They didn’t even start out with any of their existing powers, there was a guy going around measuring stuff (which yay! good job!) who then got government powers and started trying to remove lots of products from the market like some kind of food nazi. The guy flipped around and switched from “telling people about bad stuff in products” to using his new legal powers to take Coca-cola off the market because it had caffeine, which he proved addictive, and but coke won on the defense that just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it is automatically bad, so… its cool that Coke stopped that, I guess? :-)
The larger point: there is more than a century here of an insulated institutional culture of “busybodies trying to extend their empire of power that uses the state violence apparatus in a moralistic way to control consumer behavior whether the consumers want it or not”.
I do think that they are de facto protecting giant monopolies and so on… I just also think that they don’t even care, and don’t even notice, and just have a sort of moralistic puritanism that what they’re doing is intrinsically right, and they think their power proves their virtue and their virtue is why (they think) they have power?
I think the right thing is not to get angry at “those people” who “should feel scandalized”. They have no shame in this matter, from what I can tell?
The right thing is to TAKE AWAY THEIR LEGISLATIVELY AUTHORIZED POWERS.
Repealing Kefauver Harris for example would have let covid have a chance of being solved with super fast deployment of new tests and new drugs.
In this case, I’m honestly not sure what legislative power would need to be taken away from the FDA to solve “whatever the root cause is” of the baby formula industry being broken. Some part of this code seems like it would need to be fixed?
I think the FDA is a cultural silo?
They didn’t even start out with any of their existing powers, there was a guy going around measuring stuff (which yay! good job!) who then got government powers and started trying to remove lots of products from the market like some kind of food nazi. The guy flipped around and switched from “telling people about bad stuff in products” to using his new legal powers to take Coca-cola off the market because it had caffeine, which he proved addictive, and but coke won on the defense that just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it is automatically bad, so… its cool that Coke stopped that, I guess? :-)
The larger point: there is more than a century here of an insulated institutional culture of “busybodies trying to extend their empire of power that uses the state violence apparatus in a moralistic way to control consumer behavior whether the consumers want it or not”.
I do think that they are de facto protecting giant monopolies and so on… I just also think that they don’t even care, and don’t even notice, and just have a sort of moralistic puritanism that what they’re doing is intrinsically right, and they think their power proves their virtue and their virtue is why (they think) they have power?
I think the right thing is not to get angry at “those people” who “should feel scandalized”. They have no shame in this matter, from what I can tell?
The right thing is to TAKE AWAY THEIR LEGISLATIVELY AUTHORIZED POWERS.
Repealing Kefauver Harris for example would have let covid have a chance of being solved with super fast deployment of new tests and new drugs.
In this case, I’m honestly not sure what legislative power would need to be taken away from the FDA to solve “whatever the root cause is” of the baby formula industry being broken. Some part of this code seems like it would need to be fixed?