[pmulard]

The FDA has no place in a free market. If people trust a company which poisons their food, they should be punished for misplacing their trust. Both the scammer and the scammed deserve a share of the punishment. Life naturally punishes the scammed already and teaches them a lesson at the same time... Without the help of the FDA... How good is that?!

--

I'd much rather pool our money into a commission that does this for the population than spend every waking moment personally auditing companies for breaking the rules. Oh, and I have to set them too. No thanks.

[foooobaba]

I am also glad the FDA protects us from chemicals and ingredients that would cause processed food to be unhealthy and harmful, if they didn’t do that we would probably end up with an overweight population and tons of food related health problems.

[oblio]

That's the industry lobbying to prevent beneficial regulation for consumers so you're kind of making the opposite point to what you meant, I think.

[AnthonyMouse]

No, it's making the correct point. The government can't get you out of having to do the evaluation yourself because the government is broken, which is unlikely to change. In fact this is a major problem with the existence of the regulations -- they protect incumbents. Patented drugs get FDA approval, public domain drugs that could be alternatives to them don't because there is no one to pay for the approval process.

If heroin is legal, nobody forces you to buy it. If generic insulin is illegal, you're in trouble.

[oblio]

The government is as broken as we let it be.

No government is lawlessness, which is MUCH worse than a mediocre government.

I'd argue that up to a point, lawlessness is worse than even a bad government.

And nothing can beat a good to great government.

If you don't want regulations, sure, Somalia is that way --->

[AnthonyMouse]

> The government is as broken as we let it be.

How do "we" fix it? You can vote for two Senators and one Congressperson and even assuming that your vote in particular was the deciding vote and one of your choices on the ballot was someone actually inclined to do something, you now have a legislature in which the bad laws pass with a margin of 33 Senators and 174 members of Congress instead of 35 and 175.

The only way to fix it would be to fix the structural incentives in place, i.e. institute more checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture. But this is the chicken and egg problem -- to change the rules you have to be in power, but if you're already in power then you like the existing rules because they're the things that put you in power.

Or in times of populism, you use your power to remove the rules that were meant to constrain opportunities for corruption because they're inconvenient to your agenda, and then those constraints stay gone because they're inconvenient to the next administration's agenda too. So how do you get them back, or introduce new ones?

> And nothing can beat a good to great government.

The best form of government is a benevolent dictator. The worst form of government is a malevolent dictator. But the only difference is who is in charge, which changes over time.

> If you don't want regulations, sure, Somalia is that way

Is there some way we can get past the thing where people are unable to distinguish between the government prohibiting acts of violence and the government prohibiting informed consensual interactions between adults and imposing competition-destroying bureaucratic rules at the behest of incumbent megacorps?

[oblio]

Laws are about statistics. Statistically you can't trust even adults with stuff like gambling or smoking. Statistically they will make bad decisions that will wreck the lives of a big percentage of adults. Not a majority, but maybe 20%.

Accepting that fact is hard, but it's reality.

[jowea]

There are governments taking action against junk food.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If people trust a company which poisons their food, they should be punished for misplacing their trust. Both the scammer and the scammed deserve a share of the punishment. Life naturally punishes the scammed already and teaches them a lesson at the same time... Without the help of the FDA... How good is that?!

If your food is poison, you don't have the opportunity to learn from your mistake and stop doing business with that company, because you die. If you don't eat any food, you still die.

But Coca Cola is fully FDA-approved -- even though it's bad for you. Because it doesn't immediately kill you, which gives you the opportunity to make your own choices and learn from your mistakes.

Which is how investments work. Some of them are better than others. The role of the government isn't to make the decision for you, it's to punish the people who deceive you. And since bad investments don't cause anaphylaxis or liver damage, the case for heavy-handed rules or pre-registration is missing.

If someone is running a ponzi or committing fraud, you arrest them, the same as you do if they're selling counterfeit electronics. If someone is just buying and selling cryptocurrency on the internet, which is the thing you purposely intended to exchange for your money, and they do nothing more than faithfully convey to you the thing you knowingly requested, what does the government need to regulate about it? Nothing nefarious is occurring.

[janosdebugs]

This sounds good in theory, but in a world where you can open companies by the dozen, international jurisdictions, no compulsory registration of company facilities, no private right of audit it's impossible to keep track of who is doing what. Additionally, tainting the news by flooding review sites and what not doesn't help either.

[paulddraper]

Yes

[pitaj]

How many people have died because of FDA gatekeeping delaying the release of life-saving treatment?

[cheriot]

What could possibly go wrong

> Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[91] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin

[AnthonyMouse]

It's perfectly legal to buy drain cleaner at any department store and if you drink it you are likely to die. But you are under no obligation to drink it. Or do heroin. So that has an obvious solution.

Whereas if you have cancer and cannabis can prevent your nausea but the federal government maintains a prohibition on it for three generations, what are your options?

[cheriot]

For something more recent, I'd recommend any of the books or documentaries on oxycontin sparking a more recent opium epidemic. As badly as the FDA failed, we'd be worse off if we didn't have one. There's good reasons people want more effective regulation instead of none.

Part of the ban on cannabis, psychedelics, etc has been to ban research on their effects as well. I think there's some clear lines that can be drawn on good laws vs bad laws here.

[AnthonyMouse]

> For something more recent, I'd recommend any of the books or documentaries on oxycontin sparking a more recent opium epidemic. As badly as the FDA failed, we'd be worse off if we didn't have one.

I feel like the problem we have is that we've utterly failed at informed consent.

You go to the doctor for a minor surgery and come home with a prescription for opioids. You take them even if you're not in any real discomfort, because your doctor prescribed them. Or maybe you could have done with half as much, but then there's a chance it wouldn't have been enough, and having the patient rely on their own judgment is discouraged. So now you're addicted to opioids.

Then we get a backlash where the people who are actually in severe pain can't get their medication because doctors used to over-prescribe it.

This entire system is asinine. The problem is not that people have access to opioids. Anybody can get them by going to a doctor and lying about their symptoms, therefore anybody should be able to just get them from the pharmacy. Stop rewarding mendacity. But the process of getting them from the pharmacy should require being informed of the risks so you can be responsible -- not being handed a bottle with a bunch of papers you're not going to read and then taking them whether you really need them or not.

We need to stop banning everything and start better informing people so they can make reasonable choices.

[cheriot]

We disagree on how human nature works and the ability for normal people to become educated on every topic that can harm them. People trust their doctor and don't have the medical training to know if something is riskier than they're told. Addiction is dangerous precisely because it overrides someone's ability to change their mind later.

Purdue and our system of insurance created monetary incentives for doctors to overprescribe and misled them about the side effects. Normal people died even when they followed instructions because of the cycle of withdrawal symptoms.

History has repeated waves of addictive drugs because there's alway someone with an incentive to sell them. This is not a place where market outcomes work.

[clarkmoody]

How many drugs had FDA approval that was later retracted after much harm was done?

[bitvoid]

If the FDA didn't exist, how many more harmful drugs would there be? Would those harmful drugs that had approval retracted still be out there being prescribed?

Just because the FDA is not perfect does not mean that it's a net negative.

[fallingknife]

Easy to have the best of both worlds, though. FDA can continue to collect and publish data on safety and efficacy of medications which is incredibly useful and absolutely worth the tax money. But if you want to take something not approved, then they should have no right to tell you that you can't take the risk.

[RandomLensman]

And if you get seriously sick from that we let you die by the wayside?

The first way to take advantage there is to outsource the cost of dangerous experiments to (sometimes) desperate people and then to society at large for picking up the pieces.

[fallingknife]

Yes. I'm not willing to have government busybodies take away my rights to make my own choices and live with the consequences so that you feel better.

[RandomLensman]

Well, then you either get enough people to agree with you to change things or move to where things are the way you like.

[nateabele]

That's the hypothetical half of the equation. The tangible, measurable half is how many people the FDA has killed by denying access to life-saving treatments. A number of studies[0] have been conducted on this topic.

[0] https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-example...

[IggleSniggle]

Right, of course. Any preventative treatment is difficult to justify, as it's a risk waylaid, whereas treating symptoms has a visible direct impact on problems faced today; nevermind that it costs 500x as much and has worse outcomes.

[jongjong]

I agree, FDA has no place in a free market. In a free market, companies would be able to sell poison to their customers... BUT, if something happened to the customers, they (or their estate) would be able to seek damages through the justice system. The problem we have with regulations is that they deflect responsibility... Any company can say "Look, we adhered to all the regulations" and use that as the basis to avoid taking responsibility if it turns out that the regulations were not adequate. Then they can just play the victim and demand more regulations. If you remove the regulator and just let the company deal directly with the consumer and don't let the government interfere with the free market to promote specific producers over others, then it would work itself out. The company would know that they have no regulatory shield to hide behind and they'll be forced to consider long-term implications of their decisions or face severe consequences and backlash from consumers.

[palmfacehn]

You have presented false alternatives.

Private regulation can exist inside of a free market. Consumers and producers of food or financial products can voluntarily participate with private ratings agencies. These standards can be higher or lower, based upon market preferences. The existence of a state backed monopoly is widely recognized as prohibitive to competition. State monopolies create issues around corruption, gatekeeping and more. Too many to expand upon here.

If you don't like free markets, that's fine. There's no need to misconstrue the options. The anti-market sentiment is somewhat surprising to see here.

https://mises.org/power-market/fda-approval-monopolists-sche...

https://www.greenchoicenow.com/v/food-pyramid-usda-dietary-g...

https://www.salon.com/2015/04/12/the_fdas_phony_nutrition_sc...

[RandomLensman]

There are no free markets in human societies. You can pick your trade-offs, that's it. Privatly regulated markets can fail, goverment regulated markets can fail.

[palmfacehn]

Privately managed, voluntary regulation isn't free-market?

[RandomLensman]

No, because this is always (ultimately) by consent of the societies it is happening in and within those power structures. It always sits on top of a lot of stuff, never in a vacuum.

[palmfacehn]

According to your rationalizations, does private property exist? Do individuals own themselves?

[RandomLensman]

Both only within in limits, as most jurisdictions and also history shows (just take the draft, for example).

With maybe an exemption if you manage to be totally isolated (but then at least private property is a weird concept anyway).

[cool_dude85]

Why's it surprising to see anti-market sentiment when we've been given a very clear look at how the free market has operated in the crypto space sans government regulation? The whole ecosystem has been dominated by grifts, outright scams, rug pulls, ponzis, unregulated gambling, etc. etc. with no end in sight. Why didn't the free market step up?

[palmfacehn]

It is surprising to see these sentiments on a site ostensibly for entrepreneurs and builders.

If you'd prefer a centrally planned and regulated economy, that is a different discussion. From my side, I believe you should enjoy your views and the living situation which accompanies it.

Not interested in arguing the virtues of either approach here. Taking exception with the inaccurate characterizations is as far as I go. If you believe an economy driven by central bank policy is a free-market, I'm not sure there's much more we can say here.

[oblio]

Ummmm... You live in a regulated economy.

Even the US economy is a capitalist system with government intervention.

[zztop44]

Because the word “free” famously has only one meaning, and everyone agrees what that is.

[palmfacehn]

laissez-faire if you like

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why didn't the free market step up?

It did. People learned that there were a lot of scams and now the market for suckers is drying up. This is a typical pattern: Problem occurs, market responds to problem and results in improvement, government simultaneously responds to problem and has no effect or makes it worse, people point to improvement and credit new government regulations or lack of improvement and demand even more government regulations. Then we get stuck with a bunch of burdensome new rules because Something Had To Be Done.

Notice also that all of the stuff you're listing is fraudulent and already illegal. If regulations work then why didn't they work?

[dleavitt]

Not to mention the innovations that voluntary regulatory standards plus enlightened self-interest have enabled in the manned submersible space.