What makes you think consumers have the bandwidth to do that for every single product they consume? What makes you think that requiring every single person does this contributes to a healthy economy? As a simple counterargument, how many children are you willing to let die due to contaminated raw milk in order for this absolute "freedom" to be honored, and what makes you think those values make sense at societal scales?

Have you seen the thread yesterday where someone was complaining that they are dying and the government is preventing them from trying an experimental treatment? You guys should talk :)

And there were so many comments lamenting the total lack of sense of forbidding certain treatments....

As in many situations, there is a balance to be struck. It's just so sad seeing so many people, presumably smart people, complaining about how an opinion opposed to theirs can't possibly make any sense whatsoever. This is why we can't have nice things.

We can't have nice things because people ignore nuance in order to make bad faith arguments :)

There is a difference between "we don't know the effects of this treatment, there is reason to believe it could work but we have no statistics, so the risk is on you" and "we know the negative effects of this product, we have plenty of statistics on the empirical risk, so we made a decision to limit the behaviors of those providing the product".

Thinking this experiement a few steps further:

1) Government bans nothing, citizens are expected to do their own research for their protection

2) Business models are developed to communicate reliable, trustworthy products.

3) Unscrupulous businesses lie about the benifits of their products, and sue the other businesses doing (2) for libel. The courts, already overwhelmed, back up, and these bad businesses can take their money, disolve, and vanish before their cases finish, leaving consumers harmed and misled with no recourse.

There are companies that are rather efficent at coming into existance to bring a few products, and then vanishing, for whatever reasons.

> Why can't the consumer decide who is lying and who isn't and what is safe and what isnt

Expertise, incentive, and efficiency. We had the approach you suggest, we got rid of it because we tired of people dying.

I greatly enjoy being able to purchase things without regularly having to send them off for analysis. If you'd like to drink raw milk buy a cow.

If you want pasteurized milk, buy pasteurized milk.

You're claiming that a federal agency is useful because of efficiency. My sides.

Yes, yes, don't think, just mock.

People being defrauded, injured, poisoned, and dying must be much more efficient. That's the reality that drove the formation of these agencies.

I'm sure an inability to trust the safety, quality, and accuracy of the things one buys wouldn't have any negative effect at all on a market.

The illustrious and unbesmirched track record of the worlds major auditing, accountancy, and credit firms has demonstrated beyond doubt that private enterprise can truly be trusted to handle these matters in a manner that puts society's needs at the forefront.

Since we're already laughing, I propose we go further! Privatising the military would unleash the inherent good and efficiency only found within corporations. A free market of privately held armies, competing against one another for the benefit of society. Federal taxes would drop drastically, what could go wrong?

> That's the reality that drove the formation of these agencies.

I said federal agencies are inefficient. You argued they were created for a reason. This isn't exactly an argument.

The argument is that they're more efficient than the alternatives:

> People being defrauded, injured, poisoned, and dying must be much more efficient

> I'm sure an inability to trust the safety, quality, and accuracy of the things one buys wouldn't have any negative effect at all on a market.

And that private business is not an alternative, having given rise to the need for such an agency in the first place and a demonstrated inability to oversee, audit, or classify honestly:

> The illustrious and unbesmirched track record of the worlds major auditing, accountancy, and credit firms has demonstrated beyond doubt that private enterprise can truly be trusted to handle these matters in a manner that puts society's needs at the forefront.

That's not to say that the public agencies responsible couldn't be improved but the idea that privatisation of these matters leads to increased efficiency is farcical.