By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

We are newly aware of the close relationship between industry and administrative agencies, a corrupting one that is building cartels and blocking serious reform of government. This is usually called agency "capture," but what if that is not the right term? Capture implies an institution that was previously pure and independent that was later taken over. In the case of the FDA, and its predecessor agencies, they have a deep history of industry involvement.

The usual story of the nation's first major food safety regulation posits a corrupt industry cleaned up by government. The deeper history offers a different story of an industry in trouble with consumers that went to government to shore up its market share.

The best documentation of this alternative view is offered by economic historian Murray Rothbard who wrote a short history of the meatpacking controversies. His article is reprinted here.

The Meatpacking Myth, by Murray N. Rothbard

One of the earliest acts of Progressive regulation of the economy was the Meat Inspection Act, which passed in June 1906. The orthodox myth holds that the action was directed against the "beef trust" of the large meatpackers, and that the federal government was driven to this anti-business measure by popular outcry generated by the muckraking novel, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, which exposed unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meatpacking plants.

Unfortunately for the myth, the drive for federal meat inspection actually began more than two decades earlier and was launched mainly by the big meatpackers themselves. The spur was the urge to penetrate the European market for meat, something which the large meatpackers thought could be done if the government would certify the quality of meat and thereby make American meat more highly rated abroad. Not coincidentally, as in all Colbertist mercantilist legislation over the centuries, a governmentally-coerced upgrading of quality would serve to cartelize - to lower production, restrict competition, and raise prices to the consumers. It, furthermore, socializes the cost of inspection to satisfy consumers, by placing the burden upon the taxpayers instead of on the producers themselves.

More specifically, the meatpackers were concerned to with combating the restrictionist legislation of European countries, which, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, began to prohibit the import of American meat. The excuse was to safeguard the European consumer against purportedly diseased meat; the probable major reason was to act as a protectionist device for European meat production.

Partly at the behest of the major meatpackers, Chicago and other cities imposed and then strengthened a system of meat inspection, and the Secretary of the Treasury, on his own and without Congressional authorization, set up an inspection organization to certify exported cattle as free of pleuropneumonia in 1881. Finally, after Germany prohibited the importation of American pork, ostensibly because of the problem of disease, Congress, responding to the pressure of the large meatpackers, reacted in May 1884 by establishing a Bureau of Animal Industry within the Department of Agriculture "to prevent the exportation of diseased cattle" and to try to eliminate contagious diseases among domesticated animals.

But this was not enough, and the Department of Agriculture kept agitating for additional federal regulation to improve meat exports. Then, in response to the hog cholera epidemic in the United States in 1889, Congress, again pressured by the big meatpackers, passed a law in the summer of 1890 compelling the inspection of all meat intended for export. But the European governments, claiming to be unsatisfied because live animals at the time of slaughter remained uninspected, continued their prohibitions of American meat.

As a result, Congress, in March 1891, passed the first important compulsory federal meat inspection law in American history....