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> and yet no one uses that a reason to make trite remarks about how we can't possibly allow a free market in food We do not have a free market in food. Even if

> and yet no one uses that a reason to make trite remarks about how we can't possibly allow a free market in food We do not have a free market in food. Even if you ignore subsidies entirely… Have you not heard of the FDA? Upton Sinclair? Health inspections for restaurants? Requirements to enrich certain food products, pasteurize others? How about the pet food and baby formula from China (free market!) that was found to have melamine and other poisons in it? A free market in food results in low quality, unsafe, non-nutritious food. Or things that masquerade as food but aren't. On that note… History will look back at many of our legal "foodstuffs" of today and call them as awful as Radon Water: http://www.periodictable.com/PopularScience/2004/08/2/index.html http://www.periodictable.com/PopularScience/2004/08/2/index.... Like slums (see my other comment) -- people will pay to live in slums, you know, the free market creates them --- a free market for food provides for a few and poisons the rest. Not unlike the healthcare situation in the US.

glenra 13y ago
> Have you not heard of the FDA? Upton Sinclair? I'm not going to get into the rest, but it's always worth mentioning that Upton Sinclair's book was a work of fiction. Most of the more disgusting and dangerous scenarios in the book were stuff that he invented to make the book more exciting and make it work better as propaganda. In short, he took dramatic license. And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved, and the USDA is essentially a way to subsidize the meatpacking industry by socializing some costs the industry would otherwise have to pay for itself. The net effect of such organizations on safety trends is, at the least, debatable. In the economic literature you often find that the rate of improvement decreases when a new regulatory institution starts managing some metric.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  >And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved, My immediate reaction is to say you're full of shit. But I'll hold off judgment and see if you can offer any shred of an argument that justifies this statement (not even asking for proof here).
  - glenra 13y ago
    >> And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved, > My immediate reaction is to say you're full of shit. But I'll hold off judgment and see if you can offer any shred of an argument that justifies this statement (not even asking for proof here). The result of the FDA's post-1962 efforts has been to dramatically slow the rate of introduction of new drugs with essentially no effect on the average quality level of the drugs that do get introduced. Some new drugs still get through, but less than half as many per unit time and the FDA approval process delays the use of those drugs and makes them vastly more expensive to develop. These extra delays and higher costs are estimated to have caused, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Good drugs save lives. Good drug information saves lives. The FDA often finds itself in the business of postponing the use of good drugs and preventing the dissemination of valid drug information. It has a powerful institutional bias towards inaction, but failing to approve good drugs in a timely manner kills people with at least as much certainly as does letting bad ones through. The notion that the modern FDA on net hurts us more than it helps is a pretty common belief among those economists who have studied the matter. I'd start with this general overview of the issues: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PharmaceuticalsEconomicsandRegulation.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PharmaceuticalsEconomicsa... And then browse this site - lots of good stuff there: http://www.fdareview.org/ http://www.fdareview.org/ Bryan Caplan summarizes the general state of opinion as: "The public thinks the FDA is great. Regular economists think it's pretty good. And economists who specialize in the FDA think it's pretty bad." (source: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/fda_public_econ.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/fda_public_econ.... )
    - hackinthebochs 13y ago
      Well, you certainly passed my low bar for rationale. I still can't agree though. Any argument based on statistics is going to be strongly biased against the FDA's current procedure. It is impossible to predict how many deaths were prevented from keeping dangerous drugs off the market, so it is impossible to make a meaningful comparison. Furthermore, a simple utilitarian argument about the net lives saved is not how most people would comprehend the situation. The situation where a drug kills someone will be weighed much more gravely than the situation where a life-saving drug was kept from you because it couldn't be proven effective. So a net-lives-saved calculation simply doesn't capture the intuition that most people have. Being biased towards conservatism is appropriate at the scale of approving drugs and advertisement towards an entire country. Most people do not have the knowledge (even considering the internet) to appropriately evaluate a drug. I would wager that even doctors are not equipped to make this sort of safety evaluation for their patients. This is exactly the sort of thing that scientists taking a conservative approach should be doing.
- ahoyhere 13y ago
  I have read a lot about Upton Sinclair but never heard the criticism that his novel was unrealistic. References? On the other hand, the inspectors assigned by President Roosevelt at the time… > Learning about the visit, owners had their workers thoroughly clean the factories prior to the inspection, but [Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds] were still revolted by the conditions. Their oral report to Roosevelt supported much of what Sinclair portrayed in the novel... And Teddy Roosevelt apparently hated Sinclair, so somehow I trust his employees finding more than I trust you, random hackernewser. >... excepting the claim of workers falling into rendering vats… And as for that last bit, is it made up? Surely considering how many workers have accidentally been killed in other "crazy" accidents involving falling-into-stuff (e.g. ammonia/effluent holding tanks), which have been documented, it's not far fetched to believe that in an abusive, unsafe, and unsanitary environment, at least one person has died that way. So, I'm left with only one conclusion: You're making stuff up.
  - glenra 13y ago
    > I have read a lot about Upton Sinclair but never heard the criticism that his novel was unrealistic. References? Try this summary: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/of-meat-and-myth http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/of-meat-and-myth A few paragraphs relevant to what you just wrote: historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair’s allegations, some of which they labeled as “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” “atrocious exaggeration,” and “not at all characteristic.” Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meat-packing business and spent a grand total of two and a half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report with predetermined conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless a historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing” of the meat-packing process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed. According to the popular myth, there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to The Jungle, and the greedy meat packers fought federal inspection all the way. The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meat packers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it so as to ensnare their smaller, unregulated competitors. Oh, and the fact that to you "it's not far fetched to believe" something does not constitute evidence for it. :-)

glenra 13y ago

> Have you not heard of the FDA? Upton Sinclair? I'm not going to get into the rest, but it's always worth mentioning that Upton Sinclair's book was a work of fiction. Most of the more disgusting and dangerous scenarios in the book were stuff that he invented to make the book more exciting and make it work better as propaganda. In short, he took dramatic license. And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved, and the USDA is essentially a way to subsidize the meatpacking industry by socializing some costs the industry would otherwise have to pay for itself. The net effect of such organizations on safety trends is, at the least, debatable. In the economic literature you often find that the rate of improvement decreases when a new regulatory institution starts managing some metric.

hackinthebochs 13y ago
>And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved, My immediate reaction is to say you're full of shit. But I'll hold off judgment and see if you can offer any shred of an argument that justifies this statement (not even asking for proof here).
- glenra 13y ago
  >> And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved, > My immediate reaction is to say you're full of shit. But I'll hold off judgment and see if you can offer any shred of an argument that justifies this statement (not even asking for proof here). The result of the FDA's post-1962 efforts has been to dramatically slow the rate of introduction of new drugs with essentially no effect on the average quality level of the drugs that do get introduced. Some new drugs still get through, but less than half as many per unit time and the FDA approval process delays the use of those drugs and makes them vastly more expensive to develop. These extra delays and higher costs are estimated to have caused, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Good drugs save lives. Good drug information saves lives. The FDA often finds itself in the business of postponing the use of good drugs and preventing the dissemination of valid drug information. It has a powerful institutional bias towards inaction, but failing to approve good drugs in a timely manner kills people with at least as much certainly as does letting bad ones through. The notion that the modern FDA on net hurts us more than it helps is a pretty common belief among those economists who have studied the matter. I'd start with this general overview of the issues: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PharmaceuticalsEconomicsandRegulation.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PharmaceuticalsEconomicsa... And then browse this site - lots of good stuff there: http://www.fdareview.org/ http://www.fdareview.org/ Bryan Caplan summarizes the general state of opinion as: "The public thinks the FDA is great. Regular economists think it's pretty good. And economists who specialize in the FDA think it's pretty bad." (source: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/fda_public_econ.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/fda_public_econ.... )
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    Well, you certainly passed my low bar for rationale. I still can't agree though. Any argument based on statistics is going to be strongly biased against the FDA's current procedure. It is impossible to predict how many deaths were prevented from keeping dangerous drugs off the market, so it is impossible to make a meaningful comparison. Furthermore, a simple utilitarian argument about the net lives saved is not how most people would comprehend the situation. The situation where a drug kills someone will be weighed much more gravely than the situation where a life-saving drug was kept from you because it couldn't be proven effective. So a net-lives-saved calculation simply doesn't capture the intuition that most people have. Being biased towards conservatism is appropriate at the scale of approving drugs and advertisement towards an entire country. Most people do not have the knowledge (even considering the internet) to appropriately evaluate a drug. I would wager that even doctors are not equipped to make this sort of safety evaluation for their patients. This is exactly the sort of thing that scientists taking a conservative approach should be doing.
ahoyhere 13y ago
I have read a lot about Upton Sinclair but never heard the criticism that his novel was unrealistic. References? On the other hand, the inspectors assigned by President Roosevelt at the time… > Learning about the visit, owners had their workers thoroughly clean the factories prior to the inspection, but [Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds] were still revolted by the conditions. Their oral report to Roosevelt supported much of what Sinclair portrayed in the novel... And Teddy Roosevelt apparently hated Sinclair, so somehow I trust his employees finding more than I trust you, random hackernewser. >... excepting the claim of workers falling into rendering vats… And as for that last bit, is it made up? Surely considering how many workers have accidentally been killed in other "crazy" accidents involving falling-into-stuff (e.g. ammonia/effluent holding tanks), which have been documented, it's not far fetched to believe that in an abusive, unsafe, and unsanitary environment, at least one person has died that way. So, I'm left with only one conclusion: You're making stuff up.
- glenra 13y ago
  > I have read a lot about Upton Sinclair but never heard the criticism that his novel was unrealistic. References? Try this summary: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/of-meat-and-myth http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/of-meat-and-myth A few paragraphs relevant to what you just wrote: historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair’s allegations, some of which they labeled as “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” “atrocious exaggeration,” and “not at all characteristic.” Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meat-packing business and spent a grand total of two and a half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report with predetermined conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless a historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing” of the meat-packing process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed. According to the popular myth, there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to The Jungle, and the greedy meat packers fought federal inspection all the way. The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meat packers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it so as to ensnare their smaller, unregulated competitors. Oh, and the fact that to you "it's not far fetched to believe" something does not constitute evidence for it. :-)