Why didn’t the market come up with a solution to food/medicine/etc. hazards before the FDA was implemented?
Who says it hadn’t?
I don’t recall any similar accreditation agencies or anything like the BBB popping up to deal with it.
Have you searched for any?
Private accreditation agencies currently exist in many markets, especially in consumer electronics. I don’t see why they couldn’t in food. It’s also not obvious that a centralized agency like the FDA would emerge in the marketplace; there may be more effective ways to convey meaningful information to consumers, but we would only know so if the market’s ingenuity were legalized.
Given there were none: There was no demand.
However, demonstrating hygiene can be done in many ways, such as an open kitchen where you can look at the ingredients used and how the chef uses them.
What a loaded question, it’s just too painful.
Yes, I did. I couldn’t find any.
I know they exist now. I’m not arguing against the privatizating. I’m just asking why in never came up in the market before the government did something about it. I feel like it would have been pretty necessary to have a private accreditation agency pop up back then.
I wasn’t trying to blame the market at all. I’m asking a simple question because I’ve never heard of anything similar having arisen in the market.
The assumption of market failure is implied in your question. Without it, the question makes no sense.
The assumption of market failure is implied in your question. Without it, the question makes no sense.
The question does not imply market failure. Metus proposed the answer that something like this never appeared because there was no demand. To me, that sounds like a satisfactory answer to a logical question.
Thank you for reminding me about that comment. I forgot to address it before. The question I had was, in everyone’s individual opinion, how is demand determined for accreditation agencies? If companies realize their products are of enough quality to pass a ‘legitimate test’ (for lack of better words), I’m assuming they’d be asking around for someone to start one. It’d also lose business for the companies whose products are of lesser quality despite being [probably] cheaper. I assume agencies like the BBB go around to companies and ask if they’d like to have accreditation oversight, and then the companies approve and pay to be ‘rated’ by them or something?
Sure it implies market failure. “Why didn’t the market fix this problem?” implies 1.) that there was a problem and 2.) there were not forces working to fix the problem should it exist.
A better phrasing of the question would have been “What, if any, private food/drug safety organizations existed before the FDA? Do you think they were effective? Did the FDA improve the situation? etc.”
I feel like the same answers would come out of both questions. For my original one, the only difference would be people saying “It did. The […] existed, etc.” Still, we’ll pretend I asked the question the way you put it.
If there weren’t any such organizations, then we can basically assume that there was insufficient demand to warrant such an enterprise, and hence, we conclude that it would be a waste of resources based on the aggregate of individuals’ subjective value preferences. This is how we speak about this praxeologically.
First, let’s get something straight here , because I think much of the discussion here is completely missing the most important point about the FDA.
The FDA is no accreditation agency or anything else the government claims it is. Accreditation agency implies a service is being provided here. Now, unless you consider extortion under the threat of physical harm as a service, then it must be realized that the “solution” you are referring to is actually a manufactured problem that never existed and will never exist on the free market.
Now. why in the world would you be seeking “similar accreditation agencies” on the free market if the above was obvious?
I don’t want to repeat myself too much as I have posted some criticism of the FDA previously but the bottomline is the FDA does a piss poor job for what it was designed. Now I can’t speak about pharmaceuticals but I can speak about medical devices (orthopedic specifically). Due to the FDA’s scrutiny the following correllations can be observed:
- Device testing often defers to the lowest common denominator i.e. because you said I need certain tests I did precisely those tests and only those tests
- Because the FDA can audit design documentation those documents are written less descriptively than would be useful should they not be audited–for instance there are cases were the design evolved one way but it was necessary to work within FDA regulations such that those design activities were intentionally omitted and a less relevant or less specific design reason is substituted
- Aside from a full blown clinical trial (cost prohibitive even for most of the larger corporations) device safety is established by a “substantial equivalence” to a previously cleared device rather than biomechanically relevant stresses and conditions.
- Device innovation is severely hampered or eliminated to those areas with better profit return. E.g. the largest driver for “new” technologies is if you can be reimbursed at a reasonable rate–note that innovation in medical devices is often tracked backwards to Europe rather than to the US as the approval process is significantly easier for most devices (and can often be post market research rather then pre-market) For evidence of this you can look to disc nucleus replacement, total disc arthroplasty and vertebroplasty (the last two are slowly catching up).
Keep in mind that doesn’t come without some risk; you might even find an increased failure incidence in the EU however I would argue that it could just as easily be tied to the greater product availability (other smaller companies) or increased procedure volume (for that type of surgery) rather than simply increased failure rate.
Bottom line: People that claim that you need to socialize the cost of medicine to decrease costs are missing a huge money sink. My unsubstantiated claim is thus: If you eliminated all federal regulation (and to a lesser extent the patent system–that causes hiccups too) you would see device costs plummet to levels never seen. When the barrier to entry goes from 5000 + 80k worth of testing (and the employees needed to execute it–several hundred thousand dollars for even something simple) to nil I think you’ll find a lot more competition popping up.
end rant
If certain products were “FDA-approved” and the agency wasn’t run by the government in the first place, then it would be providing a service.
I would want a similar accreditation agency just like I would want a a similar mail-delivery service to the USPS if UPS and FedEx were not in business today.
Brian Anderson: “I feel like the same answers would come out of both questions.”
Apparently, your feelings were wrong.
Is the FDA providing a service of accreditation? It is not a “loaded question” like your original one. It must be answered in a straight forward manner, e.g., yes or no.
Brian Anderson: “Why didn’t the market come up with a solution to food/medicine/etc. hazards before the FDA was implemented?”
There was worth of mouth. For example, “hey, child, don’t eat that flower because it is poisonous!”