A Stitch in Haste

The city of Nashville is considering banning food vending trucks:

Problems with insects and rodents are worse in food wagons than in restaurants, said Jerry Rowland, director of food protection services for the city Health Department. Inspectors have also found wastewater from food truck sinks running out onto the ground.

The story is making national headlines because critics of the proposal are alleging anti-Hispanic racism, since the trucks tend to serve Mexican food and are owned and operated by Mexican immigrants.

This may well be true, but it is not the focus of my post. This is:

Some vendors also prepare much of the food at home, which health inspectors have no way of regulating, he said.

Since when is the rule “that which cannot be regulated must be banned”? Putting aside the fact that the claim is ludicrous (the city can find a way to regulate hot dog stands but not taco trucks?), there are other ways to protect consumers. Word of mouth often proves useful, for example, as does simple competition (“build a better taco and the world with beat a path to your truck”). And if fingertips really do start appearing in the portions from the nearby Chili Truck, then of course the civil courts are always available.

And besides, here we see the bureaucratic tendency to see only the purported “benefits” of a law without seeing the costs. If you ban food trucks, then yes you remove the unsanitary vendors, but you also eliminate all the perfectly healthy operators too. Loss of utility for the customers, loss of opportunity for the vendors, market disruption and inefficiencies everywhere. Because some public health bureaucrats “know what’s best.”

More:

“The Health Department could go out and shut them down today, but all that mobile vendor would have to do is roll up and go to another location, and the Health Department doesn’t have a way of keeping up with where they’re going,” he said.

But that’s patently false. All the city would need to do is license not only the vendor, but also the location for the truck. This is how New York City licenses its mobile food vendors. Why can’t Nashville operate the same way? (And if truly draconian measures are needed, the city could of course flat-out seize the truck like an illegally parked car. My libertarian tendencies would hope such a nuclear option would not be necessary, however.)

Consumers tend to be very good at not being swindled. They are very good at taking care of themselves. Licensing and regulation can serve efficiency-enhancing functions, such as creating deterrent effects and facilitating private recourse against wrongdoers. But regulation for regulation’s sake, for naked paternalism, is efficiency-destroying and outside the realm of a proper government function.

Like exterminators, bureaucrats want there to be problems. Otherwise they can’t justify their own existence. But that doesn’t mean the problems are real or that the treatment is worse than the problem.