Thursday, March 09, 2006

DAVID T. BEITO: Upton Sinclair's Fabrications. A letter from Lawrence W. Reed, the president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, appeared yesterday in the Wall Street Journal on Upton Sinclair's role in meat packing regulation. Many thanks to William Stepp for calling it to my attention: John J. Miller's essay on Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" (Leisure & Arts, Feb. 23) reminds us that Sinclair's novel on Chicago meatpacking plants was motivated by the author's ill-informed passion for socialism, but there's more to the story. The dreadful conditions Sinclair depicted in his novel were largely hogwash. Read More... [Liberty & Power: Group Blog] As it turns out, the big meatpackers themselves pushed for the 1906 act because it put the federal government's stamp of approval on their products, foisted the annual $3 million price tag onto taxpayers, and imposed costly new regulations on their smaller competitors. Far from a crusading truth-seeker, the socialist Sinclair was a sucker who ended up being used by the very industry on which he heaped so much unjustified scorn. Nothing much has changed in the last 100 years. 1:28:39 PM    comment () trackback () China's Kleptocracy Rolls On. CSM: Ni's courtyard house, officially "protected" for years, was bulldozed in 2003 to make way for skyscrapers. It is a familiar story in Beijing - except Ni refused a cheap buy-off. His life savings were in the house. He withstood... [John Robb's Weblog] The article refers to rioting and protests in response to this kind of theft. I actually consider this very promising, compared to the US where the same kind of things happen every day without any resistance. 12:33:08 PM    comment () trackback ()

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