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It's not like "enforce more" vs. "enforce less" is the only axis along which the behaviour of a government agency can be tweaked. For an extreme example, imagi

by 4bpp 5y ago

It's not like "enforce more" vs. "enforce less" is the only axis along which the behaviour of a government agency can be tweaked. For an extreme example, imagine you had a court system that picks 100 people at random to execute each year (most of whom are naturally innocent). Then, you have a crime wave. Would you say that the solution to this problem would be that the courts need to be tougher? ...more lenient? Both seem quite obviously wrong: being more lenient would solve the problem of innocents getting executed but do nothing about crime, being tougher would only trivially solve the problem of crime near the limit point where everyone is executed. However, being hostile towards such a court system seems quite appropriate. Likewise, I don't think Theranos is sufficient evidence that the FDA needs to simply be stricter, nor is the difficulty of getting approval for pig hearts sufficient evidence that the FDA needs to be more lenient. Instead, taken together the two imply that the FDA needs to be more specific at blocking the bad therapies and allowing the good ones - in other words, it simply needs to get better at its job. Is this not something we can demand of the government?

InitialLastName 5y ago
> it simply needs to get better at its job The issue here (and with regulators in general) is that in general "being better at their job" means going into more depth to determine whether an approval is warranted, which means expending more resources on investigation. I don't know that I've ever seen any overlap between the people who think the regulators do a bad job at regulating and people who think we should be funding the regulators more thoroughly. All that not to mention that when a regulator like the FDA starts going into more depth in its investigations of an industry, that industry's firms start spending more money on either complying with or deceiving the regulator, risking a downward spiral of wasted resources.
malfist 5y ago
But the FDA isn't executing 100 people (or corporations) per year. FDA isn't even indiscriminately halting progress. Your argument has no premise. The FDA regulates with cause and investigates all new medical products before they can be brought to market. They don't willy nilly approve some and nix others.

by 4bpp 5y ago

InitialLastName 5y ago

> it simply needs to get better at its job The issue here (and with regulators in general) is that in general "being better at their job" means going into more depth to determine whether an approval is warranted, which means expending more resources on investigation. I don't know that I've ever seen any overlap between the people who think the regulators do a bad job at regulating and people who think we should be funding the regulators more thoroughly. All that not to mention that when a regulator like the FDA starts going into more depth in its investigations of an industry, that industry's firms start spending more money on either complying with or deceiving the regulator, risking a downward spiral of wasted resources.

malfist 5y ago

But the FDA isn't executing 100 people (or corporations) per year. FDA isn't even indiscriminately halting progress. Your argument has no premise. The FDA regulates with cause and investigates all new medical products before they can be brought to market. They don't willy nilly approve some and nix others.