[321abc]

That might be a half-respectable position, if libertarians were against all concentrations of power. But they're not. They're more than happy to give corporations and individuals all the power their money can buy them. Also, libertarians have plenty of scorn for what the government does wrong, but little respect for what it does right.

The EPA, before the anti-EPA right wing nuts of the bush administration took it over, was doing good work, like trying to keep mercury out of our water. Of course, under the "pro business" bush administration, they've undermined such protections and declared that mercury and other toxins in our water aren't so bad after all and raised their acceptable limits in water (which is just a small sample of the outrageous "pro business" bullshit the bush administration was guilty of).

I happen to enjoy the National Parks in the US, as I think many Americans do; and I, for one, am glad that they're in public hands instead of the hands of the corporations. Yet Bush appointed people to head the National Park service who had explicitly expressed their opposition to even the existence of National Parks. And they've proceeded to sell off public lands and undermine the protections of the National Parks by granting more permissive logging rights to corporations and by watering down environmental regulations.

Now on to the FDA, which does a pretty good job of protecting the quality of the food and drugs it regulates (though in my opinion they are not nearly strict enough, because in many cases they in bed with the corporations and are underfunded, so consequently their regulation and enforcement is not nearly strong enough).

All the "pro-business", anti-environment, and anti-public-property abuses of the Bush administration would be increased a hundred fold if the libertarian vision ever came to pass. The libertarians would get rid of the EPA, the FDA, and sell of the National Parks. The corps would be free to pollute our air and water, kill off all endangered species, and the corps would be free to "self-regulate" the food and drugs they produce (meaning a free-for-all for a quick buck at the expense of public health).

And the above doesn't even begin to address the havoc libertarians would wreck on our education system (turning it in to even more of education for the wealthy than it already is), and destroy the few vestiges of a social safety net that America has managed to save despite many decades of assault from the "small government" crowd.

Basically, what libertarianism really amounts to is the attitude that there should be even more concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy, and the poor can go fuck themselves.

In my youth I was drawn to libertarianism (and I still agree with a few of their positions, such as their opposition to the War on Drugs), but as I've learned more about politics and history I see that the vast majority of those who will benefit from libertarianism are the wealthy, which is one reason (another is his racism) why Ron Paul could sneak in as a Republican candidate, where he wouldn't have stood a chance as a Democrat.

[solutionyogi]

Could you give me an example where FDA has done a good job? Let me give you some examples of where they have fucked up.

* Seven thousand people die every year because the FDA hasn't approved the Ambu CardioPump, a CPR device that is available in just about every other industrialized country.

* Nine hundred people die every year because the FDA hasn't approved the OmniCarbon heart valve, which also is in use just about everywhere else.

* From November 1988 to May 1992, about 3,500 kidney cancer patients died waiting for the FDA to approve the drug Interleukin-2, which was already available in France, Denmark, and seven other European countries.

* In 1988 alone, between 7,500 and 15,000 people died from gastric ulcers caused by aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, waiting for the FDA to approve misoprostol, which was already available in 43 countries.

* And 22,000 people died between 1985 and late 1987 waiting for streptokinase, the first drug that could be intravenously administered to reopen the blocked coronary arteries of heart-attack victims.

I have a friend who does medical research and to quote him:

//// As a professional in the medical device field, I can bear witness to many better reasons.

1. Delay of life saving technologies. I've had a product which has already saved lives in clinical trials waiting for FDA approval for 10 years!!! How many have died unnecessarily in that time? Nobody risks their job in FDA by saying "no", only "yes" The review boards are a joke. They consist mainly of your potential competitors!

2. Needless paperwork. At least half of my company's expenses are directly related to useless compliance with FDA paperwork. The joke here is that it doesn't have ANY connection to REAL patient safety, just the proper invocation of holy words on endless reports and forms. Maybe the FDA is really a secret cabal? Just kidding...

3. Chilling effect on new products and technologies. Want to make venture capital run away and hide? Say "subject to FDA approval" ///

Tell me again how is FDA useful?

Also, why do you think libertarians will wreck havoc on education? Could you explain me with example of how they will wreck havoc? AFAIK, libertarian recommends a school voucher system which will ensure that all kids get education and the free market forces ensure that they get best education possible.

The libertarianism doesn't advocate concentration of power, it actually promotes liberty for everyone involved.

[321abc]

How is the FDA useful?

From http://fdaissues.blogspot.com/2008/03/upton-sinclair-book-ju...

In "The Jungle", Upton Sinclair, "wrote about how dead rats were shoveled into sausage grinding machines. He explained, in nauseating detail, how diseased cows were slaughtered for beef; how guts and garbage were swept off the floor and sold as "potted ham."

Upton Sinclair even described how the occasional worker would fall into a meat-processing tank and be ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard."

The Chicago meat-packing industry was in deep trouble after Sinclair's landmark book, The Jungle, was published in 1906. It caused outrage in America and abroad and meat sales fell by half. The book forced the government to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration."

That's one of the things the FDA does right. I, for one, am glad I'm not eating rat sausage and meatpacker lard.

Another thing it does right is requiring food and drugs have all their ingredients listed on them. I am appalled when I buy other products, such as various cleaners and other chemicals, which are not under the jurisdiction of the FDA and could have all sorts of carcinogenic and dangerous chemicals in them without my even being aware of them, because they are not required to list their ingredients on their labels. I am glad that at least the food and medicines I consume do require strict labeling.

While many people may have died waiting for various drugs and medical devices to get FDA approval, there are also no doubt countless thousands saved because this approval was required. All you have to do is look at the days before the FDA existed to see the mountains of snake oil garbage that was peddled to American consumers (things like these radioactive quack cures: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm )

I am quite grateful to be living in the days of the FDA, and wouldn't want to go back to the pre-FDA era.

This is not to say the FDA is perfect, by any means. It's been affected by budget cuts and has a huge conflict of interest in its sometimes incestuous relationships with the corporations it is supposed to regulate.

These deficiencies are cause for reform (perhaps even radical reform) but not for elimination of the FDA altogether.

As for the complaints of your friend in the medical industry, I agree that the approval process takes too long. More funding of the FDA, and perhaps even requiring the FDA to conduct its own studies (eliminating the corporation from the loop, which have a conflict of interest in testing the safety of their own products anyway) would help.

I have a friend of my own, who worked as an internal safety inspector in a pharmaceutical plant owned by a major pharmaceutical company. He said that the plant should have gotten closed a decade ago because of its poor safety record (for which it had been sited by the FDA many times in the past), but it stayed open because the company's CEO had a lot of pull in the FDA.

This sort of thing calls for tougher regulation, not weaker regulation (much less the elimination of the FDA altogether).

As to your point about education vouchers, those are mainly used by right-wing religious fanatics, who are dissatisfied with the "liberal", desegregated education their kids would get in public school and want to get their kids in to religious schools and schools which are free to discriminate in ways public schools can't. I see no evidence that the voucher system would work for a wider segment of the population. Again, the people who would most benefit from this would be the rich, and religious, racist nuts.

See this report on vouchers from the Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/vouchers/vouchers_main.asp

which, among other things, notes that:

"Under a system of vouchers, it may be difficult to prevent schools run by extremist groups like the Nation of Islam or the Ku Klux Klan from receiving public funds to subsidize their racist and anti-Semitic agendas."

Finally, your point about libertarianism not suggesting concentration of power. On the face of it, this is true, since libertarians never actually come out and say they suggest concentration of power. However, it's not difficult to read between the lines and see that's exactly what will happen when the checks that the government keeps on corporations (the EPA and FDA being just two of many good examples) are removed.

In fact, we have already seen what this is like. It's happened in America during the days of the Robber Barrons, where child labor, an 80-hour work week, workers being literally chained to their desks in sweatshops, the abominable conditions described in Sinclair's "The Jungle", no worker safety regulations in the workplace, and no environmental regulations were quite common. I do not want to go back to those days.

Apart from increased concentration of power in corporations, which libertarianism is powerless against, there's also the concentration of power in individuals, which the US system as a whole does a piss-poor job at controlling. That definitely needs work, but libertarians have nothing to say on the matter. If Bill Gates managed to get his hands on all of the world's wealth (or even, say, all the world's water) and the rest of the people on Earth had none, libertarians would presumably not have any problem with that. But thankfully, many other people do have a problem with that kind of inequitable distribution of wealth and power and will work to prevent it.

Another example of the government doing good work is when it manages to break up monopolies. However, it doesn't do nearly as good a job at this as it should (else Microsoft would have been broken up decades ago, and the media consolidation that's happened in the last decade or so would never have been allowed to take place). But, again, I don't see why libertarians would have any problem with monopolies (unless they're government monopolies, in which case they'll raise a stink).

I believe that for most libertarians, the rhetoric of caring for liberty is a mask for not caring much about anyone who can't make it the rat race of the social darwinists. This is why it's really no suprise that many libertarians are wealthy, highly educated types that imagine themselves made in the mold of Randian heroes. Conversely, you're not going to find many libertarians in the projects (with the possible exception of the drug dealers). And the only libertarians you're likely to find out in the sticks are the militia members and gun nuts who believe in conspiracy theories featuring the UN taking over the US, and the like. Fortunately, the majority of Americans haven't bought in to this bleak vision (yet).

[solutionyogi]

In India, we don't have any department like FDA and it works just fine. The market forces will ensure that only those companies who provide edible food survives and rest are driven out of business. Taking your own example, after Sinclair's book, didn't meat sales fell by half? Did you need FDA to see that consumers didn't eat that meat? Let's imagine that government did not create FDA after that book and meat sales continue to decline. Don't you think that meat companies would have come up with a plan to restore consumer confidence? They would change their practices, advertise the fact that they are not clean and safe. They would have asked independent journalists to visit their facility. And slowly buy surely, consumers would have come back.

Let me give you an example. FDA doesn't regulate coffee temperature. A lady gets first degree burn from McD's coffee. She sues McD and wins. McD (and all other companies who sell coffee) ensures that they set up right temperature for their coffee. FDA didn't have to do anything and still all the consumers are better off than before.

You haven't given me any public studies where it is proven that FDA disapproval saved people's lives. The page you have linked lists bunch of products but nothing else.

You have yourself outlined the biggest problem with FDA. Because FDA is made up of people like you and me and when you give them power, rest assured that the power will be misused. I would rather trust free market's invisible hand do the work for me instead of few hundred government bureaucrats of FDA. Who is responsible if people die because these government bureaucrats are too slow to approve a drug/medicine?

You copied/pasted text from ADL site about extremist groups running the schools. The point of voucher system is that as a parent of a child, you are allowed to choose a school where you send your kid and that school gets the voucher money. I am sure you are not going to send your kid to school operated by extremist group.

Explain me again why one needs to break a monopoly? You have to understand that it's not easy to become a monopoly. A corporation has to work extremely hard and satisfy their customers for a long time to become a monopoly. If a monopoly starts misusing their status and screw with their customers, soon there will be more companies trying to service the customers and it will automatically take away monopoly. For all practical purposes, Google has monopoly in Internet search. I am sure you would suggest that we should break this monopoly. What good this will do for the consumers? And yes, we oppose government monopoly because they become monopoly not by servicing customers, they become monopoly because the law grants them monopoly. Prime example: USPS vs Fedex/UPS.

You also question inequitable distribution of wealth. Let me ask you, how are you going to ensure equal distribution of wealth if government is in charge? How is government going to make sure that wealth is distributed equally? The fact is government doesn't even have wealth of its own.

Here's why I believe in libertarian philosophy. Government is about power and if you give this power to someone you better be sure that this power is not misused. The very power hungry people who are running for the government are precisely the people who should not be given power.

See this video on Greed by Milton Friedman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

My choice quote:

'Where in the world are you going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us?' :)