Dead Babies and Capitalists

Chinese babies are dying. There’s a chemical that a Chinese baby food manufacturer put in their formula powder that raises the protein levels in the milk. That can makes the formula a premium product that can be sold for more money than regular formula.
Unfortunately that chemical also tends to kill the baby. It’s the same chemical that they sent to us in pet foods last year. Sick and dying dogs, sick and dying cats – now sick and dying babies. The least it does is cause kidney stones in infants. Hundreds of babies. Want to watch a tiny baby pass a stone?
The offending chemical is called Melamine. It’s meant to be used in plastics and glues – but it does raise the protein count in milk. Maybe you can say it’s nine grams of protein per glass instead of eight or seven. Premium stuff. Unfortunately, …
It’s kind of a neat trick. The company, called Sanlu, waters the milk down to make a gallon stretch farther – and then adds Melamine to jack the protein count back up. Snake oil salesmen have been pulling that kind of trick for millennia. Unfortunately, this time they picked a chemical with nasty side effects.
I am not China bashing. Like every other home in America, we have a fair amount of stuff around that is made in China. A few years ago a Chinese firm bought up IBM desktop computers. Remember when Microsoft based computers were called “the IBM standard”? I guess we can now call our Hewlett Packards and Dells “the Chinese Standard” --?
You’d practically have to shut down K-Mart and Walmart if you pulled all the Chinese goods. And – it would shatter a lot of American household budgets if we pulled Chinese goods. An even bigger consequence might be that the Chinese got mad and stopped loaning us the money we need to bail out our banking industry.
We’re kind of stuck. But we should remember that Chinese capitalists are no different from American capitalists. Unless they are carefully watched, good capitalists will always water some form of “milk” to enhance profits.
We need them. Chinese capitalists, European capitalists, Japanese capitalists, and American capitalists. Ever since John Calvin freed businessmen from the strictures of the Medieval Church and convinced men that they might glorify God by making large profits, we have depended on them.
Our whole lifestyle requires their existence. But they must be watched. Like small children with large metal toys in a sandbox, they must be supervised and regulated. Otherwise they are likely to bash one another and break things.
We know this. In America we’ve had a Food and Drug Administration for a century. We continually fault the agency for being too strict, not watchful enough, too lax and too fussy. But only imagine what sorts of things our manufacturers would be adding to our food and drugs if the FDA weren’t there!
So we supervise. We regulate – trying to strike the balance between protecting the consumer and stifling creativity. China just isn’t there yet. And, especially with foodstuffs and medicines, we should be very alert to that fact. China is only beginning this balancing act.
So is India. We should be aware, as a recent Business Week (Sept 15, 2008, “Outsourcing the Drug Industry”, p 049) article pointed out, we are on the verge of letting the Indians do a lot of our drug research for us. This is still a third world country, with lots of unbridled capitalism.
These are the same people you try to talk to when you call customer service over a credit card or a computer glitch. They come cheap. They’re smart. They do good computers and cars and lots of other products. How good is their version of the FDA?
Cuss the FDA and the federal government as much as you want, you don’t really want to live without it. Over the past few decades we’ve busily de-regulated Wall Street and the banks. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea either.
Come to think of it, is there really much difference between watering the milk and watering the stock? In any case the consumer gets an awful bellyache.