[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.

[snitko]

So use force instead of convincing people, because it's easier and cheaper.

My problem with any regulatory agency is that it can't claim to work on behalf its clients. Why? Because funding comes from taxes and taxation is not voluntary. No one asks people whether they want to pay taxes or not. They still have to or they will be fined even more or will go to jail. Thus, FDA lacks basic market mechanisms that could check such a consumer protection firm in check. If a group of people feel dissatisfaction with their work - fuck them, who cares? They're still getting their funding.

Homeopathy dealers are having a great time and make tons of money. They may not make medical claims, but that doesn't stop them from hurting a lot of people by offering something those people believe is a cure. Let's not pretend government does anything to stop it, really.

[hackinthebochs]

Personally I feel the libertarian premise is absurd so anything that follows, however rational, is nonsense to me. I don't think we can have a productive discussion.

[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]

The question is not whether they were notified or not. The question is whether you believe that you yourself, as a taxpayer who funds the FDA, have the right to order people what to spend their money on and how to live their lives. It doesn't matter if a person is going to hurt himself or not. Why should it be in your power to take away someone else's freedom in the name of safety this person might not even want?

Looking at this particular case of 23andme I will tell you this. It's ridiculous. The claim is that somehow consumers might act in a way that can hurt them based on the information they received from the company. That sounds a lot like censorship to me. In Russia now people are prevented to look at sites that promote suicide or drug use. It's essentially the same thing: sites are notified, if they refuse to remove the information, they are banned within Russia. Hey, we want to protect our people.

[dragonwriter]

> The question is not whether they were notified or not. The question is whether you believe that you yourself, as a taxpayer who funds the FDA, have the right to order people what to spend their money on and how to live their lives.

If I didn't believe that, I couldn't believe in the existence of government at all, which is nothing but a means by which the people whom the government works for direct the people who are subject to it (largely overlapping sets) what to spend their money on and how to live their lives.

So, yes, I'll agree that that question -- which is equivalent to "do you believe government should exist at all" -- is a threshold question here. But I don't really think its the interesting question here.

> Why should it be in your power to take away someone else's freedom in the name of safety this person might not even want?

The only "freedom" even arguably being denied here is 23andMe's freedom to market their product with particular claims. The issue is not whether they can sell the product, but the manner in which they are marketing it.

[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.

[snitko]

I don't think calling names helps the argument. You can't just say "well, that's a little to extreme, so you're wrong". I simply pointed out that it happens so that most kids are educated in public schools. Would it be such a stretch to propose that those children are educated according to what government believes is important? Surely no one doubted this happened in the Soviet Union. How is the US, or for that matter, almost any other country different? Soviet children were taught to believe in communism, american children are taught to believe in democracy. Haven't you ever tried to question it at least a little bit? That maybe, only maybe, if something (and especially a political ideology) is taught in every public school as a universal good, it really may not be one?