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 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
What are your thoughts on the patent office, NSF, FDA, etc.?
It seems to me that these are government regulatory systems which are intended to act as another layer of peer review.
In a broad sense, I support any institution that means to do anything as long as its revenues do not come through coercion. Within that environment, I would not personally support lots of different institutions with my efforts, but I think they should be allowed to gather the support of others.
As to your specific question, I'm not well-versed in IP to be able to give details explaining the effects of any specific positions. However, I think these sorts of things would work just fine in a market. I'll use the FDA as an example.
Let's imagine there is no FDA anymore. Individuals and businesses are allowed to sell any food they want. Do you think that this would open the door for businesses to start selling contaminated food? I do not. I think doing so would be a death knell. If consumers do not trust a food source, that source is likely to go out of business, which means the source will make itself trustworthy. The likely main way that companies would show their trustworthiness is by endorsements from other companies that specialize in food safety. There would likely only be a handful of these companies, since they would require a ton of capital, experience, and prestige to operate, but they would all have meaningful niches and be in competition with each other. I think instead of seeing labels like "FDA approved", we would have labels like "Safety Company A approved" or "Safety Company B approved". Enough consumers would have opinions of these brands, and their choices would reflect. Groceries would develop contracts with these companies for those reasons and others.
That's all a long way of saying I think the market can do what the FDA does just fine. I also think the market can do it much better, since that's what markets do. The "better" would include things like costing less to the taxpayer (since the businesses wouldn't receive revenues based on tax and would be more efficient and priced into the products themselves), and having higher standards in determining approval. While the FDA is full of good people and good policy ideas, if shit hits the fan and a whole bunch of people get sick, it does not lose its funding. But if Safety Company A approves a product and it kills some people, the company will be at threat of going bankrupt. The safety companies would know this, and their risk assessments would determine that they need to be even more sure that the products they endorse are safer than what we currently get in from the tax-funded FDA.
Peer review is great when it works, but there are, sadly, just as many lazy people, liars and hacks in the scientific community as anywhere else. There are too many examples of outright fraudulent claims which have passed through multiple layers of peer review. History has taught us over and over again that a policy of skepticism is always best.
Indeed. I completely agree. Imagine what it would be like if any hacks or charlatans got monopolistic power of the scientific review process. Instead of merits rising to the top and the scientific community weeding out the bad even though at times the process is turbulent, we would have long dark ages.
The free market is a way to keep the bad people from rising to the top. Tax regimes seem to encourage bad people rising to the top. Even if they don't encourage it, the amount of damage a bad person can do when given power in a government monopoly is far greater than in any business in a free market. A lot of people hate the Koch brothers. Let's assume that hatred is not ill-founded. How many people have they killed? How many have they jailed? How many have they made sick? How many have they beaten up? How many have they imposed moral beliefs on their personal lives? The answer to those questions is a number much smaller than what happens when a bad person has monopolistic legal authority.
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