How Dumb Can Government Get?

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If you ever doubted life was absurd, you only need to look at the types of decisions bureaucracies make. 

We live in a world where food wrappers have warnings on them telling you not to eat, ladders are plastered with warnings so numerous that you can barely see the aluminum underneath, and packages of nuts have warnings that tell you that this bag of almonds contains nuts. 

In the spirit of this stupidity, I present to you this gem of a news story: Costco is being forced to recall packages of butter that do not warn purchasers that the butter contains milk. They even have given instructions to people on how best to dispose of their dangerously milk-containing butter. 

In case you were wondering, here’s info about how you can return or dispose of your butter, presumably to replace it with butter, which is also butter.https://t.co/6bBOlTvlyn

— Spike Cohen (@RealSpikeCohen) November 11, 2024

Apparently people who buy butter might be surprised that the butter is made of milkfat. 

Personally, I picked up this bit of trivia somewhere along the path of my life, and the information stuck in my head. This, it turns out, is a rare thing according to the federal government. Consumers must be protected from the dreaded cream-derived substance lest a rash of milk-allergic people die of ignorance that butter is not on the safe list. 

To be fair to bureaucrats–something I am loathe to be–this type of idiocy is not restricted to government bureaucracies alone. Bureaucracies exist to create and enforce rules, which is antithetical not only to bad actions but also to common sense. 

We create blanket rules to place boundaries beyond which bad actors cannot go or stupid mistakes are not made–a good thing in principle–but in the process, we abandon any semblance of intelligence. 

The tale of the recalled butter is not just an example of how insanely stupid government bureaucracies are–it is that–it is also a reminder that rules can be as destructive as the lack of them. We all want clean food and water and safer products, but as the regulatory state grows, it constrains us in uncountable ways. Rules can make society stupid. 

The cost to recall the butter will grossly exceed any potential benefit. The amount of time, money, and energy involved in recalling a perfectly safe product for not having two words printed on the package–words that say what literally everybody already knows–will be astronomical. 

This makes the world a little bit worse than it needs to be.