I think medicine is a very particular field of regulation. Examples from this field would generalise extremely poorly as soon as you move them in any field where a released product doesn’t directly save lives or isn’t designed to improve life quality.
An industry not being free to dump pollutants of unknown effect on the environment will harm marginally its own profit. This profit correlates pretty poorly with people’s wellbeing, even the jobs such an industry provides aren’t strongly correlated with the industry having to spend less on filters and waste disposal. But unknown chemicals dumped in the environment can reasonably be expected to correlate negatively a lot more with people well being.
The article quoted for the FDA states that the European regulatory institutions related to drugs are outperforming FDA, releasing more drugs while keeping deaths low. So the FDA seems to be an institution failing in over regulation, but that doesn’t really makes evidence against regulation, especially if you consider the the European Union has an overall approach that is more leaning toward regulation than the USA.
The question isn’t “regulation: yes or no” but “regulation: how and how much”.
I don’t think the “regulation bad” side have any people that would argue for “zero regulation”. We can all clearly imagine how fast things would go downhill with that. The debate should be understood as “do we have too much regulation or not at the moment?”, but even that question is stupid.
Different fields of technology and industry require different approaches, because mistakes caused by over-regulating and under-regulating would have very different costs. So it would be plain madness to simply argument for “more regulation” or “less regulation” unless you had extremely good evidence that all systems were currently skewed in the same direction, which is not the direction evidence if flowing at all.
It’s not just that people need to have a more rational attitude toward regulation, listing all the pro and cons honestly when deciding, if you put all those pro and cons in the same “regulation good or bad” bucket you already lost the battle for rationality and gave in to an ideological false dilemma, a dilemma that has really poisoned American culture from what I’ve seen.
Also: simply stating that “well, government officials would act in their interest, so regulation won’t ever be reliable, nothing we can do about that” strikes me as motivated stopping. People are actually know to reliably try doing a good job or caring about the lives their decision will end or save, if you don’t dip them in a cut-throat politics environment too much.
If the incentives to do a good job are poor you can work to improve them, and also give them better tools than a sledgehammer to intervene, and knowledge about the delicate forces they’re messing with.
You don’t even have to wait for promotion-hungry regulators to decide to go against their interest and reform their own system. You can have promotion-hungry politicians or utility-hungry citizens try to do that for them by perfectly selfish reasons, and yeah, you’d of course get another imperfect system who still has to react to public outcry and was shaped by other interests, but you still can try to improve from the current situation.
I think medicine is a very particular field of regulation. Examples from this field would generalise extremely poorly as soon as you move them in any field where a released product doesn’t directly save lives or isn’t designed to improve life quality.
An industry not being free to dump pollutants of unknown effect on the environment will harm marginally its own profit. This profit correlates pretty poorly with people’s wellbeing, even the jobs such an industry provides aren’t strongly correlated with the industry having to spend less on filters and waste disposal. But unknown chemicals dumped in the environment can reasonably be expected to correlate negatively a lot more with people well being.
The article quoted for the FDA states that the European regulatory institutions related to drugs are outperforming FDA, releasing more drugs while keeping deaths low. So the FDA seems to be an institution failing in over regulation, but that doesn’t really makes evidence against regulation, especially if you consider the the European Union has an overall approach that is more leaning toward regulation than the USA.
The question isn’t “regulation: yes or no” but “regulation: how and how much”.
I don’t think the “regulation bad” side have any people that would argue for “zero regulation”. We can all clearly imagine how fast things would go downhill with that. The debate should be understood as “do we have too much regulation or not at the moment?”, but even that question is stupid.
Different fields of technology and industry require different approaches, because mistakes caused by over-regulating and under-regulating would have very different costs. So it would be plain madness to simply argument for “more regulation” or “less regulation” unless you had extremely good evidence that all systems were currently skewed in the same direction, which is not the direction evidence if flowing at all.
It’s not just that people need to have a more rational attitude toward regulation, listing all the pro and cons honestly when deciding, if you put all those pro and cons in the same “regulation good or bad” bucket you already lost the battle for rationality and gave in to an ideological false dilemma, a dilemma that has really poisoned American culture from what I’ve seen.
Also: simply stating that “well, government officials would act in their interest, so regulation won’t ever be reliable, nothing we can do about that” strikes me as motivated stopping. People are actually know to reliably try doing a good job or caring about the lives their decision will end or save, if you don’t dip them in a cut-throat politics environment too much.
If the incentives to do a good job are poor you can work to improve them, and also give them better tools than a sledgehammer to intervene, and knowledge about the delicate forces they’re messing with.
You don’t even have to wait for promotion-hungry regulators to decide to go against their interest and reform their own system. You can have promotion-hungry politicians or utility-hungry citizens try to do that for them by perfectly selfish reasons, and yeah, you’d of course get another imperfect system who still has to react to public outcry and was shaped by other interests, but you still can try to improve from the current situation.