For the next three weeks, I’ll be doing a clinical with the New Orleans City Law Department, which involves a deep dive into the city’s licensing regime. I’ll try to share some of the more entertaining things I’ve gleaned from my work and see what sorts of insights it might give for larger liberal policy.
In New Orleans, the city code thankfully ensures, in a single sentence, that bread flour not be mixed with any “unwholesome, deleterious substance.” There’s a little added definition, but decisions about what constitutes such a substance seem to be left up to the health inspector’s discretion. In the next three sections, the code specifies, in painstaking detail, not just the materials that the paper wrapping the bread must be made of, but the weight of the paper, and the minimum number of loaves that can be delivered to a restaurant while wrapped in this paper. Based on their relative treatments in the text, it seems like the New Orleans city council that passed these laws though that the paper needed to be more strictly regulated than what actually went into the bread.
Such weirdly specific regulation can be detrimental to the cause of positive government regulations. Read more
