FDA aware of dangers to food. (Washington Post via MSNBC)
The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.
Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.
Smells like shit.
The FDA and other government regulators are measures to counter the free market, not extensions or representations of it. I don’t know why anyone would be surprised that the government fucks up and protects corporations. It’s been a long-standing use of regulation. Environmental regulation isn’t there, eg, just to protect us from too many contaminants, they’re also there to set a level of contaminants that businesses can expose us to without worrying about being cited or sued. These issues could be handled much better with the personal responsibility, the media, the courts, and a healthy fear by businesses of the free market — a market free of protections from the FDA.
The free market is a misnomer. It’s an illusory, false battle cry invoked by those who stand to gain the most by gaming the system.
It’s like Tony Soprano championing the level playing field of the waste management industry.
Any argument about allowing the free market to decide is a red herring. There is no free market.
The “free market” is a mythical beast, like the unicorn. It would be nice in theory to think that magical forces compel the market to naturally act in the spirit of altruism and benevolence, but I’m unsure how that materializes in real life.
Just as socialism sounds peachy keen, in practice it seems to fall a bit short of its lofty ideals.
>> The free market is a misnomer. It’s an illusory, false battle cry invoked by those who stand to gain the most by gaming the system.
Oh, BS. Is it an ideal? Sure. Do some that champion it have unrealistic expectations for it? Sure. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious advantages to it and serious problems that arise from disrupting it.
It isn’t a misnomer anymore than calling a freeway a “freeway” is. It’s just a name that’s been defined and explicated throughout the years. By “free market” or “market economy” I just mean an economy built on minimal government regulation, strong property rights, and rule of law.