I agree however, anti-bacterial soap is silly. Looks like a lot of people here agree. Looks like a market segment to me. Didn't need a gun, theft, or a jail cell to create it.
I'm highly skeptical that if antibacterial soap were banned, demand would drive a a black market. People are far more aware of and particular about their Shiraz and Saison (and the intoxicating effects thereof) than their Softsoap's antimicrobial properties.
Liver damage is a person harming themselves by their own choice. Drunk driving is a collection of specific instances of a person breaking the law and taking action which will cause direct harm to another. Alcohol as date rape is just a non sequitur designed to be incendiary. It only effects people who drink and, again, is just a person using alcohol to aid them in committing a crime.
Commonly available antibacterial hand soap hurts everyone even if you are using it reasonably, legally, and responsibly. The harm to the commons is directly proportional to the quantity of it that is used in the normal, reasonable way by everyone.
Alcohol is not great for "society" because it increases the likelihood people will make bad decisions, and can cause specific health problems for the people who choose to use it.
This is akin to emissions standards, which I assume you oppose as well?
Saying you are comparing apples and oranges wouldn't be accurate, because at least apples and oranges are both foods.
Everyone saw the writing on the wall that a ban was coming.
If I'm never told that antibacterial soap can harm the environment, then I might just show up at the store, see that one seems to be "better" and grab that one.
And I shouldn't have to spend an hour researching every item I find on my grocery store shelf. If we've done enough studies on an ingredient to know it's harmful, I'd rather there just be a law to not allow that ingredient.
So, when a portion of the population starts changing their mind on something, the FDA might determine that there's enough political will for a new regulation, and if they move quick, they can be seen as a progressive and helpful industry.
The FDA causes incalculable harm in other ways, mostly by prohibiting good things from coming to market.
For example, factory farming is incredibly harmful, but local alternatives are mostly illegal, for not complying with FDA regulations (which only approve factory farms). [0]
Another example: An amazing, cheap, reversible male birth control option called Vaselgel has been functioning in India for decades, and a few organizations have tried to bring it to the USA, only to be unable to afford the FDA regulatory hurdle. Male birth control is an amazing option for so many different groups, and prohibiting it has real costs on society. It's slated for human trials in 2017. [1]
By working against these interests, the FDA causes far more harm than it prevents. This soap antibiotics ban is (to my cynical view) an easy win for the agency, in an attempt to build good-will or trust in the market.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp...
And if "antibacterial" soap isn't better, and might be worse, then I'm all for restricting it.
There have been a small number of laboratory studies that imply it might be possible with triclosan, but they used extremely low levels of triclosan, and real world studies have basically shown the opposite.
http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/consumer_sa... Page 30
"Furthermore, in most in vitro studies, resistance to triclosan has been measured as an increase in MIC. As mentioned in section 6.2 above, the measurement of resistance based on MIC only, might have little bearing on bacterial survival to concentrations found in situ."
"Ledder et al. (2006) investigated acquired high-level triclosan resistance in a number of distinct environmental isolates and reported that a relatively small number of strains showed a decrease in triclosan susceptibility (E. coli, Klebsiella oxytoca, Aranicola proteolyticus and S. maltophilia) while the susceptibility of the remaining 35 species remained unchanged. They concluded that repeated exposures to triclosan did not systematically produce high-level triclosan resistance in all bacteria. Furthermore, among the strains with decreased susceptibility, there was no change in antibiotic susceptibility or susceptibility to other biocides. Similarly, another study by the same group on repeated exposure of dental bacteria to triclosan resulted in the same conclusions"
"Cole et al. (2003) collected 1238 isolates from the homes of users and non-users of antibacterial product and were unable to demonstrate any cross-resistance to antibiotic and antibacterial agents in target bacteria. In addition, this study showed an increased prevalence of potential pathogens in the homes of non-users of antibacterial products. "
"With our current state of knowledge, it is generally accepted that antibiotic resistance in clinical isolates is not necessarily associated with resistance to biocides. "
"urthermore, the antibiotic susceptibility profile of the oral streptococci investigated did not change following the use of triclosan containing toothpaste. Aiello et al. (2004) did not find any statistical significance between elevated triclosan MICs and antibiotic susceptibility in bacterial isolates taken from the hands of individuals using antibacterial cleaning and hygiene products for a 1-year period."
"The authors did not observe any increase in triclosan MIC in these bacteria"
As far as I've read from this though, it doesn't apply to the use of actual antibiotics, which do cause strain resistance. That is the issue that I am definitely in support of, and it seems I wrongly correlated anti-bacterial soaps in that issue as a fact when it does not appear to be so.
I would buy hand soap without it, if it were for sale. But everyone seems to think it's safer, so all the manufacturers are encouraged to add it, and it's a negative feedback loop.
They're old now, but I think some of the best answers to this are found in the writings of Frederic Bastiat.[1]
This bit in particular is relevant:
------
What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.
------
But if you add in more pertinent details, I think we're just left begging the question. What if I sell parson A selling antibacterial soap to person B by misrepresenting the fact that it contains a chemical that will kill bacteria when, in fact, that chemical is ineffective as advertised. This sounds a bit like fraud to me--and it touches on an especially important sphere of life to boot--health and medicine--where fraud-like concerns are especially important.
Do I, as a third party, have the ability to intervene under these facts? I think there's a cogent case to be made that I do. And, at any rate, I know of no simple analysis that one could apply here to make answering the simplified interpersonal case any simpler than the government-regulation case that it is supposed to help us think about.
Of course, it should also be mentioned that there are perfectly good schools of political thought under which the powers of government are not merely the aggregated power of individuals. Here's a thought just to get the intuitions flowing: there might be things that we allow the government, but not individuals, to do because the government acts by way of a deliberative process that can produce more reliable or better justified decisions than we would trust any individual person to make. For example: you might think that it is never acceptable for one person to kill another, even in retribution for a crime, because individual actors can't be relied upon to evaluate guilt and innocence properly, or because their actions would not have the expressive value necessary to warrant such an act. The state, however, is able to organize behavior in a way that largely solves these problems, meaning that there may be cases where it is acceptable for the state to kill even though no individual person could morally have done so. (I actually oppose the death penalty, so I have other objections to this line of argument. But this seems like a potentially useful example nonetheless.)
Certainly such schools of thought exist, but I'd stop short of calling them "perfectly good." I think Bastiat makes the case pretty strongly that there's no moral basis for saying that a group can hold any innate authority beyond that which the individual members hold. And by "authority" I mean the ability to compel people who don't voluntarily consent to the governance of the group to do the group's will. Of course if a group of people voluntarily choose to delegate some decision making authority to a collective, that makes perfect sense.
The state, however, is able to organize behavior in a way that largely solves these problems, meaning that there may be cases where it is acceptable for the state to kill even though no individual person could morally have done so.
I have a hard time with that. How can merely aggregating a bunch of people together create a moral justification that doesn't exist otherwise? What's the basis for saying that this is so?
I tried to provide an explanation in my comment, but it must not have been very clear.
The answer will depend on one's reason for thinking that individual action was immoral. Often, an otherwise immoral act can nonetheless be justified through extrinsic circumstances. For example, assume that killing is generally wrong. But it can be justified if you have the proper level of confidence that the victim himself is a so-far-unpunished murderer and if killing him after a public trial in which his crime is exposed would send a morally important message. (I think these are fairly representative of the purported justifications for the death penalty.) But there is a problem: an individual acting alone is virtually never in a position to satisfy these criteria. It takes a lot of people acting together to satisfy them--a government.
But education is a much better option than regulation. Regulation is inflexible, and subject to enforcement by people who have the exact same set of flaws and bad judgements as the groups that we're trying to defend ourselves from.
You're right about this being a "schools of thought" difference. You have a good example, about "might we give the government powers to do things, because it could be better at it than we."
That's really the fundamental question, and I appreciate that you got to that core issue so quickly!
My thought (I'm not OP, but I think he and I might agree) is that since the fundamental weakness we're trying to fix is a part of human nature.
Some people will act against the interest of others, even while saying they are acting in their good.
So, the solution is not to give more power to one group (who's subject to the same weaknesses as any other group) but to make sure we avoid giving power to one group where they can have undue influence over others if they fall prey to those weaknesses of human nature.
I fully expect to have companies try to screw me. I fully expect the government to do the same, in some situations. I wish, however, that I could disregard the negative impact of the government as easily as I could the negative impact of the companies.
But I cannot, because one of those groups can override my preferences with its own.
The law is not a pooling of resources. It is a compact wherein everyone holds the same blade to everyone's throats, so that everyone will behave in a manner that benefits the whole, rather than out of pure self-interest. Thus, a government may lawfully do those things that individuals have given up as a condition of maintaining good standing in the cartel.
The enforcer needs to be exactly as monstrous as is required to discourage cartel defections.
As you might expect, this leads to a host of real and potential problems with governments, but those problems have a different root cause than the state acting outside the authority of natural law, and are practically insurmountable for quite different reasons.
Government derives its authority from being a better-than-random strategy in a massive, never-ending game wherein players are continually chosen at random to participate in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Government provides an incentive to consistently cooperate rather than defect. Other winning strategies may exist. Some of them may even produce better overall scores. We allow government to exist and direct certain aspects of our lives because, on average, it makes us richer in the long run. Or it makes enough of us richer that we are prepared to gamble, to try to be one of them.
One of the biggest problems is not being able to know for certain whether the government player is defecting against us in the metagame, even as we cooperate. How do we prove mathematically whether the state really is acting in the best interests of all of its people, treating each of them equally, or not?