Why I care more

How can we not have the FDA?  They check our food to make sure it is not contaminated.  They are to make sure that our drugs are safe for the marketplace to be sold to consumers.  Anyone for ending the FDA has to be evil as they apparently do not care about protecting a person's health just like us terrible guys do not care for women's health by arguing that I should not be forced to pay for her birth control.

But what if I said that I care too much for our health to be willing to keep the FDA around.  I mean lets look at some of the situations that are created with the FDA.

Can the government be sued for messing up when it comes to regulating and inspecting drugs?  Are government employees often fired for bring poor at their jobs?  The answer to each of these is a NO!  Because of this we get the worst of both worlds.  An FDA that is very slow to approve drugs on the market because there is no incentive for them to approve a drug that can help people unless its very very safe because they are not going to make a profit by approving the drug anyways.  But at the same time they will not be sued or fired often for approving a drug or not inspecting food thorough enough.

If the FDA was demolished, then a private insurance company would have to back up a drug company or food company and their product.  That insurance company is in it to make money so you very well better believe that they will make sure food is not contaminated.  They do not want lawsuits so they will get these things right way more often than wrong because the risk of being wrong is being sued in court, having profitable contracts voided, being fired as an employee, or going out of business altogether due to not doing a satisfactory job.

At the same time, there is an incentive to approve drugs to the market that would allow doctors and patients to make more decisions for themselves.  Insurance companies can say that this drug has a high risk and thus to insure it we charge much more.  But drug companies want to approve drugs because that will make the companies more profitable and make them more money as well insuring more drugs.  Thus good drugs that have side effects but can still be helpful despite those side effects will be approved more often than they are by the current FDA.

Many people want to act like Libertarians do not care about people because we want to get rid of rent control laws, minimum wage laws, regulations, the FDA, OSHA, and other things... But in reality... we want to get rid of many of those things because we care MORE than others.  Its like if I'm against some kind of government law or oversight than that means someone else cares and I do not.  But as a libertarian I look at the incentives of laws and the consequences and base my opinions and views there not based on the nation that we need protection from everything.  I care more so I put more time into studying the results than someone who supports simple government protection.

Unfortunately Libertarians are not winning the argument on this because so many of them want to focus on things like legalizing gay marriage, pot, getting our military behind our boarders only, and abortion "rights".  Thus they alienate so many and in fact more often than not the base that usually supports their economic ideas, the conservatives, and thus little is accomplished.  Hopefully younger conservative libertarians like myself will change this and can shrink government.