In the current antilibertarian thread, the issue of regulating antibiotics and their use came up. The question posed was, “would libertarians regulate its use?” The answer was no, leading to this little melt down:
Okay, so fight my ignorance here, what is the CURRENT state of regulations with regards to antibiotics and their use? I was under the impression that the government controls their sale by requiring a prescription. And prescriptions are only issued by physicians (and their assistants) licensed by the government. Hence, I was under the impression that right NOW we have the **opposite **of libertarianism when it comes to antibiotics. Right?
So why do we have so many superbugs popping up in the US and Canada? Shouldn’t the regulations have prevented it? There are plenty of countries that allow people to buy antibiotics without prescriptions, do they have significantly more superbugs that the countries that regulate them?
More importantly, now that we are all aware of the societal impacts of antibiotic misuse, what NEW regulations are we willing to impose for the betterment of society? The biggest problem is that people fail to take the complete dose, how is the federal government going to solve that so that we’re all safe?
I believe that the main overuse of antibiotics in in the food industry - specifically ‘factory’ farms for livestock. Mainly to keep them healthy in crowded conditions and encourage rapid growth - not for treatment of disease. I’ve seen figures that indicate more than 80% of all antibiotic usage is in farming.
This has become another heavily politicized area of science, but as one with a degree in microbiology, it scares the crap out of me.
There’s the flaw in your reasoning, right there, and it is common to all arguements by libertarians angainst a strong federal governemnt: “Regulations can’t prevent all problems, therefore we shouldn’t have regulations”. The perfect is not the enemy of the good; regulations reduce superbugs, and the problem would be much worse without them.
No system is perfect, but at least your doctor knows what’s at stake, and will only dole out antibiotics if he/she knows it’s reall necessary. If it were available OTC, people would be taking them for every sneeze and sniffle.
Also, last time I was issued antibiotics, my doctor drilled me to be sure I finish the 5-day course, even if I feel better. I already knew to do so, but didn’t interrupt him because I was glad he was doing his job.
Well, the government could do all sorts of things for “the common good”. Often, we have a a “movie of the week” approach, where the most vocal gets the government attention rather than the most objectively important. Think of how we approach airport screening. That’s not necessarily bad, and it’s not a wholesale indictment of our government today.
But, in Libertaria, many of those things would not be done “for the common good” because the assumption of Libertarians is that liberty is primary, even if it doesn’t produce the most “good” as measured by other things. That’s an assumption Libertarians make, an axiom, and not really subject to debate. If you don’t accept it, then you’re not a Libertarian. If you want to understand Libertarianism, start with that assumption and think of what follows. You don’t have to agree, but you can accept it for the sake of argument.
No, their default assumption is “government is bad”; they care nothing about “liberty”. They just pretend that oppression and coercion that doesn’t come from the government doesn’t count, and are heavily in denial about all the ways the government protects and enables liberty.
Yes, but even the most hardened Libertarian looks around and sees various things that must be treated as a commons, because there isn’t a practical way to enclose them. The atmosphere, for example. Yes, you should be free to dump whatever chemicals you want into your private atmosphere. And this would work if we lived in domes on the Moon. But we live on Earth, and the chemicals you dump into the atmosphere have a way of drifting off your property and into MY property.
It’s pretty easy to see that antibiotics have characteristics of a commons as well. We could throw up our hands and allow everyone to graze the commons until it’s a field of sand. That’s one approach. But there are other approaches we could take.
And the idea that Libertarians take “liberty” as axiomatic, even if it leads to worse outcomes, is silly. Nobody actually does that. Nobody constructs an moral/ethical/social/political system from a set of axioms and then lets the results play out however they play out. What is liberty good for, if it doesn’t create human happiness? Of course, it turns out we’ve discovered in the last few hundred years that liberty actually does create human happiness, which is why people like it. So “liberty” isn’t an axiom, an end in its own sake, it’s a means to an end.
Of course some people do; various would-be Utopia builders have tried that throughout history. With disastrous results, naturally. And certainly plenty of libertarians say that that is exactly what they would do; stick to their ideology no matter how many people die or how much suffering it causes.
“government regulations do not do a perfect job of keeping us all safe, so therefore lets throw every single regulation out altogether”.
??
One thing is that I believe we were not aware that antibiotic resistance would be so bad, until it was upon us and was public health risk. Then it was there and we had to deal with it.
It is likely that antibiotic resistance could be reduced if we had even stricter regulations around their use. However, as a society we deem that personal liberty is very important, and outweighs the negative consequences of having government regulations that are too onerous (medicine cabinet inspectors, fines for not taking your prescription until all the pills are gone)
It is also likely that antibiotic resistance would be increased if we eliminated the regulations that we DO have in place right now (eg allowing sale of various antibiotics over the counter and allowing TV ads from companies, so that the pubic takes more antibiotics and does not use them properly)
As a society we have taken the middle road. Perhaps it is not the best path, but it is certainly not one extreme or the other.
And the first sentance of the entry for Communism is “Communism is a social, political and economic movement that aims at the establishment of a classless and stateless communist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production.” That’s not what Communism has actually been like though, has it?
The proposals being pushed by libertarians will do anything but promote liberty. And it’s standard for libertarians to simply deny that any form of oppression not coming from the government counts, or to claim that it doesn’t even exist. Regardless of what Wikipedia says about their alleged philosophy they’ve never shown any actual interest in liberty.
How would a Libertarian handle Typhoid Mary today?
She broke no law yet was relegated against her will to quarantine for most of her life after it was found her condition as carrier caused the deaths of others. Yet she lived a long life.
Typhoid is a treatable disease (antibiotics, apropos of this thread) and there is a vaccine. In Libertaria, both would be readily available for whoever wanted them and could afford them. People who couldn’t afford them would have to depend on Charities.