Showtalk said:

when I saw steak was $33 a pound, I didn’t even consider it. Instead, I got a different type of meat for $4 a lb

Same here. I respond to high prices of one food kind with switching to something else.

People count on extras to take home as leftovers.  

Usually condiments aren’t as harmful as secret additives.  Supposedly subway head to change their bread recipe because it contained an ingredient also found in tires.  They did and the bread became tasteless.  They lost business over it.

Showtalk said:

Usually condiments aren’t as harmful as secret additives

Things like melamine to bulk up cereals, or formaldehyde to retard spoilage? (thinking of some of the stuff in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle")

.

It sounds unappetizing.  We need to read labels.

Both of those things are illegal to add to food, and both are actually toxic. But they have been used as additives in the bad old days. Melamine is used in the manufacture of countertops and not intended for ingestion. Formaldehyde of course is embalming fluid and is rather poisonous. Neither should be anywhere near food. But unfortunately, some unscrupulous characters have done unsavory things in the past and that is why we now have such a maze of regulatory red tape

Red tape is good if it saves lives.

Yeah, there is a correct amount of red tape to keep the worst people from exploiting unsuspecting consumers, desperate workers, etc.

Then there's an excess of red tape that merely hamstrings honest hardworking people with incomprehensible mazes and saps resources to deal with pointless regulatory compliance costs - often regulations written by clueless elite bureaucrats thousands of miles away who have never worked an honest day in their lives in an industry they know almost nothing about.

A classic example from the late 1970s. There was some federal regulatory type that was inspecting drilling rigs for some obscure safety measures that actually were less safe than some more innovative measures that companies were not allowed to do even though overseas, it had a better proven track record than the antiquated methods rigidly imposed in the US.

This dude really believed that you drill one kind of well and you get "regular". You drill another kind of well and you get unleaded. You drill yet another well and you get "premium" and finally another well produces diesel.

The frightening thing is the power this clueless bureaucrat had, the ability to totally shut down a drilling operation over almost anything petty.

And such a bureaucrat mindset was portrayed almost perfectly in the movie "Ghostbusters" where the EPA dude shut down the containment grid.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ObstructiveBureaucrat

Well, of course.  There are separate wells for diesel fuel, too. How do they keep their jobs?

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

Yeah, there is a correct amount of red tape to keep the worst people from exploiting unsuspecting consumers, desperate workers, etc.

Then there's an excess of red tape that merely hamstrings honest hardworking people with incomprehensible mazes and saps resources to deal with pointless regulatory compliance costs - often regulations written by clueless elite bureaucrats thousands of miles away who have never worked an honest day in their lives in an industry they know almost nothing about.

The good red tape is about the same percentage as good lawyers... 99.8% of them make the rest look bad!

It's called bureaucracy by any other name and for the most part, it's 99.8% of the time more expensive and less effective than anything the public sector can do!

FWIW