Free Market Regulation

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Regulators Owned by the Regulated": 
I agree that having a government-sanctioned FDA is problematic. But I think it's good to have some kind of "pseudo-regulatory" or "rating" agency (independent partial or non-government or entirely private?) for drugs and such to inform people. Such an agency should be free of bias and influence by the entities that they are supposedly regulating (not so the FDA apparently sometimes). Could such a private agency provide clinical trials on drugs, and be able to ban drugs before they injure and kill people?
See:
http://www.consumerlab.com
"Our Mission: To identify the best quality health and nutritional products through independent testing."

Yes!  That is exactly the solution, the free market solution, division of labor.  Let's go back to before the FDA. Your doctor prescribes a medicine.  The medicine is either made by a company who trembles at customer dissatisfaction, or a pharmacy that makes up the drug according to the Dr's formula (we have these today, they are called "compounding pharmacies."  

Now before I use the word "insurance" let me make an important point: once upon a time the game plan for insurance companies was to arbitrage ever lowering insurance rates against faster lowering loss rates.  How does one play that game?  Well, if the actuarial tables say 1 in 1000 houses burn down each year, and you can add smoke detectors and get that down to 1 in 800, then you can offer a 10% discount to homeowners who install them and book the vig between the discount and your 20% less payout.  (But but but, regulators specified smoke detectors!  No, regulators front run good ideas so they can keep rent-collecting).

Note how the State & Feds gets involved in insurance.  What the Government offered the insurance companies is guaranteed profits on the status quo.  Instead of the actuarial tables as a starting place to ever lower costs, the tables are the basis of ever rising costs.  If we include "domestic partners" in healthcare plans, how much will the rates have to go up on everyone else?  "OK."

So let's go back to our patient, doctor and pharmacist,  In a free market, each has an insurance company with an army of people studying medicine and costs and outdoing each other in lowering insurance costs by lowering losses, and thus making money.  Why would we need an FDA?

As you can see, if we got rid of the FDA, all those people who work now at rent-seeking and yielding net-negative results would be employed using their skills at real science and lowering costs while advancing medicine.

Compare the free market to the mess we have now, in which, also, our medical records are super-secret (so no one can see what harm is being done.)

So absolutely, there would probably be a further division of labor of private companies slicing and dicing data and competing with each other to sell insurance companies studies either commissioned or produced on speculation which are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

The rationale for getting rid of the FDA is strictly consumer protection.

The FDA yet again failed to protect consumers, and so they will get a promotion.

“Each batch of drug product purporting to be sterile and (contaminant)-free is not laboratory tested to determine conformance to such requirements,” it adds. The motor on one device was leaking oil and a paper towel had been laid down to soak it up.
The firm should have methodically tested products for sterility and potency, but didn’t, the FDA found.
The company doesn’t keep samples of shipped products to test in case there's a problem later, and doesn’t have complete records of what it shipped or where. “There is no quality control unit,” the FDA reports adds.
The FDA has asked for extended power to regulate large pharmacies like Main Street, which are licensed like home town, one-drug-at-a-time pharmacies but which act more like drug manufacturers. FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg says another deadly outbreak is certain to come.
Congress is working on a bill to give the FDA these powers.

Not only is it a statistical impossibility for the FDA to do the job the public fantasizes it does, the FDA necessarily needs to do nothing to grow, as in this case.  That helps the corporate body grow, and for individuals inside the FDA, they can pick off (usually milk and cheese) small businesses and gain personal feathers in their caps.

The FDA was involved in a $400 million dollar loss to Chilean fruit exporters in 1989 when of all the fruit imported their inspectors went straight to 2 grapes in a shipment and found them injected with cyanide.  Sorry, cyanide cannot last that long, so the cyanide was introduced into the fruit in USA.  No one investigated what was clearly a crime, nor has anyone questioned how the inspectors happened to go straight to the two grapes in the shipment.

(One can understand if the obvious occurred, the inspectors poisoned the grapes, this would be kept quiet.  Motive?  Chile was thriving after Allende was overthrown, best bet is an an american inspector can be traced back to days as a pro-socialist exchange student in Chile, and wanted to harm economic progress of thriving-monetarist Chile.)

Our system will fail, the Feds know it, and they keep buying bullets and stocking arms, like preppers.   OK, so civil war or whatever is coming.  That is not interesting, what goes around comes around and USA will get as good as it has given in Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and so on.  Our future is our past.  The question is what kind of system will we have apres deluge?  I say we will not need an FDA.

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