Y’know, even if we go with “to maintain their regulatory monopoly against the threat of disbandment by the latest Randian Flavor of the Month demagogs and the ill-informed Fox-watching yahoos who elect them into positions of power,” that could arguably be effective enough to get the job done.
Let’s move away from the FDA and discuss the other functionally insane parts of Paul’s platform.
I’ve spent maybe five horror struck minutes looking at it, and frankly, it looks like implementing it would make the zombie apocalypse look like a fun night out.
The 2013 budget shows a revenue gain from privatizing the FAA. He's going to do that in one year? How is that even possible?
Assuming that the FAA is privatized, who’s going to pay for it? I assume the airlines? Who will then pass the cost on to the passengers? So…instead of paying taxes to fund the FAA, I’ll be paying more for airline tickets? I’m not seeing the big win here. Same thing with the TSA. I don’t like them, but I need some convincing that privatizing it is going to make it more efficient or cheaper for me.
Highway and transit funded at gas tax revenue? Uh, huh. I’d kind of like to see some back of the envelope noodling that would convince me that this revenue is enough to, I dunno, inspect bridges and repair roads.
Looks like no department of energy. Swell. Guess we’ll just let peak oil happen and let the chips fall where they may.
Paul plans on selling something like $40 billion of federal lands. What lands and to whom? Convince me that a bunch of mining and drilling interests aren’t going to be getting one sweet deal here. There sure aren’t going to be any government watchdog agencies left to make sure no shenanigans are going on. And with the EPA on a strict leash, I guess the strip mining of Yellowstone can happen apace.
Another 14 Billion or so comes from reducing the federal workforce. OK…but that comes on top of the ~ one trillion dollars in cuts which largely, I would think, involve cutting the federal work force.
Hey, let’s consider for a second the effect of slashing a trillion dollars of government spending in one year. This isn’t a slow withdrawal – it’s major cold turkey. So, doing some kind of naive back of the envelope guessing, and being charitable, I figure that approximately 1,000,000 -2,000,000 people are going to be out of jobs. Probably another 1-2 million will be affected severely in some ways, either because government contracts don’t happen or grants don’t get funded. This isn’t actually counting the ripple effects in the economy as this number of people stop consuming. Not sure I see the line item for unemployment benefits for a couple of million people in Paul’s budget, but I might have missed it.
Now Paul will likely argue that all these jobs will made up for by private enterprise, and if they aren’t, we didn’t need them anyway. But who’s going to pay for all these new jobs? How is all the infrastructure to support these hypothetical jobs going to be built in a year?
I’m not sure if you were trying to disagree with me, but for what it’s worth, I agree completely. Corruption is precisely what we’re looking to avoid.
You do realize that we pay for all these jobs right now, right? The government doesn’t create money, it takes money from taxpayers. The less money the government takes from us, the less dependent we need to be on the government.
And you think handing regulatory oversight to the free market is going to solve that?
Look, I won’t even pretend that I know how to solve corruption. My personal view is that the more you give all the power to a single entity, the easier it is for that system to get corrupted. That’s all I really have to say on the matter. If you have an idea for how to effectively end corruption, I am open to being convinced of your viewpoint.
The thing is, as I see it, right now the power isn’t all with one entity, it’s a shared initiative. You have the drug companies doing their thing, and you had the FDA making sure everything’s copecetic.
On the other hand if you give the companies producing the drugs the responsibility of making sure everything is copecetic – that’s where you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.
I can see nothing but corruption arising from Mr. Paul’s little scheme.
Well it sounds like it really comes down to a difference of opinion. Who do you trust more with your health: the government or yourself? And I’m not even arguing for either side, I can definitely see the benefits to trusting the government over yourself. I can also see the benefits of not trusting the government and doing your own research. If you’d like to trust the government then you’ll think Paul’s plan is shit, and I can’t blame you for that.
A single entity that’s transparent and held accountable seems infinitely more effective at stopping corruption that numerous entities that are neither.
Holy Og, that is the biggest false dilemma I have ever seen. If you really believe this is an accurate picture of the world I don’t know what to say.
I think the corruption is based on the influences of the system, not just the number of parties involved. If the FDA was a private company and had two big competitors, would it necessarily do a better job? That would depend on factors like how it makes its money. In the current setup, the FDA does not get paid by drug companies, so it is supposed to be able to consider the interests of patients without regard to how their decisions affect the profits of the companies. If the FDA were like a ratings company and was paid by the drug companies, wouldn’t it be under pressure to return favorable opinions?
This isn’t even a false dilemma, it’s irrelevant and sounds like a talking point. The FDA doesn’t prescribe drugs and it does not tell doctors what to prescribe any more than it picks your dinner. It approves (or rejects) the marketing of drugs and medical products based on scientific studies, makes decisions on the wording of the warning labels and other packing and marketing materials, inspects food and drug facilities for safety, and things like that.
It’s not between the Government and yourself – it’s between the Government and the drug companies. It’s not yourself that’s regulating drug companies, it’s the FDA.
For the life of me, I can’t understand the concept of – let’s not hold drug companies accountable; they’ll just police themselves because its good for business.
Yes, being paid by drug companies would create problems with corruption. Is this a problem we’ve seen with other ratings companies?
What I meant by “it’s between the government and yourself” is simply that with FDA regulations, the government decides what is considered safe to go in your body. If you consider something safe but the FDA doesn’t think so, the FDA can limit your access to those substances.
Unless one is a research scientist, how the hell is one supposed to know what’s safe to go in one’s body and what’s not? On guts? Trial and error? Hope and a prayer?
Are you implying that the FDA has nefarious reasons for stating what’s poison and what’s medicine?
So you don’t actually want to privatize the FDA at all, you want to eliminate any safety mechanism entirely. No regulations, no limiting access to things that are harmful or untested or quackery.
My opinion, probably not worth the bandwidth to some.
So we get rid of the FDA, and it’s (too often corrupted by political pressure) approval process and oversight. Who fills the void to ensure stuff works and won’t cause more harm than good?
Vested private industry? Um, yeah. That’ll work. Like no study was ever skewed or evidence of side effects or harm hidden… RJ Reynolds anyone? Ever read Sinclair’s the Jungle? The Pure Food Act was passed for a very good ** reason**.
Independent private industry? To quote that annoying lady on the phone commercial, “Where’s that money coming from, Steve?” If folks are unwilling to spend the money for the FDA now, why would ANYBODY actually believe they’ll approve it going elsewhere later?.. unless it’s for a whitewash to get them off a legal hook.
Some of you should read what life was really like for average working folks back in 1900.
The FDA decides whether or not a company can market a drug as a treatment for a particular condition based on considerations like safety and how well it works. Do you have a problem with the government setting limits on things like e. coli contamination?
Have we seen this problem before? Yes, we have! During a little dustup called the global financial crisis. One of the contributing factors was that bond ratings agencies - which are paid by their clients - were giving top ratings to financial instruments that wound up being very shaky. It’s an elementary conflict of interest.
Meanwhile I forgot another basic reason companies are not going to want to publish all their drug data in the equivalent of a Consumer Reports for Medicine: it’s proprietary research. The universities, labs, and companies that do that research are not going to want to give that data away for free.
Thanks, though I’m afraid the “plan” is even more confused than I thought. For example:
So if I think the gold/silver ratio is going up, I’ll pay for my goods with Citibank silver notes and ask for Smith-Smith gold notes as change? Perhaps paying a surcharge if Citibank solvency is under question this week?
Such an approach might almost make sense if it addressed a real problem, or even if wage-push inflation were a threat. Instead, all I can guess is that many High School Freshmen have suddenly learned about fractional-reserve banking, have gotten confused and, rather than asking Sophomores for help, are ranting on the Internet blogs.
Who would fund this theoretical private company? The drug companies?
That might work. Until the first test comes along that shoots down a promising (i.e., lucrative) drug. Guess who’d get leaned on by their funders to hush up the bad tests? It already happens now with drug companies.