I always hate getting on this late because it seems that the conversation at some point takes on a life of its own and I want to be back on the topic. I appreciate your writing so much because you always give voice to my fustrations. I want to respond to the writer who said " Where did this start?" If you think back to the time when there was a good oppositional press it was during Watergate. The two journalists most remembered from that time are Woodword an Bernstein. Just think of what they have become. Woodward joined the establishment and Berstein had a meltdown. Now he is back with a Clinton hating book in a vulgar attempt to make money.I think Woodword needs to be asked some serious questions about things he knew and held back from the public so he could cash in on a tell all book. These guys still get respect.

kdwmson:

Mona's point about the FDA, though clumsily put, is not a red herring. The problems created by central regulatory systems are not an aspect of the quality of the people who run the agencies, but an aspect of the regulatory enterprise itself.

I never said it was the result of bad people. (Bad people only entered the equation in a big way under Bush.) What I did say is that regulations can be substantially improved without junking the whole, contrary to to thrust of Mona's argumentation (such as it is).

Markets and private cooperation can an do produce both law and standards. Most of the mercantile law that came to us through the English common law was developed privately, as was a good chunk of maritime law and the civil code.

I'm not sure what the heck you think you're talking about, since common law comes from court decisions, and the English court system was clearly a creature of the government. Furthermore, even more fundamentally, the existence of any and all mercantile law is precisely what's meant when folks like me argue vs. folks like Mona that markets are a human creation.

Most of the land titles in the United States have their roots in private entities such as miners' claim associations and "tomahawk rights" initiated by squatters.

So????

Neither central regulation nor free markets are expected to produce perfect results. But market enterprise outperforms government enterprise in most circumstances.

This is both a ludicrously over-broad claim, and a totally irrelevant one. What matters is not what's true "in most cases." We want to know if this specific bridge would fail, and what to do about it. "Most bridges" have nothing to do with it.

There is no reason to assume that a private standards lab would not outperform the FDA, and even less reason to assume that a dozen competing private standards labs would not outperform the FDA. Not everybody wants or needs the same level of risk exposure. The FDA model assumes there is only one right answer for 300 million Americans, which doesn't seem to me very likely to be true. For a large and diverse population, regulatory pluralism is almost certainly a better approach than the one-size-fits-all central-planning model.

The mega-corporations are already gaming the system to a fare-the-well. And now you want to let them venue shop as well?

Sweet!

While Keith's are not. Might pay for some of the so called "informed" folks to watch his show befoire they write a slanted article. K.O. is a fools fool.

Your whole post exemplifies why any lover of liberty simply has to be scared shitless of Democratic/progressive attempts to "fix" health care. You are already making yourself a stakeholder in the most intimate decisions a person can make, such as what drugs they wish to take. The public purse is also affected by unprotected sex, and unplanned pregnancy. Failure to exercise. Fast food. Alcohol. Cigarettes. "Unnecessary" driving.

It's this Libertarian absolutism that scare the shit out of me. Y'all have one solution to everything: the market. Every analysis gets jammed into that box, regardless of the temporal or spatial nature of the problem. Even "the" in "the" market is a lie: markets are analytical tools with no pre-existing reality of their own.

It seems a vast failure in imagination. We either have "the market" regulating cigarettes, or "the state" enslaving us. Of course I'm a stakeholder in the lives of other human beings - that is why we invented such concepts as property, the market, the state, the family... The question always is the specific claims of the stakeholders, and the practical effects of applying our claims. But as soon as you abstract it out to "the market", "freedom" and "the state", instead of looking at the real freedoms of real people, you have created a subtle form of absolutism, and there lie the roots of an alternate authoritarianism.

Have you never wondered why Libertarians have been so drawn to authoritarianism in practice? Why so many Libertarians to this day support little George?

Here I side with Mona. The protection offered to the individual by collective action should never come at the price of unnecessary and self-righteous intervention in our lives by others, except in those cases where there's a clearly demonstrated benefit which outweighs our interest in personal liberty.

Murder may be prohibited, in other words, but smoking may not, even if it does raise the cost of health care to all. (Adjustment of risk pools, i.e., higher premiums for smokers, would seem perfectly reasonable to me, however, and -- full disclosure -- I'm a smoker. If we do that, though, we'd then have to have a table of increased risk, from trans-fats to skydiving, from a genetic pre-disposition to diabetes, to travel in the Middle East. Do we really want to go that route?)

To claim that libertarians aren't "anarchists" makes this point still clearer. Libertarians believe in collective states that coercively enforce rules that they value, but not in collective states that coercively enforce rules they do not value. But there is no philosophical or moral difference between a libertarian state that enforces "property rights" and a libertarian state that enforces "rights to health care."

We believe in protecting individual rights that inhere in everyone. Everyone has a right not to be murdered. Or to have their property stolen. Libertarians have no problem with public courts that enforce and uphold those rights for everyone, since everyone has them.

By contrast, no one (save for chidren in my care and the like) has a right to my not smoking dope. Or cigarettes, or consuming alcohol on my own property. Or taking Xanax even if my doctor thinks it unwise.

You would have a right to kill me if I were trying to kill you. And you can transfer that right to stop my killing you to the pool of everyone else with that right. But you have no right to storm my door to grab that Xanax out of my hand in indignation that I lack a permission slip from my doctor, and so that is not a "right" you morally may pool with others to enforce.