[cscurmudgeon]

>> Why do you believe you have the right to tell other people what to buy for their money?

I am not doing that. The FDA is doing that. That is their job. If you disagree with that, you should also be okay with charlatans selling snake oil.

[snitko]

You are paying for it with your tax money, therefore you are doing it. I'm not okay with selling snake oil, but I think it is wrong to prevent other people from buying it. It's okay to inform them it's a bad idea to buy certain things - it's dictatorship to prevent them from doing so. If you can't convince somebody, it's your problem, not that person's problem. FDA doesn't convince, it just comes and shuts you down or doesn't allow you on the market.

Besides, where is FDA when charlatans sell homeopathic medicine? Show me a little consistency here.

[cscurmudgeon]

I never said that the FDA is perfect or covers all bad cases. Just because a few bad apples can escape the law now, in letter, does not mean that we should not have regulation. Medical regulation is far from dictatorship. It is orthogonal to it.

Just because a govt. prevents from doing X, does not mean by default that the govt. is a dictatorship. X has to be something basic like the right to live or the right to free speech. The FDA is not brutishly shutting down 23andme. They seem to have reasonably tried to work with 23andme. But the startup has been stubborn.

[snitko]

You don't get my point. I'm questioning the existence of the FDA itself. What's your excuse for not letting each individual decide for himself what he wants to spend his money on? It's his money after all. He didn't ask you to pay for what he wants. What is your problem with that?

[cscurmudgeon]

I get your point. I don't get anarchists who don't want regulation but want things like the Internet and technology funded almost entirely by governments.

A true anarchist would live in the wild and survive on leaves, branches, sticks and stones. Don't use roads, don't use the internet, don't use any of modern medicine (look up on how much the NSF, DARPA, DoD, NASA have contributed to modern science and technology. It is not as though Google materialized out of thin air.)

None of these companies operate in a vacuum. They stand on society's shoulders and have to operate within acceptable legal boundaries which stem from ethical standards.

Also, from an operational view, if bad companies mess up, taxpayers end up footing the bill.

(Before you delve into more predictable hyperbole: I am not advocating for complete govt. control of everything like in N. Korea.)

[snitko]

> A true anarchist would live in the wild and survive on leaves, branches, sticks and stones.

I think this image of anarchists was partly intentionally created by governments. Anarchists, at least those who endorse free market enterprise, believe in rules. However, they see government as an ultimate monopoly that issues rules and enforces them with unchallengeable force. If you agree with me that monopolies are not good for consumers, then it only takes a little step further to see that government is indeed a monopoly. Why does it have to say who can marry whom, who can smoke what and who can buy what? The alternative isn't living in the woods. The alternative is having a polylegal system and private protection agencies. You choose an agency and a package of rules you like and start paying. If you dislike the services - you unsubscribe and stop paying, you don't wait for the next election. Moving to a different country cannot be considered a true alternative, since it's usually complicated, expensive and you still are forced (not asked) to pay, like it or not.

> None of these companies operate in a vacuum. They stand on society's shoulders and have to operate within acceptable legal boundaries which stem from ethical standards.

Society doesn't equal government.

> Also, from an operational view, if bad companies mess up, taxpayers end up footing the bill.

That's because you have taxpayers and government can bail out companies which are in bed with it. If you didn't have taxes, people would simply let a bad actor fail and be replaced by a better one.

[cscurmudgeon]

You mean like in Somalia and unlike that in the US?

[hackinthebochs]

Massive information asymmetry means it is highly likely that people will be taken advantage of. The FDA balances the information asymmetry of the public and a product by defining a process that allows companies to make certain claims.

[snitko]

This doesn't answer the question of why FDA bans products and services instead of simply informing consumers of possible dangers and letting them decide for themselves. Government has the largest resources to reach out to people, so any message it would want to communicate, it could.

If the government really cared about consumers, it would go after homeopathy dealers, religious leaders and other charlatans. Never gonna happen. Why do you think that is? Why homeopathy existed for such a long time and never had any problems with authorities, but a startup that actually provides some value to people, suddenly is a threat that needs to be shut down?

[hackinthebochs]

>why FDA bans products and services instead of simply informing consumers of possible dangers

Because that costs money that they shouldn't have to spend. If a company is marketing a product as X, why should the FDA have to counter with marketing that says product is actually ~X, rather than simply stop the marketing as X?

I'm sure homeopathy dealers aren't allowed to make medical claims. Perhaps the FDA doesn't go after them as stringently as you might like, but lets not pretend that they have free reign.

[dragonwriter]

> This doesn't answer the question of why FDA bans products and services instead of simply informing consumers of possible dangers and letting them decide for themselves.

To the extent that it does this, it does it because the FD&C Act set standards by which they are required to. Why Congress did that is a different question.

But, it must be noted, that what they are doing here is not banning a product, they are prohibiting the marketing of a product for a particular set of advertised uses without meeting particular standards of proof that it is effective for those marketed uses.

> If the government really cared about consumers, it would go after homeopathy dealers, religious leaders and other charlatans. Never gonna happen. Why do you think that is?

In the case of homeopathy, which is regulated by the FDA, it is less regulated to less stringent standards than traditional medical products and devices largely due to public pressure.

> but a startup that actually provides some value to people, suddenly is a threat that needs to be shut down?

23andMe is "suddenly" a "threat that nees to be shut down". They were notified years ago of the requirements they needed to meet to market the product the way they do, they initiated the application process to meet those requirements in 2012, and haven't responded to FDA requests for further information necessary to move forward on those applications for over a year.

You act as if the FDA noticed the existence of 23andMe and immediately moved to destroy them. That is very much not what has happened.

[snitko]

Also, talking about information asymmetry. Isn't it ironic how most kids are educated in public schools? Surely no information asymmetry can come out of this, it is the democratically elected government after all that takes care of the children and what and how they learn.

In other words, government with its massive resources and near monopoly on many things like police force, law and education taking advantage of people? Not possible. A startup funded by Google? No question evil.

[hackinthebochs]

You're coming off as a little died-in-the-wool here.