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by snitko
4588 days ago
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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. |
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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.