Quote Originally Posted by MrTroy View Post
"When he asks is it worth it?" on drug research and standards, he says no. I say YES. If all of the sudden Food and Drugs were no longer regulated, than some really shady stuff would go on. Obviously the point of a business is to make a profit. Now if you were a food company, say McDonald's, and you could get away with using below USDA Grade A beef, which, with no regulation, would not exist. So without the USDA we wouldn't even KNOW that they were using low quality beef. McDonalds buys low quality beef to save 25% on their bill for beef.

Now this beef may carry more disease and other nice things associated with low quality crap, but doesn't really taste different. More people might get sick here and there, and who knows WHAT is in the beef. Same thing with drug ingredients, instead of testing a drug for 10 years, they see some good results after 1 year, and decide to push it to market. Who knows if the ingredients in the drug will cause cancer, to cause pregnant women to lose their baby, to have 10% of men have a drop in testosterone levels, to have 8% of people die of a heart attack from the drug.

I just don't trust drug and food makers to do the HEALTHY thing when it comes to their product if there was no regulation. I would hate to see the factory conditions of some food factories if there was no government health standard.
The cool thing is that you don't have to trust them. If they don't do the healthy thing and there's no regulation, then demand will spring up for someone who does, and whoever fills that demand will run the other out of business without them making some changes. Though I don't see food places being in the business of harming their customers when they can clearly make more money by giving them what they want. Though really just look at a place like White Castle, that's so god-awful and constantly dirty even with our current regulations that I don't see them doing a whole lot of good except in making it harder for the little guy to succeed.

The flaw I see about the drug argument, is that if you want to be just as "safe" as you are now with the FDA in place, then just wait 12-15 years after a drug is released and see what other people have said about it before you start taking it. The only difference is that you aren't being forced to wait, you actually have a choice. I saw him give another speech in person where he talked mainly about healthcare. He has a thought-experiment where we still have the FDA use their approval processes, but have companies be allowed to market and sell their drugs before getting FDA approval. So those who want the FDA approved drugs can still wait to get them, but those who are dying and want to experiment can also do so with drugs that have yet to be approved.

My father is actually the co-founder of a business that makes medical devices (one particular device, just a lot of them), and this was a huge problem. Over three years of tedious back-and-forth with the FDA, finally it was approved just a week ago and he's finally allowed to market it. He says "I'm never going to invent something new to help people in the U.S. again, the FDA is just too much of a pain in the ass." After seeing firsthand the hoops they had to jump through, I can't believe I ever thought it was a good idea, but intuitively it makes sense that we want to be protected. Luckily he was able to file it under a predicate device so it only took three years, and not five or however long it would have taken. This is just a topical device by the way, it never enters your body in any way in proper usage. I think it's my head that should be examined though, as I have no idea why I thought a government agency would actually do things in a way that makes sense.

Quote Originally Posted by gismo
Stuff
Some of these things are explained in the videos you missed. I just have to point out the internet. Information about the truth of what a company claims can easily be found online. If an advertisement is false, then word gets out. A business won't become nationally/internationally successful based on scamming us. There are plenty of commercials that show women being ridiculously attracted to someone wearing a certain fragrance, but so what? Who believes those? They are just amusing to watch. Who am I to say that they shouldn't be running those commercials? If they shouldn't be running them, then fewer people will buy their products and they will go out of business if they don't change. We naturally punish or reward these companies for what they sell and how they choose to sell it. If we aren't getting what we want, then they don't get what they want. Then again this is largely explained (in a much better way) in the 2nd two videos.
Quote Originally Posted by gismo View Post
Look at the shit we are in now because of the housing markets. I mean giving mortgages to people who were never going to be able to repay is just dumb. This whole mess could have been avoided, but too many people got too greedy and they made some dumbass moves. I have seen some of the ad's from the US trying to sell mortages and to be honest, I am surprised nothing was done about them.
Yeah it certainly is dumb. The U.S. government subsidized lending to people who couldn't afford a home, and by thinking the government knows better than we do, they created an unsustainable situation that lead to the "crisis" we're in now. Though that's not the side you'll hear in most of the media. You'll hear that it was deregulation that caused the trouble, but do some real research to quickly debunk this myth.