Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
I've seen Tea Party supporters seriously propose eliminating the FDA because they apparently think that the all-mighty invisible hand of the free market will be sufficient to regulate the safety of the food and medicines we ingest.
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Yes, because a federally mandated organization like the FDA is always looking out for the safety of the American people, which is why they have been constantly telling their sister organization, the Department of Agriculture, to stop subsidizing corn to make it cheaper to feed cattle with, because it has been proven many times that feeding corn to beef cattle in an effort to get them to the slaughter house faster will make them develop highly acidic GI tracts. The E. coli O157:H7 strain that is produced as a result is immune to the acids in our own stomach, and people have died horrible, painful deaths from eating contaminated beef.
As the 'FOOD, and Drug Administration', the FDA is directly responsible for making sure that the obese, Big Mac loving people in the US are never at risk of getting sick from eating their favorite, unhealthy and vile fast food burger, but its painfully obvious that they're not doing anything about it.
Go watch 'Food Inc.' and then come back and tell me that the government is looking out for our best interests safety wise. Especially with the food we eat.
Not to say that you should completely deregulate everything. In fact deregulation or regulation isn't the problem at all. The problem is that every single government department tasked to look out for the 'common citizen' has been bought and paid for by big business. From the financial regulators, most notably the SEC, who were caught watching porn when they should have been doing their job and keeping the 2008 meltdown from happening, to the CFTC who has been giving secret exemptions to major banks in the US since 1991 that nobody knew about, to the Federal Reserve System that blindly threw around billions upon billions of taxpayer money, blindly bailing out banks in the largest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to 'Wall Street', to the FDIC with its ridiculous 'too big to fail' stance, to the Department of Agriculture and its 'relationship' with big food companies like Kraft, Dole and many others who are making damn sure they're using the Department of Agriculture to help screw over the little guy. Know how hard it is to run a family farm in the US? Not only with big food companies, but you have have companies like Monsanto, DuPoint, Cargill and others who somehow got the Supreme Court to put a patent on 'life'....so now Monsanto can sue smaller farmers who want to use heirloom seeds instead of the genetically modified ones that Monsanto produces. If you save your own seed, Monsanto will come calling and strongarm you into abiding by 'their' law....or the law that the Supreme Court and the Department of Agriculture helped create.
I could go on and on about big oil, big tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc, etc....and how 'regulation' by the government has allowed them to profit billions while 'common' people are left to fend with nothing.
No amount of regulation will solve this. No amount of deregulation will solve this. It is a simple issue of government having been overtaken by big business. Problem is nobody realizes it, and those that do don't have the power to fix it.