It isn't always private - I can remember a about a dozen years back, there was a bit of a kafuffle over certain Florida counties which had state-sponsored kosher inspectors. I don't remember what happened, but suspect they were dropped. Back when I worked in Manhatten, one of our programmers was a Conservative Jew - he always brought in his own lunch, and declined to join the rest of us in our forays into Chinatown. Every now and then I insisted that the lunch group let him pick the site, and once we wound up in a truely only-in-New York place; the Milky Way, a kosher dairy bar on lower Broadway with a spaceship theme. Among the gleaming chrome, black velvet, and fiberoptic stars, the black-clothed Hassiddim appeared almost surreal to this goy. (Imagine the closing scene from "History of the World, Part 1".) Peter Trei

Declan McCullagh[SMTP:declan@well.com] Protection racket? Nah. More like "I won't buy a lamp that's not UL-certified" or "I won't buy a novel that Oprah doesn't recommend."

Kosher rating systems are a wonderful example of private reputation systems. There are hundreds of rating agencies; they seem to generally coexist -- folks who are sufficiently interested can rely on whichever they choose, or none at all.

-Declan

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 09:34:43PM -0500, Neil Johnson wrote:

...

I was listening to a radio program on NPR (The cypherpunks favorite statist medium :) ).

They were discussing the problems with the certification of kosher food.

Evidently there are many different organizations with differing ideas on what it takes to be kosher.

They interviewed one restaurant owner who follows kosher practices and has been certified by a rabbi.

However, the local kosher certification organization says he isn't because he doesn't have a full time rabbi on staff in the kitchen (who just happens to HAVE to be from their organization). So most orthodox Jews won't eat there.

Kind of sounds like a "protection racket" to me.

Neil M. Johnson njohnson@interl.net http://www.interl.net/~njohnson