Any proposition that would give the State any kind of new authority or create new regulations is best voted down. Even if it might be considered beneficial to altruistic interests.
I had to listen as the people sitting next to me during computer science high fived each other as new taxes were passed and government mandates were yayed.
Supporting mandatory GMO labeling in isolation is quite different from supporting mandatory GMO labeling under the assumption of a corporatist system with giant food companies and crowding out of private quality certification, not to mention an education system that destroys the reasoning ability of the general populace. Criticizing policy in isolation is a fool’s errand and only leads to confusion and people concluding libertarians are misguidedly rigid ideologues who cannot see the forest for the trees.
There’s a very basic distinction in the kinds of GMOs that is not being made and which I find infuriating - namely, whether the resultant GMO could have come about through natural processes (sexual combination) or not. For example, splicing spider genes into a goat - that could not have come about through any sexual combination. Hence, it is different than the kind of genetic alteration when you replace a damaged gene that leads to disease with an undamaged version of that gene or when you intentionally double a gene (something that can happen in sexual combination, even though it’s a disorder of the genetic copying process), and so on.
Also, property rights are being violated willy nilly. It is an act of aggression, in my view, to create an artificial lifeform that could not have come about through natural processes, then allow that lifeform to reproduce with the property of others. For example, if Monsanto’s wheat spores blow over onto the field of a farmer who is growing non-Monsanto wheat and some of the non-Monsanto wheat is converted into Monsanto wheat, I think that should be treated as a property-rights violation. If you’re going to mess with Nature, then you need to keep that shit on your own property.
Also the patents on genetic codes are the height of absurdity. Wonders never cease.
The law would have the same efficacy as the FDA. That is, it would create a false sense of safety… or do you really believe that the people enforcing this law would not be bribed into approving GMO products as “Natural”?