One of the bills the Humane Society is really pushing now is the Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009. This closes a loophole in federal law which was widened under Clinton in 1998, when the amount of money a garment had to be worth to be labeled with its fur content was increased from $20 to $150. The bill is especially relevant following the Humane Society’s 2007 investigation which found that dog fur was regularly being imported from China into the U.S. and mislabeled as faux fur, raccoon or coyote fur, or not labeled at all, at major retailers like Neiman Marcus and Macy’s.
The way to handle this in a libertarian society would be lawsuits. Lots of them, filed by individual consumers for deception and false advertising. That’s one thing that’s different in today’s society vs. a libertarian society. Today, using an egregious environmental example brought up by one of my fellow Humane Society lobbyists, the citizens of Smithfield, NC suffer from the stench of manure lagoons, their children get sick, and their only hope falls to the EPA.
The EPA in turn slaps Smithfield Foods (America’s largest pork producer) on the wrist with a one-time fine of .035% of Smithfield’s yearly sales for polluting so badly and making so many people ill– and, oh yeah, an award for environmentalism while they’re at it. Smithfield, of course, considers these puny fines the cost of conducting business and continues on like normal. Meanwhile, the company’s neighbors have no recourse or redress since the EPA has already done what it says it can.
Fast-forward to a libertarian society (no utopia, but better in many ways than what we have now). All of those individuals would personally sue Smithfield Foods in a slam-dunk case, collecting millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, in damages for this company polluting the entire town and rendering it virtually unlivable. Smithfield has also in the process of pork producing polluted the water sources of much of eastern North Carolina, so virtually everyone in that half of the state could jump in with lawsuits, too. What happens in this system? You guessed it, Smithfield would be out of business tomorrow.
So in our prospective libertarian society, there are many consumers who would be upset about their mislabeled fur and would sue and have an effect on these companies’ bottom lines that would make them sit up and label their products correctly. People wouldn’t be able to afford it, you say? The type of people who can buy $500 faux fur coats at Neiman Marcus can spare a few for a lawsuit and may even have lawyers on retainer. In our current system, instead of any semblance of justice on the part of those wronged by these companies, we have the Humane Society suing the deceptive companies under an obscure federal law (the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act) with no results and trying to get federal legislation passed at the same time.
So, I’ve told you what tactics I would use to immediately solve the problem of the deceptive fur sellers. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss why a federal law won’t really do anything on behalf of the cause of ending the fur mislabeling and could in fact make things worse.
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Libertarian Girl » Blog Archive » Current Law Not Enforced! Pass Another Law, Stat!
August 4th, 2009