Thanks for telling me what I want. I wasn't sure before. Lol, oh wait. You don't seem to get it. You seem to think that without regulation, this is the only possible outcome. You really think that there aren't already con men? The entire pharmaceutical industry is a con and it's primarily because of the FDA! You already live in that kind of society! Allowing the free market to work by deregulation will give the people more options and indirectly force these companies and businessman to give the people what they want. A company cannot grow if you don't buy their product/service. Those that try to swindle will likely be phased out as the ones that do not try to swindle will get the business. That currently is not possible with the level of regulation we have. Anarchy is not the same as Liberty and we are not trying to condone anarchy. The sooner you neo-conservatives accpet that, the better. The fact is that you are wanting to be as indirectly responsible as possible for your own well being. You want the government to tell you what is and is not safe for you. Keep this in mind. The most basic principle to being a free American is the notion that we as individuals are responsible for our own lives and decisions. We do not have the right to rob our neighbors to make up for our mistakes, neither does our neighbor have any right to tell us how to live, so long as we arent infringing on their rights. Freedom to make bad decisions is inherent in the freedom to make good ones. If we are only free to make good decisions, we are not really free. - Ron Paul
Hence why the post office is going broke and is just a bad money pit. The government can't run things like this with out falling short. We, and other advanced nations, can't afford it. The beauty of free market, if the consumer finds out that practitioner is causing lower quality of care, or products, if there are competitors, the swindler will go out of business. This was evident with the GM, and Chrysler FAILURES, people chose Honda and Toyota because of the crap Detroit put out.
Gawd that is a load of malarkey. Serious, if you have a rep for being a bad business, are going to get consumers? If you continually have people die because of the crap you are doing, will you stay in business? Have you ever ran a lemonade stand, cause even a child knows that you have to make the product sweet to get return customers.
if making people healthier makes one money, one will do it. Amazingly, all of these nasty, greedy people only go into private business, but never into government.
Would you go to a doctor with only a high school education or are you too unintelligent to seek out medical care from someone who is qualified to provide it without the help of government bureaucrats? Ron Paul's point is really about selective barriers created by government licensing schemes. In order to get help, for instance, for a broken leg, you will have to see a doctor, which costs an enormous amount of money because of the premium they can charge by being a protected class. You really may not need a doctor for that situation. An x-ray from an x-ray firm and someone who is trained in fixing minor broken bones ought to be just as good. Regulations can and do exist without government intervention, and where they are provided by private industries not only are the products often superior, but the availability of goods and services ranging from premium to lesser quality keeps the costs down. Perhaps you dream that government control of your medical decisions will create lower costs. Dream on. Rent seekers will have more power because they will only have one customer - the government.
Greedy profit-motivated people want to (forcefully or not) swindle people out of their money without helping them, as much as they possibly can. Please be realistic with human nature.
Since I'm a humanist, I define that as having a greater overall positive effect on (deserving) people, than not. That's obviously a very broad definition, but it's the best I can come up with if I'm going to summarize it in one sentence. That does not equate to utilitarianism, by the way. Not in the way I mean it.
The FDA takes unsafe products proven to be unsafe out of the market. That's it's main function. It doesn't just purport to do that, it actually does. I should have "FactChecker" back that up. Without the FDA, all these proven-to-be-dangerous drugs would still exist, and people wouldn't know they were necessarily dangerous because they wouldn't realistically be able to conduct scientific experiments which could possibly deduce said information. That'd be unrealistic and overly burdensome to people. It wouldn't be just. And it wouldn't be "liberty". Government wouldn't be necessary if people could reliably self-govern. I don't think they can. I'm too cynical. Actually, if a product is scientifically and clinically proven to be dangerous, that's not "the government tell me what is not safe for me". That's publicly exposing the dangers of a product and then taking it off the market. You don't consider it a "right" to put others at undue risk, do you?
Again, they wouldn't necessarily have any way of knowing, without proper clinical trials and scientific experimenting, that the drugs were overly dangerous. That wouldn't even be their personal responsibility.
umm...government is a private business. It's not a public entity, at least not in the way it exists in today's society. The only separation between government and what you would call "private businesses" is that government is more forceful, yet in some ways more benevolent. Sortof a contradiction, but there you have it. It's all about the individual. I've known poor people who were very benevolent (kind, respectful), and some who were cruel and violent.
It's a good approximation in a lot of cases, although a lot of pathological individuals exist when it comes to any "normal human behavior". In any case, how is that relevant?
You said private businesses don't care about making people healthier. How do you know they won't be pathological?
That was an extreme, but most don't. If economic security is thrown out the window, and everyone is fending for themselves (as in Austrianism), people will do anything to make a buck, legal or illegal, helpful or harmful. That's not meant to persuade anyone of anything, either. It's reality.
Totally and completely impossible. Why does the law matter? What is helpful and what is harmful? The problem with the economy is that people won't do anything to make a buck. Oh so that's why you wrote this but didn't post it on the internet! "Reality"
People say "favor 'liberty' (whatever they really even mean by that) over 'security'", but they don't even know what they exactly mean by this. Without any liberty you can have no security, but on the other hand, if you have no security, it's hard to use liberty for anything. A lot of people on this forum seem to want to divide people as much as possible until everyone fights for themselves greedily, and no one can ever plan or count on anything long-term due to low security in society. They'd be reduced to doing whatever possible to survive in the immediate future. It'd be a terrifying Hell hole. That might be what they want to live in, but as long as people like me are around, they won't get their way. I've come across a lot of lazy people like that, but they aren't the biggest individual problem. In fact I'd say natural disasters (which aren't anyone's fault) are a bigger problem than they are, all in all. Ultimately though, the biggest problem we have, economically, is resource scarcity. More specifically, overpopulation. In fact, overpopulation is EQUAL to resource scarcity, for that matter. It's the same problem rephrased! I'm stating it as a matter of fact.
Sorry, Indridcold, but that's projection. I understand from your statement that without government regulation and control you would do anything to make a buck helpful or harmful. Of course, legal or illegal would be moot point. But, to then pretend that you are somehow representative of reality is ludicrous. I can think of no institution with less interest in my welfare than the government.