Some people don’t mind GMOs in their food and believe that GMOs are scientific progress allowing better food choices. Others feel that GMOs are dangerous or unhealthy.

First Whole Foods and now Ben & Jerry’s have announced they will no longer offer products with GMOs. This is a great example of the marketplace working. If people don’t want something they don’t have to buy it. If the store they shop at offers it they can lobby or boycott that store and if enough people do so, the store will change or go out of business.

It is quick, efficient, peaceful and totally voluntary.

Contrast this with government action using the same example of food choices. Some want government to ban GMOs. Government laws and regulations rarely do what they intend and often accomplish the opposite. The laws are typically not written by the advocates pushing for change but by the very same special interests who the advocates are fighting. The laws are therefor often stacked in favor of large, well-connected, companies and interests, this is why the laws are 800 pages or more. Government action is inefficient, takes much more time, has unintended consequences and is expensive for the taxpayers. It is not voluntary. Most importantly, is inherently violent because laws are enforced by threat of violence and taxes are collected by violence.

The result when government gets into the food industry for example is corn syrup and sugar subsidies which increase calories and decrease nutrition, armed agents making raids in raw milk sellers (check out the video of the health food store in California who was raided by a Swat team for selling raw milk), regulations hindering new competition from healthier alternatives. The free market is not perfect but in most cases and for most solutions it is far superior to the corruption, violence, inefficiency and expense of State solutions,