How would I even know whether “Shady Meatpacking Tester Company” is a reputable company or not?
How much time do you put in to figuring out the source of your hamburger, and whether the producer is reputable?
How do I know? They’re under no obligation to disclose it. Am I supposed to spend hours researching each and every purchase I make?
But this is not a fair comparison. With regulation in place, that eases our concerns. So some of the cost for supporting something like the FDA or USDA or whatever would be returned to us, and we would use it for supporting private entities, or assume it ourselves in terms of research etc. Probably in either case we would not spend a lot of time with it. How often do you check up on UL procedures, a private company?
Sorry, my mistake. I simply browsed your list of 15 countries and assumed USA was at the top. I forgot about Norway’s oil. Luxembourg with a small population of 500,000 is kind of an oddball country to rank – which is why mentioned normalizing the rankings to population and immigration patterns.
Ok, that is your opinion. I can’t argue with you. I have my own reservations about equating “life expectancy” to “health” and “smartness” to “educational attainment.” I’m not debating this point – you can stick to those measurements and your interpretation of them.
First, because as pointed out how would you know how good the testing company is ? Buy your own lab and learn to use it ? And second, what makes you think you’ll have a choice, that there will be ANY company selling safe, healthy food in Libertopia ? What makes you think that ANY company will be honest unless forced ? What makes you think that there will be much competition without antitrust laws, laws against price fixing and all the rest ?
Question:
Libertarians are always talking about the free market, researching your options, and making informed choices. So why don’t you exercise your options and find someplace where they do things they way you want to do them? Cause its obvious it is not going to happen here.
Libertarians remind me of living in a 2,000 unit apartment complex which has monthly meetings on how to run the place. Each meeting they put forth some whacko ideas which get no support and go nowhere. Every year they run for president of the Citizens Council and get beat 1,987 to 3. But do they quit pushing their agenda? Not on your life. Every month they keep coming back with their ideas.
Do they pick up and move to a place more to their liking? Nope. They stay put and are a giant pain in the ass to everybody else with their constant preaching and telling us about the better way to do things.
News bulletin: LIBERTARIANISM IS GOING NOWHERE… GET USED TO IT.
Please exercise your market choice and find the nation which is more receptive to your idealogy. Cause it ain’t here.
In support of this, remember the cigarette companies did exactly this with the “unbiased” research that proved smoking wasn’t harmful. Naturally they never quite advertised this.
Whoa, whoa whoa. Not at all at once, people. Let’s go with UnNoc for the moment.
But you knew sometime, at some point, that the testing company was unsavory. I guess that must have come to light after the fact.
So at the point of purchase, you must have either
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Gathered enough data from whatever sources - friends, reports, etc. - and concluded testing company was OK. Then purchased. Then found out later that testing company was bad.
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Decided to weigh the risks of buying with a testing company you knew nothing about, wing it and go ahead anyway. And then found out later that the testing company was bad.
I think it has to be one of those two. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
You’re free to pick whichever one you want for your hypothetical example.
Which one was it? Why did you buy the meat? What was your logic?
A major flaw in libertarian thinking is the scale of time and distance.
Economic time scales are not human life time scales. The reaction of the “free market” to evil is quite slow.
The standard answer of “well buy from someone else” or “if the service is needed the free market will provide it” take years or decades to accomplish is some cases. Businesses to do not pop up overnight, even in a unregulated environment. The raising of capital, labor, and resources are not trifles to hand waved away.
When the path-of-least resistance is provided, it will undoubtedly be taken.
The ‘free market’ reacts to evil? What?
Either way, my first indication that I have chosen poorly in either one of those scenarios is that I get a life-threatening illness due to the tainted hamburger. So far, you don’t seem to be figuring in the cost of learning that a particular testing company isn’t up to par.
If the cost is potentially life-threatening, than why did you buy it? Why didn’t you just say ‘Eh. Not sure about this. And I have many, many other choices and substitutes for canned meat in my diet. I’ll go buy something else.’? Why didn’t you do that?
Although I’ll make it easier for you by giving you a choice.
Right next to the canned meat in question, there is another can of meat. On it is stamped ‘FDA approved’. Would you feel differently about buying that can? Why or why not?
Because in an unregulated environment, you have the choice of eating contaminated food or starving. Especially since it’s all probably from the same source; without regulation, monopoly is the natural state of business.
Of course I’d buy the FDA approved can, if I had a choice. Of course, in Libertopia I’d probably be fired since I’d be working for the same company that controls everything wherever I live ( monopolies, again ), and they’d fire and condemn to starvation anyone who doesn’t shop at the company store. Assuming that they ALLOW anything other there than the company store; it’s unlikely in Libertopia that that FDA can would be there. Just one product, from one company, that you have to buy at the price they demand or starve. Just like the good old days.
Because, as I said in the example, they are a monopoly. Or maybe all the companies do it, it’s not like we haven’t just seen all bond rating agencies hand out ridiculous ratings to sub-prime securities due to their cozy relationship with the issuers. Or maybe just plain old asymmetry of information. What, are we all supposed to have a lab in our basement to test the meat?
And this proves my earlier point. You libertarians are so worked up about the government “compelling” you to support all sorts of things that you would rather not pay for. Yet you have no qualms with “compelling” me to not eat meat if there were no reputable labs (even assuming that that I would be in a position to obtain such information.)
Compulsion takes more forms than you guys seem willing to countenance. I assure you, although no one pointed a gun at him, the guy in the 1870’s who had to choose between working in a dangerous coal mine that gave him black lung or starving was every bit as compelled as you poor dears who have to part with some of your money so that the government can implement programs designed to safeguard public welfare.
While it is an absurdity to think that people have the free choice to simply not eat food, let me ask a different question.
Some people think that the highest duty a business has is to increase its value and return profit to its owners or shareholders. I don’t mean to make a straw man argument here, for many of those people also believe that this raison d’etre should be balanced with other obligations, along the lines of being a good steward to the community and so on, but that the will to profit ought to be at the top of the list. Do you agree with these sentiments, and why?
Gah. There are way too many arguments being thrown around in this thread to be able to respond to them all.
And this is one of the problems a general thread on ‘libertarianism’ always has. It degrades into a gigantic collection of straw-man arguments, unsupported assertions on both sides, and in general devolves into a chaotic mess.
If you want to argue libertarianism, a far better way would be to pick a very specific area of government intervention, and argue the Libertarian side vs the statist side. Stay focused, don’t let the argument stray into numerous side-arguments and various straw men, and see what happens.
I find the arguments that Libertarianism necessarily devolves down into chaos about as compelling as the argument that any government intervention necessarily leads to the gulag and gas chambers.
Libertarians would do themselves a lot of good if they would stop holding out for their ‘ideal’ world of no government and private police forces and fire departments, and accept that in the real world, Libertarianism vs statism is a direction, not an end result. The question should not be, “Should we abolish government?” But rather, “Should incremental change at this moment in time move more towards more government, or towards less government?”
Now, as to a couple of specific arguments:
I flatly reject the argument that health care or drug manufacture is too complex an industry for me to be able to make my own choices. The idea that in an unregulated market we’d all have to be experts and spend all our time studying to make good choices is complete nonsense. I am currently surrounded by numerous items provided by the free market - items whose quality was not regulated, and which I know very little about, yet they are extremely high quality in terms of value for money. Do you have to be a computer engineer to buy a good laptop? Do you have to have intricate knowledge of the internal combustion engine to buy a car that runs well? Do you have to have intricate knowledge of thermodynamics to buy boots that won’t freeze your feet in winter?
The answer of course is no. So how is it that I’m able to buy all these high quality products and not get fleeced? Because the market has spawned numerous intermediaries and aggregation sources for the information I need. Some of it is the revealed wisdom of the masses - I don’t ever have to crack open a car magazine to know that BMW makes fine cars. I pick that up by osmosis through the culture. But if I want to know more, I have a world of experts to turn to. Trusted reviewers, magazines with reputations for honesty to uphold, the friend who’s an auto mechanic, etc. Brand name itself goes a long way. I know Apple isn’t going to sell me a complete lemon of a computer, because if Apple was in the habit of doing so, it would no longer be around.
Then there are the certifying agents - NOT the government, but insurance underwriters, industry trade standards organizations, groups like the Better Business Bureau or Consumer Reports.
Sure, sometimes a lemon gets through. Sometimes a bad product gets onto the market. But that happens when the government is involved, too. All those recalled drugs you read about made it through the FDA approval process. The cars that are recalled for safety issues passed government crash testing and safety standards. The difference is that when government certifies things, people assume they are safe and use them en masse, so if the government gets it wrong, widespread calamity can ensue.
What would a world look like without the FDA certifying drugs? I have no idea, because I can’t predict how the market will react to a need - only that it will. I can make some guesses, though - For one thing, doctors would become much more careful about what they prescribe, because right now, a government stamp of approval largely acts as a barrier to malpractice suits. For a doctor to be insured to deliver drugs, I’m guessing he would have to meet the standards set out by the insurance agency. And for the insurance agency to set those standards, I can imagine that it would do its own testing - much like Underwriter’s labs does.
But the difference between this kind of regulation and government regulation is that the insurance company has a much stronger incentive to be rational about the risks AND the benefits, whereas government is heavily biased against risk. If an insurance company is too strict about what drugs it allows its doctors to prescribe, it will lose customers. If it’s too lax, it will pay out too many lawsuits and go out of business.
But such a system also retains freedom. Some doctors or insurers may offer liability waivers for drugs that have not been approved. Or perhaps some doctors will pay a risk premium which allows them to prescribe from a wider schedule of drugs. I have no idea. But if a big demand for a certain type of drug comes up, (say, a promising new AIDS drug), people will retain the freedom to try it. But if they don’t want to take such risks, all they need to do is find out which insurers are the most stringent with respect to drug safety, and seek out only doctors who use those insurers.
Or maybe some completely different system will arise. I don’t know, but I can visualize many different ways in which the market can solve this problem.
To the person who said that the burden of proof is on Libertarians: NONSENSE. Freedom is the default position, the burden of proof should ALWAYS be on the person who wants to take it away from me for some ‘greater good’ or for my own good. Every single government regulation should need to prove itself before it’s accepted.
As for the notion that the FDA is needed because clearly the people voted for it and therefore its rightness should not be questioned… Would you apply the same rationale to, say, the Patriot Act? It had widespread support when it passed. How about Prohibition? Hey, don’t argue with Proposition 8 - it won in a free election, so clearly those gay people have no cause to complain, right? Obviously, Prop 8 is necessary, or people wouldn’t have been compelled to vote for it.
I hope you can see the fallacy of this argument. Government is full of bad laws that the people demanded at the time.
Anyway, I could go on, but I do think it would be more productive if we rather took some current issue where government intervention is proposed and examined it from a libertarian/government standpoint. That might be a debate that actually gets somewhere, rather than this cacophony of unrelated arguments and straw men.
Start specific. Say, with a proposal that hybrid vehicles should get tax breaks to encourage their use. Or perhaps with need for a big ‘stimulus’ package. Or even a more specific set of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley or the Americans with Disabilities Act. Something that has a shot at not being hopelessly derailed.
So if I’m understanding your position correctly, you wouldn’t object to the existence of the FDA - you just don’t feel it should be compulsory. The FDA would exist and the government would run it just like now. But drug companies would have the option of either submitting their product for FDA approval or foregoing it. And customers would have the option of buying drugs that had FDA approval or buying drugs that were never tested by the FDA. Sort of the equivalent of the kosher registration system.
There are plenty of places where there is no FDA to limit the safety of drugs, and where you can buy damn near anything you want with or without the advice of a doctor. Strangely, the health care systems in those places is worse, and the counterfeiting of drugs is a serious problem.
Could you name some of those places, so we can compare other factors, such as access to information and how well developed the markets are, and whether the health care deficits as you see them might not be attributable to other problems?
Why don’t we just narrow this discussion of Libertarianism down to the FDA then? It seems like it’s a reasonable enough example of a government program that most people here think is absolutely necessary. Let’s explore that.