Well, I confess I was thinking of state prosecutors, who do the vast majority of prosecutions anyway.
Federal prosecutors are still accountable to the people, despite being unelected, because ANYONE can make a complaint about their qualifications to practice law, and, conceivably, get their license yanked.
Judges have far more power to stop overzealous idiotic prosecutors than mere directed verdicts. There’s a threshold burden of proof at preliminary hearings, and defendants file motions to dismiss, to name a couple.
I aptly demonstrated from the EPA’s own webpages that it is regulating Milk under the rules it has for crude oil spills. I agree with you that the WSJ articles aren’t quite what happened, but the EPA’s claims that it was never regulating milk or trying to are contradicted on its own website.
“Question: Why did EPA regulate milk in the first place?
All kinds of oils, including animal fats and vegetable oils, have been considered oils under the Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) rule based on the legislative definition of “oil” in the Clean Water Act. Milk is considered an oil and its storage and handling have been subject to the SPCC rule, which is intended to prevent damage to the inland waters and shorelines of the United States.”
I note, comparing this FAQ to the rule they actually promulgated, which DOES NOT EXEMPT dairy farmers who do not comply with the container rules, that the EPA isn’t being exactly honest with us.
Notably absent: “Does the EPA have jurisdiction over dairy farms under Oil Spill Rules?”
The answer, according to the EPA, is YES.
Milk is still oil according to the EPA. Note that they could’ve changed their interpretation instead to something bearing a relation to good sense, but instead wanted to keep its jurisdiction over dairy farms.
I also note they DID NOT exempt any other kind of food stuff–is peanut butter next?
Yeah, we have lots of examples of Federal prosecutors being reined in for being overzealous. (Heck, the last batch of Feds who were punished were punished for not being sufficiently zealous in carrying out political vendettas.) And there are tons of examples of Federal judges curbing out-of-control prosecutors.
Well to be fair, you’re not too convncing either, ha ha.
You’re still making a mistake. I am supporting an untried system. You are making a requirement for that untried system that we can change nothing about the administration of criminal law.
I have acknowledged previously in this thread that if we were to do this, a major reform, we’d have to write some new laws. Laws that we do not write at the moment due to reliance on a regulatory agency system.
I have never proposed relying on an unreformed criminal/civil court system, so it is a bit of a strawman to point to defective issues currently in the system, as though I am proposing the current criminal justice system in its entire current form. I’m not.
I am not trying to be convincing. You are attempting to persuade us to eliminate a flawed but functioning system with an untried system for which all of your claims have, so far, failed to be persuasive, and which even you admit require additional changes outside the system that you have not considered in depth.
At this point, you are basically offering the following solution to a problem that you have failed to prove is as desperate as you want it to be: http://www.betz.lu/media/users/charel/math07.gif
Not that I doubt it correlates, but this map tells us nothing about antibiotic misuse. I also see no evidence that poultry farmers are continuing to misuse quinolones, so no imagination required. Regarding human use, we may want to look to Norway and increase regulation.
Now, as to hidden taxes/costs passed to consumers, We are currently paying 1.75 trillion in hidden taxes due to regulation. This is almost twice what we paid in income tax last year.
Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain, “The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms,” Small Business Administration Small Business Research Summary No. 371, September 2010, at http://archive.sba.gov/advo/research/rs371.pdf (July 19, 2011).
My argument here is that this is beyond excessive.
Those who love mohair can’t expect it to get any cheaper; new rules have been put into effect governing goat-herding. (They couldn’t do it right on their own, it took an agency “expert” goat herder to realize the problems associated with goatherding, like uncomfortable beds, and the need to bring a lantern with you if you’re out in the rough.These are obvious federal priorities, you know.
Holy shit dude, how have you gotten this far and still missed the main point. Go back to the OP and look at the quotes:
“Deregulation makes us less safe”
The regulations we have were put in place before superbugs, and haven’t been changed in response. The regulations people THINK are making us safe have nothing to do with superbugs.
Which is not the same thing as saying regulations CAN’T make us safe. They could, if we were willing to put them in place. I could think of all kinds of regulations that would nearly eliminate the threat of superbugs in the US, I doubt you’d like any of them.
Right now, the regulations we have do nothing about superbugs. For example:
[indent]The CDC campaign – “Get Smart: Know When Antibiotics Work” – urges consumers to use these drugs sparingly and many Americans have taken that message to heart. Recent data from the CDC show that antibiotic use is leveling off in the United States. In 1994, 300 out of every 1,000 pediatric office visits resulted in an antibiotic prescription. By 2007, that number had fallen to 229, a 24 percent decrease.indent
Evidence that antibiotic use was reduced WITHOUT the need for regulations, what was required was information. People ended up regulating themselves when presented with enough information. The FDA COULD have accomplished the same thing with regulations, and congress could have accomplished the same thing with laws, but in the end, antibiotic use was reduced through education–not regulation.
Notice also how the regulations we have now fail to stop the ease with which antibiotic are issued. Which is why there are far more antibiotic prescriptions written during flu season.
Again, to drive this point home, we do not currently have regulations that prevent antibiotic misuse, where the misuse leads to superbugs. We do have plenty of other regulations, that make a lot of people feel safe. But they’re not safe, because the regulations aren’t doing what they think they’re doing.
That misconception is fuzzy thinking. We see the same thing when it comes to commercial airline safety, feel good measures that make people think they are safe. Anyone looking at it critically realizes the obvious flaws.
So how is deregulation supposed to make us less safe?
You insinuated that congress can’t deal with the problem, but that a regulatory agency could. Care to clarify that point? You were arguing against David42’s point that congress can do the work instead of a regulatory agency. What is it about congress you feel makes them too incompetent to handle regulatory issues?
Are you calling him a liar or saying that he lied?
Again to look at this system of belief you’re expressing here. The antibiotic controls we have aren’t designed to prevent misuse or superbugs. You are also trying to draw a conclusion after the fact. What we do know is that we have a lot of superbugs, and more being created every day. You are trying to say we only have a few, and it’s because of the regulations we have. I’m saying there are a lot, and the regulations did nothing about that. You have no way of proving whether or not there would be more without the regulations. And frankly, I don’t see the regulations as having any impact one way or another.
You don’t know that. The world might be as bad as it is because of the regulations. It’s possible the world could be better, if we were willing to have better regulations. But we’re not willing to do that, we have to have middle of the road regulations that leave us without safety, but all the downsides that go with poorly thought out regulations.
At least you’ve finally come to accept that there are flaws in the regulations. The regulations make people think we’re safe, the flaws are what makes us not. You simply take it as an article of faith that the flaws are so small that it’s the regulations that make the world as good as it is.
Not really, because you don’t respond to reason. You don’t want any regulations, be they created by bureaucrats or by politicians. Bureaucrats are unelected, therefore unresponsive to voters; politicians are easily manipulated by money interests. We get it, you don’t like government. But that is not a persuasive argument to do away with regulations altogether. Even flawed regulations are better than none. You have said nothing to persuade me otherwise.
Correct me if I am wrong, but emacknight (nor me either) has advocated getting rid of all regulations. Getting rid of the current scheme of “regulatory agencies” altogether or to the point that the problems are solved is what is being promoted here.
Really people, pay attention this time when I say the word “regulation” gets used in two fashions–one applies to the rules promulgated by regulatory agencies. The other is used in a broader sense for government control of a situation, and regulation can mean the criminal law in that sense. For instance, driving is regulated by traffic laws and courts. By “getting rid of regulation” I eman getting rid of revolving door employment and capture of the regulating agency; duplicated efforts, excessive waste, unrealistic punishments, and being above the law, and passing regulations for things where there is no problem.
This keeps getting translated to “anarchy,” and that’s a completely false claim.
I’m fine with having “regulations” or some means of control over industry.
No. It is impossible that without restricted access to antibiotics the world would be better. Arguing that is simply nonsense.
If there were no regulations people would take more antibiotics, they would take more partial courses and there would be more super-bugs. Libertarian thinking is generally childish and poorly thought-out, and it is no different here.
Again the issue of “partial courses.” We have never had regulations that dealt with the issue of partial courses. Which you admit lead to superbugs. With all the regulatory agencies entrusted to keep us safe, why have they chosen to ignore such a simple issue? That’s not to say we couldn’t, it’s to say that we don’t.
Secondly, and more importantly, you ignored the reality that regulations are not the only way to alter behavior. I already linked to a program by the CDA that was able to lower antibiotic use through information. People use antibiotics improperly when they lack information, regulations or no. Just as they used ecanacia and all sorts of other tomfollerly because they lacked information.
So again you are wrong in your assumption that lack of regulation would mean more antibiotic use. You might want to reconsider which concept is poorly thought out and childish. As stupid as libertarianism may be, your arguments aren’t much better.
And even if we grant your statements truth, it leaves the question of “how many more?” How many more antibiotics would be used than what West Virginia currently uses? How many more superbugs would there be? And how bad would those bugs be compared to what we have now?
Right now–the current situation we exist in today, not a hypothetical but the actual reality we live in–has people using antibiotics, in huge numbers. Taking partial courses. And then using the remaining at an inappropriate time. In combination with open boarders that allow people from unregulated countries to enter. All leading to the prevalence of superbugs. Your system failed, not the hypothetical libertarian system, the one you currently have.
ALL use leads to superbugs. That doesn’t make a system “failed”. It’s not like we’re Mexico. We could have less resistance if we regulated more. Norway does it. Maybe we should too.
By the way, if anyone was thinking of checking out that book that David42 has been harping about, don’t bother. It’s useless. It’s just a list of unreferenced anecdotes about poorly implemented laws and regulations.
And not a word on antibiotic resistance in its entirety.
That’s not to say it couldn’t make an interesting conversation piece for another thread.