The Biggest Flaw in Libertarianism

I would hope you are right. It is hard to see the truth through the one way mirror of modern media.

Do you have any information on what the controls are for the regulatory groups?

I always assume problems in organizations stem from the top. Workers tend to follow the examples they see from those in real authority, if they want to succeed.

 

Your entire arguments rests on the notion of a blind trust in some form of Statism/Leftism.

Your acceptance of letting the few rule the many, yourself being one of the many, is astounding.

YOU: Can somebody out there pleeez rule my life and regulate everything i touch or experience? PLEASE!?!

You are a perfect little slave. Submit.

 

That's reasonable but the problem is that sometimes companies spend TONS of money in R&D, testing etc... and a drug has the potential to be hugely profitable for them so they put it on the market. Then some PhD in O.Chem reviews the work or studies and mentions that long term use will result in blindness, deafness and testicles that hang down to the knees. Guess what? Sometimes execs say "screw it" and put the drug out anyway. Used to happen all the time. Remember, the modern pharmacuetical industry is relatively new. People used to be told the best thing for headaches was "laudenum". Which it was! Your headaches went away almost immediately! Opium will do that, you know. What many Libertarians don't think about is that regulation is the best thing that eer happened to the pharmcuetical industry.

So care to post something a tad more substantive or is this the extent of what you have to offer on the topic of the OP?

 

This always reminds me of "fen phen". I remember, the FDA cleared fen phen for use in the 90's. Then later on it said that fen phen could cause heart problems. Then later on there was a massive class-action lawsuit against the makers of fen phen which I believe was in the billions of dollars.

Was the story of fen Phen a success of regulation? Did the regulation by the FDA do much of anything at all in the case of fen Phen? If the FDA clears a drug, are they financially liable for damages that those drugs do?

The truth is, it would be foolish for a drug company not to test their product before it is marketed. I don't know how much the company made off fen Phen, but I would assume they probably made a net loss off the product in the end. And it really wasn't regulation that ended fen Phen, it was the lawsuits. And lawsuits are effectively how libertarianism regulates markets.

It seems to me the only exceptions would be some sort of fly-by-night company, where it would be impossible to recoup damages from a product if it turned out faulty.

 

Can you please narrow your position and be more specific? I do not know what is meant by a company being "not nice".

 

I'd like to cite examples from Australia but, like anything invented by humans, they're flawed. There are a number of anti-corruption agencies established by the federal and state and territory governments and for the most part they work fairly well. But there have been some examples of absolute stupidity as well as blinding incompetence amongst them. Some of them were established by panicked governments fearful of elector retribution and were given far too much authority by the parliament resulting in overreach. Some, particularly one which is being established in the state of Victoria at the moment, have been allegedly set up with weaker authority than first promised, so that particular groups (shock! horror! - parliamentarians and judges) are not investigated by the authority, which leaves the grunt level public servants, including police, as the hunting ground.

On organisational problems, I agree with you, the top sets the culture and the lower levels just go along with it, until some poor bastard decides to be a whistleblower and attempts to get things changed but ends up being barbecued by all concerned.

 

Problem with law suits is that they're after the event. Yes they may prevent repetitions but it would be best to have effective proactive regulatory procedures in place before harm is done. You've mentioned one failure, it's not fair to ask you to prove successes so I'd just state that it's entirely possible that the FDA and its associated processes have probably worked in many, many cases to prevent harm before it's done.

 

The thing with regulations is that they do a lot to retard innovation in products. You meantion drugs, but most of the drugs we're currently testing won't be available for a generation -- if it takes 5 years to develop and then it must go through an almost 10 year approval process, your cure for cancer, if you start working on it today won't even be potentially ready for market until 2027. And all of that time, it costs you a lot of money in labs, scientists, doctors, animals for testing, buildings for all of that, etc. This costs millions of dollars a year. So unless your potential cure for disease is going to make the company $10 million, it's not going to happen (actually, this is absurdly low-balled, it might be $100 million). So unless you have a drug that you can A) charge a ton of money for, or B) is something that everyone has or will have, it's not worth working on a drug to treat. So we end up with "orphan" diseases that will never be treated -- not because we can't figure it out, but because no matter how cheap the drug is to make, by the time you test it to the FDA's satisfaction, the company will never break even. So if you have a fairly rare disease (fewer than 200,000 cases), you're SOL, not because no doctor can do the research, but because the government regs have made research on a treatment for your disease unprofitable.

In other places, regualtions are less directly harmful, but they add a lot of barriers to competition. If you have to meet a lot of arbitrary regulations before you can make money, it creates a real barrier -- buildings that must be refitted to meet a code cost a lot of money. And unless the person wanting to start a business has the cash to make all of those changes. Now if you're already established, you simply take a bit less profit and open the store. So it impedes small businesses while making very little trouble for the big business. So a lot of good ideas are not being done as the people who have such ideas cannot afford the added costs of the regulations. You aren't hurting Target with stupid building codes -- you're probably shutting out a lot of potential competitors for target won't be able to open up shop.

So at some point you have to realize that in most cases, regulations actually do a lot of harm in our economy.

 

Libertarianism is a political philosophy. It is not an economic system, it is not even a personal philosophy. It is solely about the philosophy of the morality surrounding human interaction in a political context. Libertarians gravitate to economic systems, such as the Austrian school, which show that voluntary trade makes people better off than interventionist third parties using legal force generally will. However, not all Austrian economists are libertarian. Ludwig Von Mises was not.

Also, history does not prove your case. If you think it does, provide some specific examples, and I would be happy to discuss the failure in the political system which lead to such an event. Strong centralized governments have killed hundreds of millions in just the past century and it's not a given that government would be the sole supplier of "reasonable" regulations. You'd have to prove that without government, there would be no regulation, which I don't think is provable, but you are welcome to try.

 

This is one of the best and most intelligent posts in this thread. I agree with a great deal of what you say. I have affirmed we have tons of over-regulation. Although many of those who are weak debaters have tried to project the opposite extreme of their view onto me, that is not the case and there is no evidence to support it.
So yes, regulation can harm both profitability and competition. I absolutely agree this is the case. But a lack of it can result in death. I place the welfare of the citizen ahead of that of the corporation. However, the only point I make in my OP is that corporations simply cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. History DOES prove that to be the case - as does current events. For example, do you think BofA can be trusted to just stop illegally foreclosing on our troops while they're overseas?

I have provided numerous examples throughout this thread.

 

We still use opiates today. Again, drugs that cause harm are regularly passed by the FDA, and the companies sued. I don't see how losing the FDA is really going to change much. Bad drugs will still be released and the companies sued, just like they are now.

 

People OD's on laudenum all the time because there could be a little in bottle A and 10x that amount in bottle B. No regulation meant no uniformity. Regulation was the best thing that ever happened to the American Pharmacuetical Industry. Now the pendulum has swung and it is over-regulated. There is a balance. Eliminating regulations altogether is not the answer.

This is what seems to be the logic of many Libertarians when it comes to the fact that no agency has a perfect record:
It takes 10 FDA inspectors to catch 80% of bad drugs before they get to market.
It takes 20 FDA inspectors to catch 93%.
Therefore the problem of making sure drugs that can kill or permanently harm people can be solved by getting rid of all the FDA agents.
WTF? Seriously?

 

It's not working is the point. It can also be argued that lives are being lost due to the drugs they hold up from being released.

 

We need to pause and step back a bit. Regulation is being misinterpreted and misrepresented.

The purpose of regulations - be they in manufacturing drugs or building codes, just as a couple of examples, is to minimise harm. Any effect on an economy of regulations is incidental and secondary to their true purpose. If you are of the opinion that there should be less or no regulation of various forms of commercial behaviour because they have an allegedly adverse impact on an economy then fine, it's an opinion you're welcome to hold. I suppose it really is a difference of oplnion - some people support the idea of regulation to minimise harm, some people don't like regulation due to the assertion that regulation is bad for an economy.

I happen to believe that all industries should be regulated to ensure minimum harm. Regulation should be across an industry and should affect all participants in that industry.

 

It could easily be argued that lives are saved because of the stringent requirements for clinical trials. It's moot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412

 

Are you saying clinical trials wouldn't exist without the FDA? Why would companies not test drugs? Not testing drugs then releasing them would open them right up to lawsuits.

 

I'm saying that there should be be no option for a company to not test. I'm saying there should be a law requiring certain processes be carried out to ensure that drugs will not do more harm than good. Relying on lawsuits is acting after the harm has been caused. Prevention, as I'm sure you accept, is better than cure or reparation. Relying on law suits only brings up the Ford Pinto calculation. No, it's a much more useful idea to have trials to ensure a drug is not going to do more harm than good before it's released into the market.

 

Chik-fil-a is still around.

 

Your posts are always reasonable, logical, based on fact and verifiable. I truly admire your reasoning.

 

I completely agree, though my desire for regulations stems from the fact that most, if not all, regulations deal with something having to do with money. Money is the greatest motivator for corruption and bad behavior that has ever existed, and as long as there is money to be made, people will attempt to make it. Basically, I don't trust people in the pursuit of money to make choices that don't have adverse affects on others. I know some will, that not every business or entity out there is completely selfish and unconcerned, but there's no way to measure that, and no way to make even a halfways solid claim that the potential harm is negligible enough not to impose standards and regulations.

Bad things are going to happen, unforeseen events are going to occur, products will fail, people will get injured, sick, or killed, and every other manner of negative affect on mankind. I don't have any illusions that regulations would ever totally stop those things from happening, but at the very least, they impose a burden on those who would use unscrupulous or harmful methods in pursuit of money. In that respect, I do believe the good outweighs the potential harm some regulations can have on everyone, including those who would not engage in the behavior regulations are meant to curtail.

 

What does the OP mean by a company being "not nice"?

 

Companies can be sued, but companies can afford better lawyers than the working class, usually.

 

do you realize that most companies will spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours for their lawyers to make lawsuits from those they injure go away. In most cases the victims just do not have deep enough pockets to bring a suit to trial, and very few law firms are willing to take on such cases since that might cost them their corporate customers. Between 1879 and about 1910 we had an almost completely deregulated economy. The excesses of many corporations caused much damage to many people, and lawsuits and access to lawyers was out of the reach of most people, especially those injured. The corporations fought all regulation tooth and claw in order to avoid accountability. Here are some examples of the kinds of corporate practices that caused the public to demand government regulations.

The General Slocum disaster - 1904 - 1021 passengers died because of failure on part of the ship company to properly maintain their ship, and the life jackets had been weighted by the manufacturer with iron to meet the weight requirement.

The only person convicted of any wrongdoing was the Captain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire 1911 - 146 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

Another example, corporations routinely dumped hazardous waste into our streams and rivers until the early 1960's when the environmental movement started. The Cayuga River in Ohio, became so polluted that it actually caught fire on a number of occasions beginning in the 1860's, with the last one in 1969. The Delaware river below Trenton became virtually lifeless between 1930 and 1985 due to the pollution dumped into it. It is now slowly recovering, but you eat the fish out of it at your own risk, since it's still laden with heavy metals which the fish absorb.

The Potomac aquifer which supplies much of the drinking water from Philadelphia through Washington, DC, is seriously at risk because of the dumping of toxic waste in holding ponds between the 1920's and 1970's. The toxins have begun to seep into it and so far have made polluted a small portion of it. The problem is that no one really has any idea on how to clean it up. And of course, in this particular case,there is no one to sue, because the corporations that did the polluting went out of business decades ago.

To depend on the market place to keep corporations, especially large corporations from behaving as bad actors, is naive at best.

 

I'm not saying the court system doesn't need to be fixed, but I am saying that is the arena in which to solve problems. It should be easier to remove money from the courthouse, where no bribes of any kind are allowed, than from the executive and legislative branches where indirect bribes are business as usual.

 

Sure, but that still doesn't remove money from the fact that the more money you have to work with, the better lawyer (or lawyers) you can afford.

The courts are best at settling certain things, but if things like pollution regulation simply came down to lawsuits, a lot of people would get sick or die before acceptable levels of pollution were established.