On Friday, Ron DeSantis announced his support for legislative efforts to ban lab grown meat in the state of Florida. He said:
You need meat, OK. And we're going to have meat in Florida. [. . .] We're not going to have fake meat. Like that doesn't work.
Since I read Chris Freiman’s convincing book on why most people should ignore politics, I’ve been following his advice unfailingly. But when political content does slip into my feed, it’s not always the brightest and best. DeSantis’s speech is a welcome exception.
In the snippet above, DeSantis appears to endorse the following, plausible principle:
MELTBRAIN: If Floridians, like, really need some product, state legislatures should ban everything that resembles it, even if any consumer whose placement on the bell curve overtakes that of a carrot could tell that they’re not the same thing, just by checking the label.
Since DeSantis endorses MELTBRAIN, odds are good he’ll apply it to other areas of consumer politics, banning gluten free bread because it resembles bread with gluten, banning toy guns because they’re shaped like real ones, and banning himself because he looks like a ball of mince.
Of course, banning lab grown meat isn’t primarily about Americans needing meat, where ‘meat’ is restricted to ‘torture meat’, of the kind that involves the torture and killing of sentient land animals. It has more to do with protection. (“I know the legislature is doing a bill to protect our meat”, he said in the same speech, as the Washington Post sobbed quietly in the background.)
Woke, methane-neutral lab burgers are one of the big existential threats to America, easily in the top two thousand. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law ceding ground to liberal, cruelty-free meat products. . .”, and the cramming of artificially oversized hens, four-to-six at a time, into wire battery cages is an important tradition in American public life.
Still, it strikes me that DeSantis is acting unwisely. Nutritionally, the reason Floridians need torture meat is that, without it, they’ll die of being massive wimps. Yet prohibition rarely works when there’s a stable, persistent demand for the prohibited good. Better to let the vegans starve themselves out of the state, taking a core liberal voting block with them.
Metaball Ron! What a total loser! He wants to ban lab meat because he thinks we need real meat. Can you believe that? I saw this and thought, "Wow, I can't believe that."
A lot of people had hope for DeSantis vs Trump, but stunts like this gave me pause. During the primary I remember him banning education vouchers from four schools in Florida because they had "ties to the CCP". Really they just seemed to be schools with lots of Chinese in them. DeSantis's big lasting legislative accomplishment was universal school vouchers, and he was willing to undermine it for a culture war headline. I think the guy happened to be lucky on COVID but otherwise doesn't have stellar instincts.