when you meld the AFT’s massive expenditures on the DC mayor’s race with an awareness of the nefarious antics of the locksmith’s association, the tour guide guild, and the barber’s cartel is a realization that the standard center-left critique of teacher’s unions is almost 100 percent off-base.

requires some kind of discussion of the center-left critique of teacher's unions especially when what follows is a center-left defense of unions.