My knowledge is limited to a small number of cases, but in those cases, my sister *was* able to close down the “F” rated restaurants, albeit with a lot of effort. But she couldn’t really close down the “C” restaurants. In her county, they didn’t even have to post ratings, though I think that’s a good idea.

albatross’ point (well, what I took from it) was that even restaurants with an F don’t get shut down by regulators. Sometimes they don’t even have to post the rating, other times they hide it. There was a funny picture going around the internet a year or more ago of a restaurant that posted the F rating warning in their window… with similar letters around it spelling out something about the restaurant so it was hidden. So the reliance on government ratings and inspection to ensure safe food preparation just doesn’t hold up. Yet it’s treated like an end-all, be-all.

I am not seeing your problem here.

Franchise/chain restaurants are one counterexample. AAA ratings (hotels and restaurants, though the hotel ratings are more useful) are another. Zaggat guides (and all their competitors) are still another. So I’m not seeing the dead hand of government keeping you out of this market.

The dead hand of government may well be keeping you from running a restaurant that would achieve the goal of safe food in some non-approved way (for example, you could serve your hamburger and chicken rare when ordered that way, but serve only irradiated meat so there wouldn’t be enough surviving pathogens to make anyone sick even without cooking). But it’s not keeping you from rating existing, open restaurants on whatever basis you like.

A good example of where government inspection can work with the free market. When you go into a restaurant…look for their health inspection scorecard, and decide for yourself.

Except I cannot get my “Boyd Kitchen Safety Rating” service off the ground because of the shitty, but free, government service…which is mandatory. Luckily there are a couple hundred tech industry areas where the “freer” market is able to answer the call without a jack boot getting in the way…for now.

Also, many (though perhaps not all) chain restaurants are pretty careful to keep their restaurants up to a higher standard of cleanliness and health than the local authorities demand. ISTR that McDonalds is one example of this. A very long time ago, when I was working at a McDonalds as a college student, I remember that our store owners were utterly unworried about the county health inspector, but were scared to death of failing the McDonalds corporate inspection. (This was an announced inspection–I vividly remember scrubbing the tile floors with a bristle brush, among other things. I think they also did unannounced inspections at various depths.)

A good example of where government inspection can work with the free market. When you go into a restaurant…look for their health inspection scorecard, and decide for yourself. A Chinese restaurant we went to often suddenly got downgraded to a “B” and we stopped going for some time. Last week, they were back up to a 99% and we had dinner there.

A fair point.

Oh for fuck’s sake. Anyone who does anything at all is trying to maximize their own utility and follow their incentives. Nobody ever thinks that is an excuse for anyone but the pigs.

http://www.accessatlanta.com/celebrities-tv/dog-nurses-ligers-after-955632.html?cxntlid=thbz_hm

Something to make you feel a little better in the midst of all the bad news.

As an independent datapoint: My sister worked for several years as a county health inspector. It was *very* hard for her to shut down restaurants, even ones with horrible sanitation. She managed it a couple times for places with godawful problems, and I’m sure that made for noticably less foodborne disease in that county.

You can and should notice bad sanitation and lukewarm food and avoid it. (And that’s what health inspectors look for, in practice, though with more access than you have–restaurants never seem to let me wander around their kitchen looking for rodent droppings or bugs, testing the temperature of the food in the holding areas, etc.) However, it’s not easy to work out what meal made you sick all by yourself. You either need lab tests, or data from many people who ate the same thing (but didn’t share the rest of their meals) to be sure.

Well, yes, beating a man to death shows you are dangerous and willing to commit violence and SWAT doesn’t want to risk getting hurt. Where-as the average pot smoker isn’t and if they are slow in a pot case he will destroy evidence. SWAT people are rational self-interested human beings just like everyone else, and we should expect them to maximize their own utility.

Well, we wouldn’t have been able to be the only industrial country, after having bombed everyone else into oblivion, but perhaps our economy and monetary system would have stayed on a straighter and narrower path.

Not to mention hundreds of thousands of people that would have been left alive, here to procreate, so our country would have possibly trillions of unspent government dollars and millions of unrealized citizens that are now spent and gone on both parts.

Hey, the Founders were idiots. the USA was meant to project power and politics hither and yon, no expense spared, who are we kidding!!!!!!

Most of them are on the wrong side of the bell curve.

As for this latest attack on pre-paid credit cards, I wonder how many alternate universes I would have to jump through to find one where American incomes and savings truly were personal and private???

So why don’t they just enforce the fucking fire code instead of heaping further burdens upon people who want to offer affordable places to sleep in New York City? I bet if this were phrased as “helping out the poor” in some bill, it would pass unanimously, just because of the eventual attack ads that could be made.