When ‘Consumer Protection’ Protects Producers from Competition

Since 2024, seven states have made it a crime to sell lab-grown meat. Florida went first, in May of that year. Texas became the seventh to do so, with fines that can reach $25,000 a day. The meat in question is grown from cells in a bioreactor tank, and most of these states banned it before a single package reached a store. Meanwhile, in Washington, a bill called the DAIRY PRIDE Act would strip the word “milk” from the almond and oat cartons in your grocery cooler. Each measure comes wrapped in the same promise: it is here to protect you from confusion. And in each case, the people who asked for it are the ranchers and dairy farmers who sell the older product.

This is the usual shape of a consumer-protection law. On the label it is a shield for you. In practice, though, it is a weapon for whoever already holds the market. I study how industries capture the rules meant to bind them, and the tell is almost always the same: the law does less to inform the buyer than to disarm a rival. It is also an old trick. A little over a century ago, a President of the United States had to sit down and rule on what the word “whiskey” means, because a fortune rode on the answer.

The year was 1909, and the President was William Howard Taft. The word had two owners. One was grain spirit aged for years in charred oak, slow and dear to make. The other was a neutral spirit cut with water, touched up with color and flavor, ready by evening. Both sold under the name “whiskey,” and a buyer holding a sealed bottle could not tell which he had paid for. Economists call that the Market for Lemons: the seller knows what the buyer cannot, and the cheap version drives out the good. The grievance was real. Some of the cheap stuff was rotgut.

A real grievance is exactly what a rent-seeker needs — someone who seeks government privilege instead of earning customers. The economist Bruce Yandle named the pattern Bootleggers and Baptists. Sunday liquor bans last, he noticed, because two camps want…