A Stitch in Haste

One of my first, worst episodes of "stupid shock" (i.e., the paradigm-shifting realization that there really are morons in the world) occurred at, of all places, Cornell University, where I was a graduate economics student. The catalyst: bovine somatotropin — also called bovine growth hormone, or BGH.

The issue, distilled, was as follows: Cows injected with BGH produce more milk. More milk means cheaper milk. Cheaper milk is good for poor people, especially poor children. Therefore BGH is good. QED.

Sorry, that was the reality-based version. This was the Cornell student body version: They're poisoning kids with cow hormones!

Of course, the pesky facts that: (1) Biologically speaking, BGH cannot, even under the worst nightmare scenario, possibly make its way into cows' milk, and (2) even if it could, the acids and enzymes in the human digestive system would completely destroy it, were of no import to these bright young Ivy Leaguers, who went around demanding the sort of things that agitated college students tend to demand — bans, boycotts, protests, etc.

Fast forward to today:

Pennsylvania is stopping dairies from stamping milk containers with "hormone-free" labels in a precedent-setting decision being closely watched by the industry.
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State Agriculture Secretary Dennis C. Wolff said advertising one brand of milk as free from artificial hormones implies that competitors' milk is not safe, and it often comes with what he said is an unjustified higher price.
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Agricultural regulators in New Jersey and Ohio are considering following suit, the latest battle in a long-standing dispute over whether injecting cows with bovine growth hormone affects milk.

I'm not very good at playing the game of "If I were a central planner..." But I must admit to having experienced a brief — very brief — twinge of sympathy for these paternalistic bureaucrats. People who pay a premium for milk from hormone-free cows, and people who infer that such milk is somehow "safer" than milk from BGH-treated cows are, frankly, idiots.*

(*I don't want to fall into the Dolphin-trap again: A consumer who has a different basis for preferring milk from untreated cows, such as some notion of animal cruelty concerns, is not necessarily an idiot — at least not for the purposes of this blogpost).

Still, a properly worded label ("hormone-free" is not a proper label, since all milk is hormone-free; the correct term is "from synthetic-hormone-free cows") is not inaccurate, but merely irrelevant. And I balk at banning advertising that is not inaccurate.

One of the few major failures of current First Amendment jurisprudence is the notion that truthful commercial speech should not enjoy full First Amendment protection. This dilution of property rights and economic substantive due process was yet another by-product of New Deal socialism initiated by Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934) (a case upholding milk regulation, incidentally). Truthful advertising enjoys some First Amendment protection, to be sure — see Central Hudson Gas v. Public Service Commission, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) — and it will be interesting to see whether this form of paternalistic censorship of truthful advertising is challenged in court.

As well-intentioned as these nanny-state regulators may be, businesses ought to be allowed to put whatever truthful label on their products that they see fit. And, as cynical as it may sound, consumers have a right to drawn false inferences from such truthful advertising claims. They have a right not to do their research. They have a right to pay a premium for something that others know to be worthless. There is, bottom line, a fundamental right to be a gullible shopper.