Why Not Have The Government Approve Our Car Choices Too?
As a follow-on to the issues I raised in this post about the FDA making our risk-reward choices for us, comes this tongue-in-cheek suggestions from Café Hayek: Lets start the FCA, the Federal Car Administration, to approve cars for consumer use:
Choices would be few. Because of the high costs of the approval process, only cars that appealed to large numbers of consumers would receive attention from the manufacturers. On the plus side, the cars that did survive the process would be very safe and very good cars. They'd have to be. Manufacturers would want to reduce the odds of failure to avoid a ten year approval process that resulted in rejection.
It would be great, assuming the bureaucrats in Washington would make exactly the same choices that you would. In other words, it would be great if we all wanted to drive identical Ford Taurus's.
If you think this suggestion is just ridiculous humor, ask yourself whether this is what Ralph Nader has been after all along.
Zoran Lazarevic:
Abolishing FDA would make drugs and devices cheaper and more effective on average. Unfair practices by drug makers would also be much more common, such as:
- false advertising (direct or through doctors, like today - but more)
- using drug addiction to increase sales (like tobacco industry today)
- using short-term positive effects to bump up short-term sales, on the expense of patients suffering long-term effects.
I think there is a significant difference between buying a Plymuth or Hyundai to suffer from high maintainance cost; and buyin an addictive drug to suffer from diarrhea for the rest of ones life.
Being in the biomedical industry for several years, I see pros and cons both ways.
February 3, 2005, 5:41 pm