WEBVTT NOTE 52. Why Everything Is Dirtier 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.240 Why Everything is Dirtier 2 00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:11.780 I'm old enough to have a vague memory of clothes so white that they were called bright. 3 00:00:11.780 --> 00:00:17.800 This happened despite the absence of additives, the ridiculous varieties of sprays and bottles 4 00:00:17.800 --> 00:00:23.320 and packets that festoon our cabinets today and that we throw into the wash to try to 5 00:00:23.320 --> 00:00:30.480 Boost the Cleaning Power of Apathetic Machines and Increasingly Useless Laundry Soap. 6 00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:35.800 Then the other night, I experienced an amazing blast from the past. 7 00:00:35.800 --> 00:00:45.200 I added a quarter cup of Trisodium Phosphate, TSP, and otherwise treated nothing. 8 00:00:45.200 --> 00:00:49.600 The results were nothing short of mind-boggling. 9 00:00:49.600 --> 00:00:55.520 Everything was clean, clean in a way that I recall from childhood. 10 00:00:55.520 --> 00:01:00.200 Next came my confrontation with the local dry cleaner, which I've used for years. 11 00:01:00.200 --> 00:01:04.680 I explained what happened and how puzzling it is that by using TSP I was able to clean 12 00:01:04.680 --> 00:01:09.840 my clothes more thoroughly and perfectly than his commercial service. 13 00:01:09.840 --> 00:01:11.440 He was not shocked. 14 00:01:11.440 --> 00:01:15.600 He completely agreed, though sheepishly. 15 00:01:15.600 --> 00:01:20.160 I pointed out that TSP, which is a natural element, is amazing not because it cleans 16 00:01:20.160 --> 00:01:25.080 – it needs soap to do its thing – but rather because it rinses, whooshing away all 17 00:01:25.080 --> 00:01:30.240 dirt, oil, stains as well as all leftover detergent. 18 00:01:30.240 --> 00:01:34.020 Bleach whitens, but it ruins fabrics and that's not good. 19 00:01:34.020 --> 00:01:38.260 What is needed is a good rinsing agent that leaves clothes not only perfectly clean, but 20 00:01:38.260 --> 00:01:40.240 also smelling fantastic. 21 00:01:40.240 --> 00:01:46.760 TSP does it, and that's why it has long been an essential ingredient in laundry sub. 22 00:01:46.760 --> 00:01:49.120 Once again, he agreed. 23 00:01:49.120 --> 00:01:55.000 It is not commercially viable, he said. 24 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:56.400 How can this be? 25 00:01:56.400 --> 00:01:57.880 It is not expensive. 26 00:01:57.880 --> 00:02:01.320 It is freely available at the hardware store in the paint section. 27 00:02:01.320 --> 00:02:04.760 If something works, the laundry service pleases its customers more. 28 00:02:04.760 --> 00:02:06.720 That means more business and higher profits. 29 00:02:06.720 --> 00:02:11.040 Isn't the goal to clean clothes well and do a good job for customers? 30 00:02:11.040 --> 00:02:18.640 Yes, true, he said, but again, TSP is not commercially viable. 31 00:02:18.640 --> 00:02:24.000 He politely deferred all further questions to the Dry Cleaning and Laundry Institute, 32 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:27.560 whose website provides no information at all to non-members. 33 00:02:27.560 --> 00:02:32.380 However, the Laundry Institute did answer my email. 34 00:02:32.380 --> 00:02:36.860 It is true that trisodium phosphate produces cleaner laundry. 35 00:02:36.860 --> 00:02:38.420 Bingo! 36 00:02:38.420 --> 00:02:39.900 Cleaner laundry! 37 00:02:39.900 --> 00:02:41.240 Cleaner than what? 38 00:02:41.240 --> 00:02:42.820 Anything else! 39 00:02:42.820 --> 00:02:49.140 Not commercially viable means that governments will no longer permit laundries to clean your 40 00:02:49.140 --> 00:02:50.380 shirts. 41 00:02:50.380 --> 00:02:54.960 You can add TSP at home – government hasn't restricted that yet – but commercial houses 42 00:02:54.960 --> 00:02:55.960 cannot. 43 00:02:55.960 --> 00:03:03.960 However, the Laundry Institute did say that there are other ways to achieve a clean shirt. 44 00:03:03.960 --> 00:03:05.280 What are they? 45 00:03:05.280 --> 00:03:06.600 He didn't say. 46 00:03:06.600 --> 00:03:12.400 He said, you will have to do some legwork to find a cleaner that meets your needs. 47 00:03:12.400 --> 00:03:13.960 My needs. 48 00:03:13.960 --> 00:03:17.880 My needs of a clean clothes, same as the laundry needs of the whole of humanity since the beginning 49 00:03:17.880 --> 00:03:18.880 of time. 50 00:03:18.880 --> 00:03:22.520 The whole purpose of laundries is to meet that need. 51 00:03:22.520 --> 00:03:24.440 Here is the problem, however. 52 00:03:24.440 --> 00:03:30.140 The goal of the regulators who regulate the laundry is not to improve your life. 53 00:03:30.140 --> 00:03:36.040 It is to wreck your life a bit at a time by pressing increasing numbers of restrictions 54 00:03:36.040 --> 00:03:40.240 and mandates upon private producers. 55 00:03:40.240 --> 00:03:46.960 One of these mandates has removed TSP from detergent and with catastrophic results. 56 00:03:46.960 --> 00:03:50.720 No one wants to talk about this. 57 00:03:50.720 --> 00:03:55.240 There is a major hush-hush culture here, because business, understandably, doesn't want to 58 00:03:55.240 --> 00:04:00.720 face a consumer backlash, and government doesn't want to acquire the reputation for being the 59 00:04:00.720 --> 00:04:04.840 civilization wrecker that it truly is. 60 00:04:04.840 --> 00:04:09.980 These kinds of regulations are capable of driving an entire industry into the ground, 61 00:04:09.980 --> 00:04:14.360 as people with the intense desire for clean clothes – the very people who are willing 62 00:04:14.360 --> 00:04:19.780 to pay for laundry services – increasingly resort to home cleaning and ironing. 63 00:04:19.780 --> 00:04:25.300 An entire step in the structure of production is eliminated, as laundry autarky replaces 64 00:04:25.300 --> 00:04:32.100 the division of labor, which is the driving force of cooperative human effort. 65 00:04:32.100 --> 00:04:35.240 It's no wonder that the industry wants no talk of this problem. 66 00:04:35.240 --> 00:04:38.440 Its very raison d'être is under attack. 67 00:04:38.440 --> 00:04:43.120 If laundries can't clean clothes, they have to shut down. 68 00:04:43.120 --> 00:04:46.120 Does government care? 69 00:04:46.120 --> 00:04:51.080 If you read between the lines in the almost candid moments of government statements, you 70 00:04:51.080 --> 00:04:53.040 can see what is going on here. 71 00:04:53.040 --> 00:04:58.980 In 2009, Clive Davies, a product engineer with the EPA, granted an interview with the 72 00:04:58.980 --> 00:05:02.980 New York Times that focused on home products. 73 00:05:02.980 --> 00:05:07.640 You might wonder what a product engineer is doing working for the government rather than 74 00:05:07.640 --> 00:05:09.680 the private sector. 75 00:05:09.680 --> 00:05:12.540 This interview shows why. 76 00:05:12.540 --> 00:05:20.140 Only one of the questions he has asked concerned the effect of home products on the environment. 77 00:05:20.140 --> 00:05:25.180 Not even one actually probed the essential question of whether the products actually 78 00:05:25.180 --> 00:05:26.180 work. 79 00:05:26.180 --> 00:05:33.580 Mr. Davies' job is to decide whether to affix a supposedly valued designation to products 80 00:05:33.580 --> 00:05:36.180 designed for the environment. 81 00:05:36.180 --> 00:05:43.020 It's pretty clear that anything that actually cleans, washes or scrubs probably can't earn 82 00:05:43.020 --> 00:05:45.140 the designation. 83 00:05:45.140 --> 00:05:49.500 An empty box that claims to be detergent stands a better chance of gaining the government 84 00:05:49.500 --> 00:05:54.780 seal of approval than a detergent that actually works. 85 00:05:54.780 --> 00:05:58.300 Then we get to the end of the interview, in which he is actually candid about the goal 86 00:05:58.300 --> 00:06:05.060 – the elimination of detergents, meaning the elimination of clean. 87 00:06:05.060 --> 00:06:09.740 Davies concedes that this would be the best possible result. 88 00:06:09.740 --> 00:06:11.940 And what does he recommend instead? 89 00:06:11.940 --> 00:06:20.300 Vinegar and elbow grease – the old-fashioned phrase for scrub harder – thus spake the 90 00:06:20.300 --> 00:06:21.300 government. 91 00:06:21.300 --> 00:06:25.860 That's the future, as these bureaucrats see it. 92 00:06:25.860 --> 00:06:32.340 It's a future of elbow grease, meaning manual labor unassisted by any products of free enterprise 93 00:06:32.340 --> 00:06:36.660 It's like machines and detergents that work. 94 00:06:36.660 --> 00:06:42.020 It's a future in which our clothes are dirty, we have no soap that works to wash our bodies, 95 00:06:42.020 --> 00:06:48.460 our dishes are full of gritty film, our floors are grungy, our windows are smudgy. 96 00:06:48.460 --> 00:06:53.580 Everything more or less stinks like vinegar, our toilets don't work, our trash is hurled 97 00:06:53.580 --> 00:06:59.140 in a pile out back, and vast amounts of our time are spent scrubbing things instead of 98 00:06:59.140 --> 00:07:02.980 of Reading, Singing, Writing or Conversing. 99 00:07:02.980 --> 00:07:10.820 It's a future just like the long ago past, complete with wash tubs, washboards and outhouses, 100 00:07:10.820 --> 00:07:16.540 along with their attendant dirt, disease and deprivation. 101 00:07:16.540 --> 00:07:20.980 My own enlightenment on this issue came within the last year. 102 00:07:20.980 --> 00:07:26.140 Like millions of others, I had forgotten what a clean dish looked like. 103 00:07:26.140 --> 00:07:48.140 The idea was to help the fish in their oxygen competition with algae, even though the household contribution to algae creation is negligible, and the scientific evidence on the issue of algae's effect on fish runs in all directions. 104 00:07:48.140 --> 00:07:55.420 The main issue here is that Americans, Europeans too, are having their living standards systematically 105 00:07:55.420 --> 00:08:00.580 degraded by regulators, who apparently hate our modern conveniences like dishwashers and 106 00:08:00.580 --> 00:08:06.060 want to drive us ever more into an impoverished state of nature. 107 00:08:06.060 --> 00:08:09.480 And don't tell me that phosphate-free dish soap works just as well. 108 00:08:09.480 --> 00:08:11.280 It's a laughable claim. 109 00:08:11.280 --> 00:08:16.560 If you buy some phosphate and add a tablespoon to the load, you enter a new world once the 110 00:08:16.560 --> 00:08:45.660 The 111 00:08:45.660 --> 00:08:49.780 The sales of new home appliances have soared over the last twelve months, according to 112 00:08:49.780 --> 00:08:51.860 industry reports. 113 00:08:51.860 --> 00:08:56.020 The data are not broken down by type, but I am willing to bet that quite a few dishwashers 114 00:08:56.020 --> 00:09:00.380 have been sold to unsuspecting customers, who had no idea that the real problem was 115 00:09:00.380 --> 00:09:03.860 with the detergents, not the machines. 116 00:09:03.860 --> 00:09:07.980 Hardly anyone I have spoken to has understood this problem, but all confirmed the fact that 117 00:09:07.980 --> 00:09:11.220 their dishes are not getting clean. 118 00:09:11.220 --> 00:09:15.320 Getting even less attention was this ban on TSP in laundry soap that took place in the 119 00:09:15.320 --> 00:09:20.360 The Early 1990s, apparently codified in a 1993 law. 120 00:09:20.360 --> 00:09:27.280 The idea, or the excuse, was to stop the increased growth of algae in rivers and lakes. 121 00:09:27.280 --> 00:09:29.760 Phosphate is a fertilizer, too. 122 00:09:29.760 --> 00:09:33.760 Even though there are other ways to filter phosphate, home use contributes virtually 123 00:09:33.760 --> 00:09:38.320 nothing to the alleged problem, and there is no solid evidence that plant growth in 124 00:09:38.320 --> 00:09:41.980 rivers and lakes is a harm at all. 125 00:09:41.980 --> 00:09:47.140 In any case, consumers gradually noticed that stains were becoming more stubborn than ever, 126 00:09:47.140 --> 00:09:53.220 and thus did a huge new range of products start appearing on the market. 127 00:09:53.220 --> 00:09:57.240 These products permit you to treat your clothes before you wash them. 128 00:09:57.240 --> 00:10:02.700 Today our cabinets are filled with such products, spray and wash, bleach pens, stain removers, 129 00:10:02.700 --> 00:10:07.500 boosters of all sorts, and we use them by the gallon. 130 00:10:07.500 --> 00:10:12.260 Does anyone stop and wonder why such products are necessary in the first place? 131 00:10:12.260 --> 00:10:16.340 And if they are so good, why aren't they in the detergent so that the whole of the 132 00:10:16.340 --> 00:10:19.700 load gets clean and not just the treated part? 133 00:10:19.700 --> 00:10:24.880 The reason, most fundamentally, is that the formula for detergent was changed as a result 134 00:10:24.880 --> 00:10:27.660 of government regulation. 135 00:10:27.660 --> 00:10:32.520 The difference wasn't obvious at first, but as time has gone on, other changes began to 136 00:10:32.520 --> 00:10:37.080 take place, like the mandates for machines that use less water, along with mandates for 137 00:10:37.080 --> 00:10:40.400 or tepid temperatures of water in our homes. 138 00:10:40.400 --> 00:10:43.760 In the end, the result is dramatic. 139 00:10:43.760 --> 00:10:49.240 It all amounts to dirty, yellowing clothes. 140 00:10:49.240 --> 00:10:54.640 This is the exact opposite of what we expect in markets, in which products are ever better 141 00:10:54.640 --> 00:11:00.760 and cheaper due to innovation, expansion of the division of labor and competition. 142 00:11:00.760 --> 00:11:05.320 But with government regulation, the results are deliberately the opposite. 143 00:11:05.320 --> 00:11:10.080 Do we pay ever higher prices for shoddy results? 144 00:11:10.080 --> 00:11:12.520 Do we see what is happening here? 145 00:11:12.520 --> 00:11:18.700 I can detect very little in the way of public knowledge, much less outcry. 146 00:11:18.700 --> 00:11:23.440 In the old Cold War days, I recall wondering how it was that the Soviet people could have 147 00:11:23.440 --> 00:11:28.960 put up with state-caused impoverishment for decade after decade, and wondering why people 148 00:11:28.960 --> 00:11:34.720 didn't just rise up and overthrow their impoverishers. 149 00:11:34.720 --> 00:11:37.740 Now I'm beginning to see why. 150 00:11:37.740 --> 00:11:43.940 If this all happens slowly and quietly, there is no point at which the reality of cause 151 00:11:43.940 --> 00:11:47.320 and effect dawns on people. 152 00:11:47.320 --> 00:11:51.700 One final note on my conversation with my dry cleaner. 153 00:11:51.700 --> 00:11:57.320 He gave me the heads up that the main ingredient used for dry cleaning, perchloroethylene, 154 00:11:57.320 --> 00:11:59.680 is not long for this world. 155 00:11:59.680 --> 00:12:06.080 California and New York are considering bans, and the rest of the country comes later. 156 00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:11.680 After that, it's all over, and the last one to leave civilization will have to remember 157 00:12:11.680 --> 00:12:16.020 to shut off the fluorescent light. 158 00:12:16.020 --> 00:12:20.940 This is the whole trajectory of life under government control. 159 00:12:20.940 --> 00:12:25.920 They are the predators, we are their prey. 160 00:12:25.920 --> 00:12:28.580 And this isn't just about clean dishes and clothes. 161 00:12:28.580 --> 00:12:34.800 It applies to every regulation, every tax, every expenditure, every stupid war, and every 162 00:12:34.800 --> 00:12:37.640 monetary manipulation. 163 00:12:37.640 --> 00:12:44.320 Everything government does comes at our expense, and the costs are both seen and unseen. 164 00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:49.600 How much will people put up with until they arrange for the regulators to sleep with the 165 00:12:49.600 --> 00:12:50.100 Issues.