Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

A couple of weeks ago, I read some news about testing beef for Mad Cow disease that made me think, “Don’t have a cow, man!” A smaller company wants to test all of its beef for mad cow disease, which would allow them to differentiate their product by advertising “100% Mad Cow Tested” (industry-wide about 1% is tested).

This is a great example of marketing to trends (which I wrote about before), even though the risk of getting bad beef is low, most people would probably prefer to pay a premium to get the “benefit” for the thorough testing. If I ate beef, I know I would.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to block the company from doing the testing. They cite two reasons:

1. By increasing the amount of testing, there is an increased chance of false positives. This could cause a panic that could seriously hurt the industry.
2. The 100% testing would give them an advantage over their larger competitors that don’t do the testing. The competitors worry that they would lose market share.

Let’s start with the second one. If you support free markets, this reasons makes no sense. If one supplier is able to differentiate his product and take market share from competitors, it’s a natural and good thing for both the supplier and the consumer. If we stopped people from making their products better, we’d all still be riding horses to work.

Now the first reason: the risk of false positives. This sounds somewhat valid. But realistically, a better solution would be to help create tests with lower false positives. Though, even that is unnecessary since the industry itself is already intrinsically motivated to do this since they have their perception to maintain.

Most likely, this move is motivated by the larger companies bribing (or lobbying) the government to pass unfair laws to help them maintain their market share. Unfortunately for us consumers, this sort of thing happens all the time.