Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
Every so often in a libertarian’s life, some schmuck asks them who would make sure food was safe or how would planes know not to fly into each other. Because, the market, apparently, won’t figure out that planes crashing into other planes is bad.
The local, state and federal food inspectors are not the only thing between us and certain death.
July 23rd, 2013 at 2:39 am
America got along, and quite well thank you, for many generations without a food and drug administration or a department of transportation, the FAA, the BATFE or scads of other bureaucracies, yet in this enlighten age no one remembers any of that.
The purpose of bureaucracies is this; when a president sees a trend, he forms a new department to get out in front of it, act like they’re in charge of it, muddle things up, make things more expensive and discouraging, and then take credit for anything good that comes out of it in spite of the bureaucracy. When things go bad, they will then call for more “resources” and more legal “tools”.. It’s what you do instead of something.
July 23rd, 2013 at 12:57 pm
Airplanes are expensive. I have no idea why people think that, but for the FAA telling them that they can’t, airlines would be crashing them into each other all the time.
People don’t stay out of car accidents because they are illegal. (They in fact are not, illegal.) People stay out of them because they are expensive. Same thing. More importantly, as soon as people think flying isn’t safe, they stop flying, making them even MORE expensive.
July 23rd, 2013 at 6:59 pm
The other side of that is this: What if it turns out to be cheaper for a company to hide its defective products from the market, rather than fix the defect?
For example: what if it were cheaper to pay the occasional customer that is raped at a large Florida theme park to be silent than it was to hire extra security?
What if it were cheaper to settle with the victim of a faulty product and demand silence as a condition of payment than it was to recall or fix the defect in the product?
I’m not saying government is always the answer, but I am also not saying that government is never the answer.
July 23rd, 2013 at 11:11 pm
I recall listening to a liberal radio host ragging on libertarians, and one of the things he brought up was the FDA. His awesome point on why we need the FDA was to list off three or four drugs that were approved by the FDA and was later pulled from the market for killing people.