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Ah yes. This is why, before we had the FDA, everything was fine, and why nobody saw the need for the FDA in the first place </s> The Libertarian capacity for i

by dTal 7y ago

Ah yes. This is why, before we had the FDA, everything was fine, and why nobody saw the need for the FDA in the first place </s> The Libertarian capacity for ignoring Chesterton's Fence is nothing short of astonishing. Free markets require free information - the FDA was created in large part to enforce accurate labeling.

ikeboy 7y ago
https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-examples-of-fda-harm/ https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-example... It turns out we can directly compare pre-1962 FDA with the current FDA and find strong harms outweighing any benefit of the current regime. If all the FDA did was "enforce accurate labelling", they wouldn't be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from delayed approval of drugs. Maybe that's not the part people are complaining about.
- dTal 7y ago
  That might be a valid point if the parent comment had been similarly nuanced. But it said "no government supervision", not "roll back to 1962". I find this kind of motte-and-bailey stuff ubiquitous in discussions with libertarians, as the "philosophy" amounts to anarchy which most people realize is bad.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    Note that I'm not the one who posted the parent comment. Anyway, the Milton Friedman talk linked explicitly mentions the same beta-blockers example as my link discusses and cites it as causing tens of thousands of deaths. He says it's been a disaster over "the last 20 years" - the talk was in 1978, so this is roughly the 1962-1978 period. And the "governmental supervision for health care" mentioned is broader than the FDA.
dnautics 7y ago
You don't talk to libertarians much, do you? I don't know many libertarians that would argue that accurate labelling shouldn't be enforced by the law. Drugs quality testing could also conceivably be performed by a non-government regulatory agency (e.g. Underwriters Labs)
- dTal 7y ago
  "People weren't dying from bad drugs before we had the FDA. I mean, it just didn't happen." --Ron Paul, noted libertarian and advocate for the abolishment of the FDA, who is apparently ironically ignorant of the phenomenon of "snake oil".
  - dnautics 7y ago
    I think you've proved my point.

by dTal 7y ago

ikeboy 7y ago

https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-examples-of-fda-harm/ https://www.fdareview.org/issues/theory-evidence-and-example... It turns out we can directly compare pre-1962 FDA with the current FDA and find strong harms outweighing any benefit of the current regime. If all the FDA did was "enforce accurate labelling", they wouldn't be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from delayed approval of drugs. Maybe that's not the part people are complaining about.

dTal 7y ago
That might be a valid point if the parent comment had been similarly nuanced. But it said "no government supervision", not "roll back to 1962". I find this kind of motte-and-bailey stuff ubiquitous in discussions with libertarians, as the "philosophy" amounts to anarchy which most people realize is bad.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  Note that I'm not the one who posted the parent comment. Anyway, the Milton Friedman talk linked explicitly mentions the same beta-blockers example as my link discusses and cites it as causing tens of thousands of deaths. He says it's been a disaster over "the last 20 years" - the talk was in 1978, so this is roughly the 1962-1978 period. And the "governmental supervision for health care" mentioned is broader than the FDA.

dnautics 7y ago

You don't talk to libertarians much, do you? I don't know many libertarians that would argue that accurate labelling shouldn't be enforced by the law. Drugs quality testing could also conceivably be performed by a non-government regulatory agency (e.g. Underwriters Labs)

dTal 7y ago
"People weren't dying from bad drugs before we had the FDA. I mean, it just didn't happen." --Ron Paul, noted libertarian and advocate for the abolishment of the FDA, who is apparently ironically ignorant of the phenomenon of "snake oil".
- dnautics 7y ago
  I think you've proved my point.