I’m talking about all the myriad ways in which the market forces companies to behave responsibly despite the fact that government has no interest in regulating them even if they fail. And my other point was that companies go far beyond government regulation when the market demands it. Auto safety, for example. There are hardly any vehicles on the road that only barely meet government safety standards. And why? Because consumers want more. Because insurance companies and insurance rates acts as an economic drag on cars that have less safety than others.
And what your argument fails to take into account is that you have provided exactly zero evidence that this is true. If you want to convince me, you’ll have to tell me exactly what it is about the drug market that makes people behave irrationally, and why market mechanisms that work in all the other examples I brought up cannot work for drugs. Because I’ve heard this argument over and over again. Any time someone proposes deregulating an industry, people like you come along with a lot of handwaving about how this particular industry is somehow ‘different’. I heard it with airline deregulation, with power deregulation, with airwave deregulation, with farm subsidies, yada yada yada. Put up some facts.
My point was that A) the FDA didn’t stop quackery, so it’s ridiculous to point to the existence of pre-FDA quackery as a justification for the FDA, and B) That when it comes down to serious issues of life and death, people today tend to abandon the quackery and go for the real thing. It’s one thing to wear a copper bracelet for your chronic arthritis, it’s another to refuse a doctor’s treatment for a brain tumor in favor of a copper helmet.
Quackery abounds. The market doesn’t guarantee perfect intellectual rigor in all parts of life. It just guarantees that, given what people desire, goods and services will be allocated efficiently to provide it. Clearly, what people want today is effective medicines. Quackery exists not to replace effective medicines, but to fill the gap between what people want and what they can get. No amount of regulation will prevent that.
Your claim, however, is that if the FDA wasn’t there, people would choose quackery over real medicine, because they don’t know the difference and would be exploited. There is no evidence of that. We have many, many content filters that bring us information about what works and what doesn’t, and we’d have even more of them if the FDA didn’t exist.
In fact, I’d say that medicine is even better in this regard than most markets, because most people know enough to go to a physician to seek treatment, and physicians are trained to know what works and what doesn’t. We don’t consult with personal auto mechanics when buying cars, or computer engineers when buying computers. But we do consult with doctors when seeking treatment.
Of course they do. Is there an epidemic of people dying of treatable diseases because they refused to see a doctor in favor of a quack cure? Other than people who refuse treatment for religious reasons?
Next time you’re in a grocery store, go have a look at the quackery section - the place where they sell the little magnetic bracelets, herbal medicines, and other useless crap. Look at the ailments they claim to treat. Rheumatism, general aches and pains, colds, etc. Stuff that doctors can’t or don’t treat, and for which trying alternative treatments won’t kill you.
You see the same thing with other areas of quackery. Too many people claim to believe in horoscopes, or psychics, or ghosts, or all other manner of non-scientific things. But how many people quit their jobs because their psychic told them to? How many devalued houses do you see on the market because they are ‘haunted’ by evil spirits?. How many people go to psychic college counselers, psychic car dealers, or psychic accountants?
A lot of this quackery is simply adult fantasy. It’s playtime. People indulge their beliefs because it makes the world more interesting. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty decisions of life, they tend to make rational choices. Of course, there are always people who go off the deep end. But government regulation won’t stop them.
My point was simply that those drug industries in those countries were also highly regulated, along with other industries. There’s no evidence whatsoever that drugs in the Soviet Union were any safer than those available in the U.S. before the Food and Drug act.
The problem I have with your arguments is that you are proceeding as if the overall benefit of the FDA is scientific fact, and that those who oppose it have the burden of proof. And when proof is offered, you hand-wave it away with feelings and general statements of mistrust of ‘the market’. When evidence is offered that industries that don’t share that amount of regulation are equally or more safe, you make the unproven claim that drugs are somehow ‘special’, and that any evidence offered is therefore irrelevant.
FDA advocates never hesitate to bring up Thalidomide as their ‘proof’ that the FDA is necessary. But when opponents bring up beta blockers and the possibility that the FDA killed far more people than were ever protected from Thalidomide, it’s hand-waved away as being ‘one case’ or ‘anecdotal’. You’re quick to claim all sorts of hypothetical scenarios of what would happen with an unfettered drug market, that companies would be corrupted and the people misled. But when we point out that governments tend to be more corrupt than business, and that it’s easier to corrupt one powerful senator than to manipulate an entire market, you ignore the argument. It’s like arguing with a religious zealot.
And yet you call us the utopians.
You know, the FDA didn’t come about in some breakthrough of pure scientific reasoning. Like other departments of government, it came about because the political winds blew in a certain direction at a certain time.
You should ALWAYS be willing to re-evaluate government regulation, because so much of it is flawed, and because the conditions that bring it about constantly change. The Department of Ediucation gets huge amounts of funding - 5 times that of NASA. And yet, there’s no evidence that it’s ever done a damned bit of good. The FDA is accepted by liberals as an obvious good, a closed issue that only utopians and crackpots need discuss. And yet, the FDA’s failures are widespread. You claim that it’s more scientific and rational than the market, while complaining that every time a Republican gets elected they put in an FDA administrator who turns science on its head.
You think companies can’t be trusted to be honest, and that the market can’t be trusted to regulate companies. But you never seem to care that wide-ranging legislation that affects our choices is made by a handful of corrupt politicians with no real understanding of the issues, cutting backroom deals in Washington.
In another thread, there’s a discussion of silicone breast implants, and the pseudo-scientific nonsense that got some stupid juries to award huge damages to people who didn’t deserve them. Well guess what? The FDA banned silicone implants as a result, despite their being zero evidence that they were harmful. Does that sound like an agency beholden to rationality and science, or one beholden to political self-interest?
You claim that we have utopian faith in the market. Well, you have utopian faith in government. When I look at the history of both in terms of their ability to efficiently provide the services society needs, I know where I’ll put my money.
