Florida Says Burgers Must Come From Cows
FL bill outlaws lab-grown meat, stifling free market.
Florida has been debating a bill in the state legislature since November. The bill was incorporated into what I refer to as a “kitchen sink” bill, which involves everything from lab-grown meat to electric vehicle charging stations to motor vehicle repair shops to driver’s license fees, and a long laundry list of unrelated topics come under CS/CS/SB 1084. The subject of this article is the bill’s section 25, criminalizing the sale or manufacture of lab-grown meat, which shows how anti-free market and how the Florida legislature loves protectionist crony capitalism instead of true capitalism. The House and the Senate passed CS/CS/SB1084 which includes Section 25 which would prohibit the manufacturing sale, holding, or distribution of cultivated meat and it makes the sale or ownership of cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor. This is lab-grown meat and this bill is now on DeSantis's desk for signing.
The Florida Cattle Ranchers felt the threat that lab-grown meat is so superior over meat grazing on Florida land, that they had to cry to the Florida legislature to ban it, rather than let the public decide their fate via the free market. While lab-grown burgers are the butt of jokes, the Florida legislature felt the need to heed the rancher’s cry and stifle the innovation with jail time for those daring to go against the sale of “real meat.”
They should go ahead and compete with whatever new technology emerges, but instead, instill fear into the legislature on the imaginary threat to their business. Imagine if a government tried to ban the use of a tractor for fear of putting agricultural workers out of business and ultimately, it only yields to regulatory capture, and to a lack of choice and opportunity for innovation and for consumers to make decisions about what they want. And the irony here is that so much of what's being consumed in the market today. Part of their rationalization is ‘We don't know if it's good for you. It may be unhealthy.’ Even though there is zero research to show lab-grown meat is worse for you than cattle meat.
The truth is there are federal regulatory bodies that have oversight on this. It denies consumers choice. It flies in the face of what has historically been an economic opportunity to bring costs down to bring innovation to market and to try and stall that innovation. This is nothing more than regulatory capture, denying the free market to thrive.
This ban on lab-grown meat will ultimately find its path to federal preemption, as historically when we've seen states try to impose these sorts of bans, the federal preemption ends the ban, and so it's very likely that we'll end up seeing some federal legislation over the next couple of years legalizing lab-grown meat if this technology is ultimately seen as beneficial. The problem is, now that Florida's done this, assuming DeSantis signs the bill (which he will), I guarantee you're going to see Texas, which is a huge ranching market, and many other states that will do the same, setting up a bad precedent for all other disruptive kinds of industries to be blocked by their local economies that believe that they're under threat. It just creates a lot of unnecessary chaos, which ultimately goes away if the free market would be allowed to breathe, rather than be stifled by protectionist measures of legacy industries. It is terrible that a bunch of big companies in an industry get together and try and shut out innovative solutions by inventing some unproven threat. This is typical corruption and cronyism and DeSantis should not sign this bill into law. It is his decision whether he wants to stand up for the free market or corrupt cronyism.