The Jungle

A failing socialist author wrote a debunked political propaganda book, that the miseducated still think was true. While it was debunked at the time, pro-Government types used this book as an excuse to create the precursor to the FDA, which has become a boondoggle that's killed or hurt more people than it has ever helped. But it's a lot easier to convince the gullible than it ever is to de-program them. ℹ️ Info           ~ Aristotle Sabouni Created: 2021-12-04

 

Alt-History

Left	Right
Upton Sinclair was a great investigative journalist who went undercover in Chicago meat packing plants and discovered gross, unsanitary conditions that lead to disease. When he exposed this, we created the FDA and made the world a better place. Fear a world without big government protecting us with benevolent bureaucracy, or we'd get more conditions like "The Jungle" reported on.	A failing socialist author wanted to write a political propaganda book, and semi-fictional hit piece called, "The Jungle". While it was debunked at the time, pro-Government types used it as an excuse to create the precursor to the FDA, which has become a boondoggle that's killed or hurt more people than it has helped, or the alternatives.

         

Facts

• [1] A relatively unknown and failing author and Socialist by the name of Upton Sinclair wanted to write a political propaganda book, so he went under cover in 1904 in Chicago meatpacking plants, and by 1906 he completed his semi-fictional hit piece called, "The Jungle".
• [2] Teddy Roosevelt (and anti-Big Business trust-buster) immediately put a team of government inspectors on it, and they concluded in the Neill-Reynolds Report that the book was, "intentionally misleading and false", "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact", and "utter absurdity".
• [3] It was a Progressive era, so the truth didn't matter as much as the opportunity to regulate, so Teddy suppressed the release of the report and used the book (by an author he had dismissed as a "crackpot"), as an excuse to create more federal government (the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Meat Inspection Act), which later became the FDA.
• [4] This was the start of what we called crony capitalism and the explosion of corruption: once the fed had control over things like this, you could pay off the correct politicians to get past inspections or guarantee your competition could not: which resulted in consolidation, reduced competition, and higher prices.
• [5] While the book and its ideas were completely debunked at the time, it's still taught in schools (Marxist re-education camps) today.

While the quality of food and conditions did get a bit better in the short term, most of this was in response to the consumer attention being paid, not the actual regulations.

Once an agency like that is created, it has an incentive to grow and expand well beyond it's value proposition. So they kept taxing and regulating and eventually this devolved into the FDA. Thus, while the quality of our products didn't change much (after the initial improvements), the size and scope of the government bureaucracy continued to grow and entropy, into the cluster-fuck that it is today, restricting choice and competition, doing very little additional good over far simpler inspection/rating systems, and often causing massive recalls not due to tainted products, but due to regulatory muscle flexing. (And thus we get more waste, expensive product, and less choice). But since those are hidden costs that most don't realize.

Conclusion

The Jungle was a propaganda scam, written by a kook, debunked at the time by the Neill-Reynolds Report... but it gave progressive politicians an excuse to corrupt food inspections. It has done little for food quality that wasn't being done without it. Today the agency (FDA) fails at food inspections, and delays life-saving drugs, treatments, and devices by a decade (while people die waiting), and they drive up their costs and reduce competition. Is it really worth it?

While "The Jungle" was thoroughly debunked as exaggerated propaganda, it became required reading in most schools to this day. Since the truth was always far less important to the progressives than telling the fictions they wanted to sell the gullible voters. so everything Upton wrote after that got the lavish support and accolated of the socialists and progressives, despite being factually wrong.

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🔗 More

Reviews List of things I’ve watched, read, seen, cooked, ate, heard about, and so on.

Books A list of Book Reviews.

The Left Lies When the truth disagrees with your agenda, you can grow (change) or lie. The left usually chooses the latter.

Alt-History This is a list of the alternate history that the left uses to twist perception and thus twist reality.

History Tales on the parts of history that have been ignored, suppressed, or lied about.

Capitalism America and freedom are founded on Capitalism; the idea that you can own property (the means of production).

FDA FDA was created because of a propaganda scam (The Jungle), to cure problems that barely existed, and they made worse.

Party of fear The lefts two biggest tools are envy, fear, and finger pointing to distract; used to manipulate their constituents.

🔗 Links

• http://reason.com/archives/2015/08/01/prime-act-would-steer-meat-processing-in
• FDA

Tags: Reviews  Books  Left Lies  Alt-History  History  Capitalism  FDA  Party of fear