One of the failings of the libertarian ideal. There's no way for even an informed consumer to have any idea what most of their purchases contain, what safety issues they have, how effective they really are, etc.
Consumers are being informed right now. A scandal can kill a company or a private inspector in a way that it can't kill a corporate oligarchy or bad regulation. Private inspectors have to compete for consumer dollars. Government regulators, at best, have to compete for less than half the votes of registered voters; or they are simply appointed.
In the system we have now, there will be lawsuits, but they will be capped and won't mean the death of these corporations, so will largely be meaningless and likely the entire thing will still be overall profitable to these companies. Any attempt to regulate will be met with lobbying efforts to make that regulation competition-restricting and corporation-protecting while giving lip service to protecting consumers.
It's certainly better that we know and (hopefully) some corrective action is taken, but overall I'd read it as a signal of dysfunction. And I don' think macintux is suggesting that we're presently within the libertarian ideal, rather we're in the universe where it's considered a responsibility of the state to prevent these kinds of things from happening, yet they are still happening. So look what happened here, and imagine what would happen with even fewer failsafes...
I thought this was common knowledge, i.e. basic first aid for burns in general?
I mean, I know what's recommended as basic first aid for burns, and maybe that's common knowledge. The why of it, in enough detail, almost certainly isn't. Note also that aloe is quite commonly recommended as a part of "basic first aid for burns in general" following cooling.
Aloe in plant form is the real deal, and more so than any commercially processed aloe product (w/added pain relievers) or other after sun product I am aware of. It significantly defies pain/discomfort, keeps the skin moisturized and in many cases can prevent peeling from burns.
Plus you can eat/juice the gel and it has hydration and anti-toxin benefits.
I feel very confident that this is irrelevant since lotion you might buy at Wal-Mart is definitely not fresh cut aloe regardless of whether it contains small amounts of aloe juice.
> Plus you can eat/juice the gel and it has hydration and anti-toxin benefits.
Whenever someone makes a generic reference to "toxins", I immediately doubt anything else that they say with respect to health or medicine. There are many things that are toxic to humans but there are no things that are generically "anti-toxin" except maybe water. I cannot imagine that aloe has any effect on mercury exposure, or cyanide consumption, or even tobacco smoke inhalation.
Well it isn't irrelevant because in tropical climates you are much more likely to have experienced sunburn, have ready access to aloe plants and personal experience with its benefits. For example, processed aloe gels aside Walmart's in South Florida generally will have fresh cut aloe vera plant in their produce section, not sure if that is true in non-tropical climates. Nevertheless, my point is clearly not address the aloe lotion in the article but rather claim of the comment that aloe vera itself is bullshit.
> I cannot imagine that aloe has any effect on mercury exposure, or cyanide consumption, or even tobacco smoke inhalation.
Just because I didn't go into detail doesn't mean I am making a blanket claim anti-toxin benefits means you pick any toxin you like and aloe is the answer. That is on par with losing faith in anti-biotics because people discuss anti-biotics generally but we know a given anti-biotic may not be appropriate for any and all bacterial infections. Anyway because I didn't label the toxins doesn't erase the decades of scientific studies which are pretty conclusive toxic heavy metals, including mercury and lead, readily bind with aloe vera. For example, when plants grown in polluted environments where heavy metal toxins are present other plants might not even show traces but the aloe plants will be off the charts. In the human body this binding process allows you to expel some of the heavy metal toxins. I believe studies show cilantro have a similar effect with heavy metal toxins in the body particularly mercury.
Fair enough, but you were responding to a comment specifically talking about aloe in lotion (or "jelly" as the nsxwolf put it).
Personally, I'm not very convinced about the value of aloe, in lotions or fresh cut. I think it has therapeutic value, but I'm not at all convinced in has more value than other modern lotions that also sooth and protect the skin. I think aloe gets a free ride on the modern "natural" train, where people tend to assume that "natural" is better without any proof.
> Just because I didn't go into detail doesn't mean I am making a blanket claim anti-toxin benefits means you pick any toxin you like and aloe is the answer.
There are two problems with the term "toxins". One, it's a generically huge category, akin to "illnesses". Saying that aloe is good for "illnesses" is meaningless. Even if it's good for some particular illnesses or toxins, it's not a general solution and referring to it as such is misleading. No medical professional would say that antibiotics are good for "illnesses" because it's misleading to the point that it's nearly a lie.
Second, the people talking about "toxins" are generally snake-oil salesmen pushing "natural healing" practices with no scientific evidence. By referring to toxins in a general sense, it associates the subject of the statement with fraud. If aloe is good for dealing with "toxins", it's good for specific toxins that can be discussed directly. The reason frauds talk about "toxins" is because it sounds scary and is virtually impossible to refute directly because the category is so broad that it's meaningless.
> Anyway because I didn't label the toxins doesn't erase the decades of scientific studies which are pretty conclusive toxic heavy metals, including mercury and lead, readily bind with aloe vera.
Can you provide any evidence for this claim? I did a quick search and found nothing except "natural medicine" sites making vague claims about its benefits with no citations.
Meanwhile I did find evidence that aloe itself may be dangerous when ingested, as it's known to cause tumors in rodents as well as kidney, liver, and other problems in some humans.
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/aloe/index.cfm
http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-607...
In the later part of his comment yes, but I took this part to be a more blanket statement of aloe:
>I think one of the reasons this particular situation went on this long is that aloe is kind of a bullshit product in the first place.
>but I'm not at all convinced in has more value than other modern lotions that also sooth and protect the skin.
I am not here to convince, but recklessly on this issue tell people in this thread, if you do not believe in aloe plant, then I know you don't live in the tropics (where sunburns and aloe plant are common place). Basically what I am saying is deniers have no personal experience with aloe plant and yet it is a very simple thing to test. So far everyone who denied I have asked refuses to acknowledge they have zero personal experience with aloe plant. The problem if what you call failure of proof, someone like me with over 30 years of personal sun care experience is called anecdotal evidence, and yet the people with no proof believe their gut. So I encourage you to get your own proof, not saying get a sunburn, but it is no more difficult to test than sunscreen itself in terms of obvious proof.
>Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
The very reason you have found evidence of aloe being dangerous is because as I said it binds to heavy metal toxins...not just in the human body but in the earth. Moreover, yes if it is grown in polluted areas it will show more signs of those heavy metals than other plants.
The present investigation shows that the A. Vera plant is effective and inexpensive adsorbent for the removal of Pb, Cd, Ni, Cu, Cr (III) and Cr (VI) from contaminated soil by heavy metals. See: http://biomedpharmajournal.org/vol9no2/removal-of-selected-h...
The aim of this study was to assess the accumulation of heavy metals (Na, K, Ca, Mg, P, Fe, Cu, Zn, Cd and Pb) in Aloe vera leaves grown in different geographical locations of India. The results also showed that Aloe vera plant can also be used as a good Phytoremediation agent as it absorbs heavy metals from the soil in high quantity. See: http://www.ansfoundation.org/Uploaded%20Pdf/22/300-304.pdf
General health benefits, including active ingredients and burn applications. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92765/
You don't need to live in the tropics to have a sunburn. I have had sunburn. My grandmother used to grow aloe. It's not magic and I'm not convinced it's at all better than other treatments for sunburn.
> someone like me with over 30 years of personal sun care experience is called anecdotal evidence
It is anecdotal evidence.
> The very reason you have found evidence of aloe being dangerous is because as I said it binds to heavy metal toxins...not just in the human body but in the earth.
Again, provide evidence of this. You're making baseless claims. The idea that aloe is healthy to consume and simultaneously unhealthy to consume because it absorbs heavy metals from the soil is fundamentally unsound.
Moreover, if aloe binds heavy metals in the body, then consumption of aloe would not release heavy metals into the body. Your health claim is based on the premise that it will bind to heavy metals but your reasoning for why aloe can be unsafe is that it will release metals rather than bind to them in the body. These are contradictory claims.
> The present investigation shows that the A. Vera plant is effective and inexpensive adsorbent for the removal of Pb, Cd, Ni, Cu, Cr (III) and Cr (VI) from contaminated soil by heavy metals.
In no way does evidence that aloe leaches metals from soil constitute evidence that aloe will bind to heavy metals in a human body. Wheat will pull nitrogen from the soil, but doesn't pull nitrogen from a human consumer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1313538/ CONCLUSION: Even though there are some promising results, clinical effectiveness of oral or topical aloe vera is not sufficiently defined at present.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/aloe/evidence/hr...
FWIW, a quick review on wikipedia indicates that there is no scientific consensus on the effectiveness of aloe in the treatment of burns.
Despite no scientific consensus of sunscreen, have you ever seen someone who forgot to apply sunscreen to a certain part of their body and its the only area that gets burned? That is one hell of a placebo.
Alternatively the same is true of aloe, you can witness people who already have a burn and apply aloe to certain areas and not others and the burn will clear up quicker and even potentially the skin will not peel where aloe was used and may peel where it was not utilized.
Now whether there is scientific consensus or not, if that is what you bring to the table, I will go out on a limb like I did with the parent post and say you have no personal experience using aloe plant for sunburn.
This seems trivially easy to test.
And it's harder to be sure about aloe from anecdotes. The question is not whether aloe does anything, the question at hand is whether it's better than any other kind of thickened water. Most people are not doing this comparison.
It would seem to me without scientific consensus and only the existence of promising claims, all we are left with is anecdotal evidence, and it is no coincidence to me, not a single person denying the benefits of aloe in the thread has any personal experience with aloe and sunburns. To be honest if I didn't have 30+ years living in tropical climate (e.g. getting sunburns) and experimenting with a number of after sun skin care products I wouldn't take a side one way or the other, but that doesn't seem to stop any ones else from apparently siding with their gut in the face of a lack of scientific consensus. Yet when I ask a simple question to be denying aloe benefits (have you used it?) I am bombarded with studies citing no scientific consensus.
>And it's harder to be sure about aloe from anecdotes.
Harder than what? If I told you sunscreen works and you called it anecdotal evidence and claimed sunscreen might do something but no more than thickened water (whatever that may be) it would be very easy to test correct? Rub sunscreen on half your body and the water solution on the other half and lay out in the sun. Well aloe is no different, lay out in the sun a little to long and get a burn, then rub aloe on one side of your body and water on the other half.
No, the thickened water comment was in reference to aloe, not sunscreen. As for what "thickened water" is, it's what it sounds like: water that has been thickened. Aloe gel is thickened water. Lotions are basically thickened water (often with some oil added).
There's no scientific debate about whether sunscreen prevents or reduces sunburn. It clearly does and it's not hard to find many studies demonstrating this. Wikipedia has several citations and you can find more without looking very far. e.g. There are piles of citations here: https://www.aad.org/media/stats/prevention-and-care/sunscree...
The question about sunblock is whether it actually prevents skin cancer, which is a much harder thing to test or prove. From what I can tell, the general consensus is still that sunblock use reduces the incidence of certain cancers.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_...
The scientific consensus is that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming, and that it is extremely likely (meaning 95% probability or higher) that this warming is predominantly caused by humans. It is likely that this mainly arises from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as from deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, partially offset by human caused increases in aerosols; natural changes had little effect
Now I understand the above can be both read fairly (i.e. similarly honey has antibacterial properties and has been used to treat wounds from ancient times through the Civil War) or unfairly (magical claims aloe is a cure all). Moreover, I am not claiming a single application is going to magically make a burn disappear. However, the same way one might continually apply neosporin, a burn cream and/or vitamin E to a burn to obtain certain benefits one might see similar benefits of those three from an aloe plant.
Certainly it is a lot more difficult to test the benefits of aloe on a grease burn rather than a sunburn where aloe can be continually applied in certain areas, sparingly in certain areas and not at all in others. Think of a sunscreen where someone uses sunscreen on half their body and nothing on the other half, then in reverse advertising aloe, by no means am I saying its a 1:1 but the difference would be no less noticeable.
Mostly Tylenol is administered as a placebo. Fake aloe is at least useful as a moisturizer.
http://www.neurology.org/content/48/1/103.short
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/10...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1526-4610.2006....
Also, whenever this happens, one should stop and consider:
"Why are we buying aloe vera products in the first place, when millions of people using the product for years are unable to detect that it's fake?"
If this happened with something tangible, say replacing all regular coke with diet coke without changing the labels, it would be noticed immediately.
Whenever people buy something which they are completely unable to differentiate from a fake, are they really being defrauded when someone sells them the fake?
Yes.
You are seriously confusing the placebo effect with ignorance of the expected effect.
It is fraud not because the user perceives the expected effect but because the user has been told that the perceived effect is the expected one.
Yes.
Edit: FTFA "There’s no watchdog assuring that aloe products are what they say they are. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t approve cosmetics before they’re sold and has never levied a fine for selling fake aloe." OK so I'm wrong, it's just market failure, the government isn't even involved in this.
In a way, we're getting the worst of both worlds. The lack of oversight from an unregulated environment with the consumer complacency of a regulated one. If we could downplay the amount of oversight on products, people might be more skeptical as consumers. Putting analytical technology or services in the hands of consumers would be even better.
In Australia we have the Australian Consumer Law which covers basics like, "It has to do/be/contain what it says it does," otherwise you get a refund or replacement.
I... don't know how anyone can survive without this most basic protection.
Surely there is a government department that covers product fraud? In the UK we have Trading Standards (and the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) [which might be a NGO?]) that would both be in part responsible to take action on the consumers behalf ... presumably there's some action needed in the UK now, can't imagine this is only in USA.
Mind you from the article it sounds like the fraud is in quantity of Aloe Vera added; that these products may have 1ppm of Aloe Vera or something??
I'm not convinced. Scandals don't scale. How many scandals per year do people actually have the attention and outrage to push through into action? 10? 100?
It's my opinion that we need regulation to set the ground rules of our interactions with companies, which will always ALWAYS be tempted to deceive us. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't spent 2 minutes in any corporate marketing department.
In a good legal system many small claims should be bought and then somebody could sue the company for money. This would be a superior version of a class action lawsuit. A version that is actually practical and would scale.
Its also not a new idea, there are historical examples of this.
This exists, it's called small claims court.
A organisation can not buy millions of claims from consumers and the fight a full class action lawsuit without any of these people being involve.
If you want to sue CVS for selling you fake aloe go ahead, it costs less than $100 to file a small claims case in my state and CVS will very likely settle with you outside of court because it's cheaper than sending someone to court to defend the company.
There are many other problems with the courts that make the system I proposed currently impossible.
Turns out it doesn't actually "expose the fiction of 'The Jungle.'" It cites "a 1906 report by the Bureau of Animal Industry" -- and nothing else. It then runs headlong into a classic libertarian diatribe against regulations.
And even if "The Jungle" /was/ pure fiction (instead of just fictionalize) -- readers didn't know that. And, despite their revulsion, the stockyards kept chugging along.
Working to some extent, right? There are whole categories of products that are heavily faked or adulterated.
So, best case nobody notices and they win, worst case someone notices and they still win. Much like large companies use 3rd party's to have undocumented people clean their toilets without being exposed to any real risks.
One possible libertarian replacement of courts are Stefan Molyneux's Dispute Resolution Organizations, but that's probably not the only way it could be done.
The regulation could say something like, products labeled "aloe vera" must contain mechanically extracted aloe vera without chemical alteration. I would guess that that's what most people who're trying to buy aloe vera are actually trying to buy. They're probably not trying to buy aloe vera with sugar added or with various additives replacing the aloe vera bits or whatever. (And isn't this who regulations are for? The buyers?)
People who want the sugary aloe vera could still buy it, but it'd have to be called something else. "Burn liniment with aloe vera in it somehow," maybe.
How would that burden manufacturers?
(By the way, I do agree with the libertarian angst around regulations, but mostly where those regulations are used as weapons against historically disadvantaged communities. Like the regulations around hairdressing that make people do some ungodly huge number of training hours to be able to braid cornrows for money. The law often gets crafted to keep poor folks or minorities down, and that pisses me off. Get rid of that shit yesterday!)
The libertarian ideal would see consumers lose that fake safety net in favor of private organisations finding and providing that information; the specific mechanisms would vary but likely be not very different than what the government does now. The important piece is that people would stop assuming that words on a package are imperically true.
It's a bit like the argument that Trump would have won the popular vote without the electoral college... because it existed, he campaigned differently than if it hadn't. Whether or not he actually could have gotten the popular vote is impossible to know at this point, but it's a hypothesis just the same.
The theory is that if the seal adds value to the product insofar as it accurately assesses some quality or standard of the product.
But it seems like the extent that copyright/trademark law is needed is still under debate. I think there's an argument that if you can own a parcel of land legally, you can probably own some data you produced, but there should be consideration for things like expiration date so it enters the public domain eventually.
For consumer goods, companies would hold each other accountable- no company would advertise "X approved" once X was discovered to commit fraud or otherwise misrepresent their reviews.
As for sibling comments on ratings agencies, I disagree.
On the one hand, ratings agencies alone were not solely to blame; though they were ill equipped to understand the complexity of the new structures. As a result, the big three settled at least 14 lawsuits, suffered stock losses and other harms.
Tell me, what can you do when the government fails? You can't sue the EPA when their inspectors accidentally cause a slurry retention pond to spill massive amounts of toxic waste. You can't sue the FDA when their safety inspections fail to catch conditions which allow spoilage and food poisoning. You can't sue the FDA when lobbyists push through unsafe medications.
Guess who you can sue for damages? Private organisations (until the government interferes even more by declaring them too big to fail)
>Many of the environmental statutes that govern EPA actions contain provisions that allow citizens to sue EPA when EPA fails to perform an act or duty required by the statue.
Right now there's a few lawsuits against the FDA to try to prevent them from regulating e-cigs.
First, the lawsuits against the FDA are for over extending their regulatory reach, not for incorrectly asserting the qualities of a product.
The note on the EPA is likewise allowing suits when it fails to act, not when it causes harm by acting. Even the Navajo lawsuit over the golden kings mine incident is based on years of neglectful oversight. The gold king mine corporation and some contractors are being named in the lawsuit for the actual damages.
Edit: for what it's worth, I'm not personally in favor of ending ALL regulation in favor of creating a market for ratings companies; there are plenty of places in the economy where it wouldn't work as well as others. I'm merely playing devil's advocate, since the question was asked. The best places for this sort of thinking are really limited to consumer goods, if that.
http://sippncorn.blogspot.com/2014/01/false-advertising-and-...
No they don't. They just have to compete for 'dollars', not 'consumer dollars'. Big industry will quite happily pay for favourable reports.
And seriously, who is going to individually pay for an inspector of a bottle of aloe? A big ticket item like a house, sure, but a cheap bottle of goo?
Libertarians have actually thought about this stuff quite a bit.
All society relies on a system of law. How this system is created or enforced is a seprete question. In almost all systems of law ever, there is a clause against fraud. Theirfore this company has defrauded everybody who has bought their product and therefore can be collectivly sued.
I must also mention that we have primitive collective suing systems in place. Many legal schooler have long advocated to change this.
It goes further then that, because the person that sold you the product and the producer might not be the same. The seller is also partially responsable and can be sued by the consumers, the seller must the sue the producer.
Its the same idea with river pollution, the lawcase goes up the river and expands.
As for discovering such cases. There are hole number of possible options if the options mentioned above are enforced.
First, there can be a commercial consumer group that finds error, the buys nearly wothless claims from lots of consumers and goes after the seller with those. This will pretty quickly have the effect that the seller has much more insentive to test himself.
Also you can have community no-profits doing this kind of things, that will make them seem less greedy.
Or his incentive is to run a fly by night operation that shuts down before it can be sued.
> Also you can have community no-profits doing this kind of things, that will make them seem less greedy.
This touches on one glaring problem with libertarian utopia. Their replacement for the evil gubmint is a host of other bureaucracies (giant consumer groups, a bunch of non-profits doing testing, insurance for everything, etc.) that presumably will have many of the same pathologies as the gubmint.
Which is kind of the point. Institutions can be functional or disfunctional. The only way to prevent disfunctional institutions bogging down the government is by not having the government run them in the first place.
The easiest way to deal with a dysfunctional institutions is by letting them die. Which is a lot easier when government is not involved.
Last but not least, there is also the element of freedom. One cannot opt-out of government and its institutions - without having to move or worse. While as proposed above - the possibility of opting out of institutions - is necessary for having any hope of not being stuck with corrupt institutions.
If, however - Oracle were a government institution - then it could leverage its monopoly over violence to get me to do its bidding - regardless of what I thought of its services.
And as one goes through history, one notices that most if not all of the institutions that governments provide - have started outside of government, yet have been included into the scope of government. Either because the ruling party at the time saw it as a means of expanding their reach OR because people have observed that it would be cheaper/more effective to run these institutions "collectively" - where the state pops up immediately as an endeavor that is already done for the "good of all".
Unfortunately - no institution is ideal. And as we have seen time and again through history, all institutions succumb to corruption eventually. And being stuck with corrupt institutions is no fun at all.
I have no idea, how you maligned my argument into the garbage you presented. But I would argue, that you are actually presenting an excellent case for striving towards preventing dishonest people such as yourself from getting power over others. Thus while you undoubtedly think yourself an edgy cynic - you are merely solidifying my point.
This kind of stuff happens every day between property owners. That's why we have things like zoning, permitting and environmental regulation. Nobody wants government intervention until their neighbor puts up a big ugly fence.
In my personal experience, I've been in disputes with government bureaucracy, and was able to get a reasonable resolution because we have elected representatives who care about constituent issues. I've also been party to disputes with large corporate bureaucracies, and your ability to push the needle as an individual is very limited.
If characterizing me as dishonest makes you feel good, go for it. But I'd return the favor by saying that like most libertarians, your position reflects an immature, self-centered and unsophisticated understanding of the world and how it works. I encourage you to take a few hours and study the history of how the negative outcomes of industrialization in 19th century America re-shaped societies thinking about regulation and property rights.
In response - your first post was snark and condescension. Now you are doubling down with vague anecdotes and sending me to "go educate myself".
How about showing some good will and trying to present a honest critique or counter argument in 1-3 sentences.
I accept that you are morally and intellectually superior - no need to exert yourself asserting your dominance. Now put up, please.
> Or his incentive is to run a fly by night operation that shuts down before it can be sued.
So what, you manufacture 10 bottles of creme and then vanish into the shadows?
Companies have a huge intensive to stay, establish partnerships, branding, funding and so on.
Also, I think the idea of legal person has gone to far. Im not against the idea of big cooperations but the legal system has clearly gone to far into the direction of none accountability (something that was actually often the case in common law legal systems).
> Their replacement for the evil gubmint is a host of other bureaucracies (giant consumer groups, a bunch of non-profits doing testing, insurance for everything, etc.) that presumably will have many of the same pathologies as the gubmint.
I have nothing against big organisations per se. That has never been my criticism of regulatory agencies.
The groups have much more intensive to actually provide value because they relay on people to be their costumer. Also, you have pluralism, different groups have different demands.
I honestly only care if stuff is not poisonous, and Im happy to pay for the lowest level of testing. I however don't really care if the meat is actually beef, Im fine with horse as long as it is tasty.
Other people, like vegans are willing to pay way more for exact information.
How about a suggestion that can make both of use happy? We keep the FDA, they do everything the do now, only that other products can still be sold, but they need to have a reasonably BIG label on it, that they are not FDA approved. We put a tiny tax on all products actually approved by the FDA to fund the FDA.
This way we the people who care about the FDA fund it. If you are not happy with that, how about we fund 50% of the FDA that way and the other 50% threw taxes? How about if its still fully tax funded?
Would that not make everybody at least reasonably happy?
Historically such system usually prove that the state is not needed, and rather then excepting that the state monopolises it.
Its like people are aching to be poisoned and die
This is in line with logos like the UL service mark or service marks indicating kosher products. Products that bear a service mark usually have to pay the mark owner a licensing fee for use of the mark, which may be partially recoverable with higher prices to the customer.
If people trust the FDA, they will look for their mark, and not buy products without it. Service mark counterfeiting would have to be dealt with through civil court cases.
This leaves the market open for a competitor to the FDA to service different consumer needs or for specific product categories.
Fly by night operations are already a problem on Amazon. Sure actual companies have an incentive establish themselves but fly by night operations aren't actual companies, their business model is dump and run.
There are ways we are already dealing with it, and we will continue to do so. I don't see what a state can do. If you want security always go to the same company that has done well by you in the paste.
It you want security you have to pay a little extra.
I don't see how a state can do more. If people are actually doing illegal stuff, then there is the policy, just as now.
That does not even cover the problem of if "people only buy from established companies" then how does any company ever become established?
Companies have huge incentives to act altruistically, but individuals within those companies sometimes have huge incentives to maximize short-term profits.
There's an asymmetry in the way companies and their employees operate. Employees can endanger the life of the company at a negligible-- or even negative-- cost to themselves. It's why banking executives might reward the opening of millions of fraudulent accounts, for example.
I've yet to see an example of a company that can completely prevent this problem. Given the lack of evidence, I have to continue to believe in regulations that protect consumers.
Each time there is a issue, there is a new movement for anther Basel. This time things will be different. But they are not. For some reason many people just keep yelling 'more regulation' without any evidence that they actually do or change much.
Yes, individuals do suboptimal things for the long term of the company, but I don't see a massive amount of cases were companies get created for a short time to defraud everybody and then leave. Every company has a intensive to set up a structure so that they can prevent this sort of stuff, its in the responsibility of the owner, who has the most to lose.
Interestingly enough Adam Smith had invested in a bank that went down. In this system you had companies with double exposure. That means that if you had a stock of a failing company you could lose the value of the stock plus pay that much into the bank.
This actually had the effect that banks when failing would try to fail early, now failing banks try to make high risk investments to get everything back and then ask for bailouts if it fails.
I would highly suggest you study historical bank systems. Compare the highly regulated US banking system (US banking was highly regulated from the very beginning, usually requiring a special charter, no branching and so on) to the hardly regulated banking system of Canada. During the Great Depression the US had about 3000 bank failures, Canada had 0-1 depending on how you count. Canada during that time did not have a central bank, but rather competitive note issue by a group of banks (the US had taxed this heavily during the Civil War and reduced it, then finally getting ride of it in 1913 with the Fed).
It must also be said that Canada suffered very heavily economically, but the banking system was stable. Canada was famed for its banking system on to this day have a far superior less regulated system. In the US many people actually wanted to adopt the Canadian unregulated system, but JPMorgan and friends did of course not want to lose their monopoly on the international market (small banks had to use a partner in New York).
You can also go back to England and Scotland. Scotland probably had the freest banking system that ever existed and it was one of the best performing system that we have historical evidence of.
Sure, with two small changes. One, we make the FDA tax progressive. Use whatever argument you like to justify this, like rich people's lives are more valuable, and therefore they can pay more to stay alive, but the key is that everyone will buy into the system in a way that they can both afford, AND be emotionally invested in.
Second, all non-FDA labeled products will have a MASSIVE tax applied, to pay for the externalized costs of bad food, such as emergency room visits, death, sickness, etc.
Of course we need a state to enforce this system, and it won't work any better than the existing one, but hey, it's a market solution!
> Second, all non-FDA labeled products will have a MASSIVE tax applied, to pay for the externalized costs of bad food, such as emergency room visits, death, sickness, etc.
That's another problem with government. Once it does everything, everything has effect on everything else. You can force any health measure on the population with the argument that others have to pay for you if you don't do something. You might as well require that everybody does mandatory sports and eat the state approved diet.
If you as a state want to make a commitment to universal health care then you have to accept people being people and doing unhealthy things. If you as a state don't want to do that, you have two options, don't do it or put a totalitarian policy state in place so people follow your rules.
Even so, there is no way to prove that these MASSIV externalisiere exist. That's simply your assertion. It could also be that these people are exactly the same on avg. It could be that because they abuse products they die faster and thus cost less money to the state.
> Of course we need a state to enforce this system, and it won't work any better than the existing one, but hey, it's a market solution!
You are contradicting yourself. Its not a market solution, its a state run system either way.
What this idea is about is testing if products that are not FDA approve really are worse in the longer term. Because if it turns out that it is the case that they are not, then we can just all agree to drop the FDA.
As long as the FDA has monopoly we have know way of knowing what there actual effects. Seems to me more people should care about stuff like that.
While we may not know exactly the actual effects of the FDA or any other governmental policy, we can have a pretty good idea. We do this via econometric analysis of countries with and without entities like the FDA. Ideally we can get time series data where a country created an FDA. We'd throw in a few control variables as well. Then we see the effects of the stuff like the FDA - and even if this isn't perfect, we'd know in general the likely effects of it.
The evidence shows that having an agency regulating drugs and food increases safety. For example, England had a massive issue with a drug which impacted their newborns. We didn't have the issue because the FDA rejected it for use.
>Even so, there is no way to prove that these MASSIV externalisiere exist Well, actually we can prove externalities exist via various quasi-experiments and math. That's kind of what economists do in order to justify intervening in a market. There are measurable externalities in healthcare - which are at least a certain size and probably larger.
Healthcare in general is interesting because of stuff like the herd effect. If someone takes a bunch of sub-par antibiotics and the bacteria they have evolve around that pill all of society is negatively impacted. The disease is more resistant (kills more people) and society needs to pay for a new antibiotic to be researched and produced. And we don't know what these potential adverse effects are initially - what if we accidentally expose a bacteria to enough weak anti-bacterial agents that it becomes immune and kills millions of people? What if a sub-par untested drug turns all of it's users into homicidal maniacs? Or, like England, we could have years of birth defects.
The companies usually don't know the risks either - because before the FDA medical tests were usually very rushed.
So, as a society we have two options to fix these externalities.
One was listed above: charge producers/consumers of poor drugs a tax equal to the costs they impose on society. The government would then redistribute the tax to injured parties. The problem here is in pricing the externaities properly. Also, how do we know what a poor drug is without testing them? We can't, so we'd have to tax all drugs the same. As a result, if we tax too high we have fewer drugs produced and society suffers. If we tax too low then bad drugs slip in and possibly we didn't guess the cost of compensating people properly. So we don't have enough to pay the widow of a man who took a pill and then died four minutes later.
The second option is to regulate away the possibility of poor drugs as much as is plausible. Here we don't need to guess at how much money the externalities would cost. We also don't need to figure out optimal tax rates to get new drugs produced. In the case of healthcare clearly regulation is the best way to deal with possible negative risks.
Case in point: try to sue anyone in Shenzhen for anything. Good luck finding who to sue first. And they build pretty much all our electronics.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/business/worldbusiness/...
That's actually what government is for. You pay it money, and if you have a good government it includes a branch to make sure consumers aren't ripped off/poisoned/injured/killed/etc.
Some governments, like the EU, are actually quite good at this.
A commercial consumer group can always be bought out, infiltrated, or threatened with bankruptcy by someone with superior spending power.
A government can only be taken over from the inside - often by those who pretend to support libertarian ideals, but in practice simply want to operate at various levels of criminality without challenge or oversight.
But a government can never be taken over completely. There are always people who believe that market forces are a naive and unworkable ideology, and are willing to work against their excesses. They have a natural role in government regulation, but no natural role in markets.
Im happy that you believe this. I however don't. So where does that leave us?
> You pay it money, and if you have a good government it includes a branch to make sure consumers aren't ripped off/poisoned/injured/killed/etc.
I pay the money because I don't really have the option to only pay for the government I like.
If you feel that way how about a tax on all products that are FDA approved that pay for the FDA. Other products can be sold with a stamp on it, not FDA approved.
> Some governments, like the EU, are actually quite good at this.
I would disagree.
> A government can only be taken over from the inside - often by those who pretend to support libertarian ideals, but in practice simply want to operate at various levels of criminality without challenge or oversight.
> But a government can never be taken over completely. There are always people who believe that market forces are a naive and unworkable ideology, and are willing to work against their excesses. They have a natural role in government regulation, but no natural role in markets.
I don't really understand your point.
Its defiantly not libertarians or people who claim libertarian ideals who create, run and push for more of these regulatory agencies.
At least, in the EU, manufacturers are held to a standard and are fined/prosecuted if they breach those standards. It's not an 'honor system' as bloomberg report. Lets face it, if there's an honor system, and you could buy maltodextrin powder instead of real aloe powder, the bulk of companies would probably do it to make a profit.
There is nothing about honor in the system that I want. If you are found to be fraudulent you should be suit for a lot of money. That money should go to the person/people sued you. Even better would be a system were you can make collective action law suits by buying up small claims.
In general such a tort based system is better because it does not require every product to go threw a cost adding regulatory step, reducing prices. Cost only happens if suit is needed, and in the waste majority of cases there will never be a case. Thus the overall system is cheaper, faster to market and gives the consumer more options.
I don't know anything about cosmetic regulation, this applies to all consumer product regulation equally. Im happy to trust you on this. I am not impaling that all regulators are bad, or always wrong and Im not saying that the US system is better then the European one. I probably rather have the EU system, but Im happy to stay in the Swiss system for now :)
This is not true. What they are trying to ensure is that you buy what you think you are buying and it is reasonably safe. If for example you want to buy a fake aloe product you can, it is just not allowed that it says aloe on the packaging.
> There is nothing about honor in the system that I want.
The honor system in this case means that the company is responsible for controlling itself and not defrauding consumers. They can still decide not to obey it and there is always the possibility that someone might check.
See public transportation in many cities as an example. You don't need to prove that you bought the ticket to get on the bus (the company trusts you), but if someone checks you pay a fine. I would say that this is not very far from what you want.
> If you are found to be fraudulent you should be sued for a lot of money
Well the problem with this is the "if" and the "when". It might take years for the fraud to be discovered and not all damages are easily fixed with compensation money (e.g. medical problems may arise). There is also no way to make sure that the money is recovered. Companies do go bankrupt. For the managers of a company, a 5% chance of a company-killing lawsuit in the next 10 years may even be worthwhile, if the profit is high enough and they (personally) can get away with it. And then there are those companies that are too big to fail anyway (too many workplaces lost, too many people directly affected, etc.)
> consumer more options
I'd rather have two options for which I am fairly certain that they are safe and not fake, than ten or twenty that could be anything. Leaving the checking to private initiatives and/or self-control is at least blind optimism. The incentives are not really there. At best it will be done only for things where the potential for large compensation sums is high.
In other words, it's not black-or-white, just like any other political ideal. If the world operated on such a strict "Libs/Dems/Cons must only do exactly what their parties' ideals say" then we wouldn't have had Obama's administration targeting innocent civilians with drone strikes, and Bush Jr. wouldn't have increased federal spending by 60% during his term.
Also, with more clear marketing and without unfair advantages, competing products and companies should be able to enter the market.
It only takes five minutes to setup a shell company under a false name, sell your toxic waste to it for $1 (or some amount that "looks real") and just dump it all under the new company's name.
You can't really sue to recover damages in such a situation and you can't assume that a paper trail will be accurate or even kept.
You could hold the people at the tail end of the pipeline responsible but they may have been deceived as well. Also, what do you do when it's all robots?
Also in cases such a pipelines and rivers, everybody can sue the person higher up and you will eventually arrive at the source.
For rivers this system has actually worked quite well. River property rights system were quite common in Britain and in the US. There is also direct comparison of rivers without such system and rivers with such system, and the property rights based once were much cleaner.
This of course changes when we are talking about dumping in the ocean. That another problem.
Also if somebody dumps huge amounts of waste on your property, or waste flows threw your river, then you have a intensive to go to court.
Also, in a well designed legal system you can do much better. Take the river example. If I don't like the waste flowing threw the river but I don't care all that much since I just use it as a cooling source, I might never bother to actually sue.
However if somebody wants to make a water sports related thing, he has a huge incentive to sue. So he sues the guy who uses the water for cooling. The cooling guy will say, he 'its not my waste, how about I give you my legal claim'. In some cases you might sell the legal claim for money.
The cooling guy improves his situation and makes a small amount of money for little effort and then does not have to be involved anymore. The water sports guy now has double the incentive to win the lawsuit, because if he wins he has two claims.
This is actually historically quite common. Most of the time you don't do much yourself, you just hand of your claims for a specialist.
Courts can't solve everything and they certainly can't prevent a great many things. Especially when there's such a simple way to avoid responsibility (shell corporations).
You're basically giving a company who is tanking permission to do whatever the fuck they want. Companies bankrupt and go out of business all the time.
There's going to be enforcement no matter what. I'd rather be proactive than reactive.
Shell companies are an artifact of how government courts assign legal liability. As courts would work differently in a libertarian society, unethical and criminal actors would almost certainly have different circumvention methods, tailored to the established rules of each different system. It's like asking how libertarians would deal with patent trolls. Patent trolls are an artifact of the existing system. They would not exist in the same form under a different system. The people who currently operate patent troll businesses would still exist, and they would undoubtedly still be opportunistic locusts, but threatening some other crop.
So how do you stop clever assholes from committing a series of offenses without meaningful consequence, in any system of civilization?
Most libertarian schools of thought are very heavily dependent on public reputation systems. A shell company with no established reputation, and no reputable person to vouch for it, would likely be entirely unable to rent or buy the boat or truck necessary to perform significant quantities of dark-night dumping in a manner that is not easily traceable.
And no matter how many fictitious name intermediaries you have, eventually a warm body has to do the dirty deed. If you can catch that guy in the act, you can hold him personally responsible unless he can provably pass the buck to someone else to share his blame.
In any case, I'm not certain how useful it is to say that libertarian theory does not solve a problem that is already not effectively addressed by existing social systems.
What if all of civilization is one giant scam?
The easiest way would be: No corporations. If the owners of a business are liable for the debts of that business, then they will have much more of an incentive to behave themselves.
Granted, I'm not a libertarian, but I can't see how the concept of corporations (a government entitled class of investors with special privileges) could emerge under libertarianism.
I also suspect that without corporations, businesses would be a lot smaller, limited to whatever the owners can personally monitor and control.
Even despite the recent election results, I still have faith that society would not voluntarily accept an ideology that necessitates a cataclysmic drop in prosperity. Thus, a "libertarian" society would probably accept at least a bare minimum number of liberal institutions.
Ideal libertarianism is like ideal communism and - like every other ideal concept - works perfectly in theory, falls flat on its face in reality.
That's exactly what I said: In other words, it's not black-or-white, just like any other political ideal.
Your argument is simply terrible.
"Assume bad player wins, other players have to go along"
I could make the same argument for any system. It would still have no argumentative value.
Edit: I broke my own rule, and hadn't finished the article. They are being sued. Hopefully if the facts hold up, the case succeeds. This seems like something that should have criminal punishment as well for the supplier.
Tim Meadows, president of Concentrated Aloe Corp., said that nuclear magnetic resonance isn’t reliable for cosmetics because the presence of multiple ingredients can cause interference and there’s no way to test for aloe in finished products. He added that maltodextrin isn’t an adulterant because it can be used in the drying process, and while some ways of processing aloe remove acemannan, that doesn’t mean the aloe isn’t real, he said.
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In other words, we don't really know the answer here and if consumers just ran to the nearest courthouse over every perceived slight in this Libertarian utopia, expect questionable jury settlements to be the norm, much like how our East Texas patent courts seem to have outcomes that are near random and demand settlements sometimes in the billions of dollars. I don't think "run to court" should be our first instinct here.
It is theoretically possible to perform organic synthesis with petroleum feedstocks to produce an artificial chemical mixture indistinguishable from natural aloe juice. But that would not be aloe, either. It would be imitation aloe. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about imitation products, provided they are not presented in commerce as the genuine article. It might, after all, be an inferior and imperfect imitation, which would not be acceptable to consumers at the same prices.
The important issue is that people may believe that the bottled product is substantially similar to cutting a leaf from an aloe plant and squeezing out the juice from it. It is whether they are getting what they thought they paid for. If no chemical can be found in the product that can only economically be sourced from an aloe plant, clearly, the consumer has been cheated.
If you do, then your takeaway from this article would be that the system is basically working as intended, at least so far.
If you don't, then you must be in favor of getting rid of the current jury system in favor of something else. What are your thoughts on how the replacement institution(s) should work?
Once we actually have suspicion the court or some private person can find another way to prove it. Since proving such a thing might be very value, there is lots of Incentives to do it. Whistle blowing might be interesting in this context.
One could also just look at their production, ask former employees and so on.
Does not seem impossible to handle.
Or we could decide that it's in our collective best interest to hold companies to certain standards and avoid frivolous lawsuits?
Politics exists on a spectrum. It is possible to be pro business but also have a strong state that acts in the best interests of its population. A government is meant to represent the people ("by the people, for the people")...
This was in the top Google results for "best countries to do business in" - http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings
New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Norway, UK, USA, Sweden, Macedonia, Taiwan, Estonia, and Finland were the top results. Most of those have a healthy government.
Also its incredible difficulte to design these standard. Its almost impossible to remove bad ones because the burocracy has a clear interest in having asany as possible.
There is a clear insentive for regulatory capture. If you do it the libertarian way you just have universal courts that are much harder to be captured by interest groupes.
This system is superior to regulation because once you have, you have little ongoing cost. New products don't have built in extra cost as it would in a regulatory system and only if somebody bother to actually sue that person, one would have to spend money.
The money spent on the investigation is largly spend privatly. This means that the investigation is done effectivly, while a burocracy usually has the opposite insentive.
Also,any of the countries you mentioned are some of the most libertarian in the world. Look at the economic freedom index (doing buissness index is part of that).
Here's a good start: If your product doesn't contain enough of X, you can't call yourself X.
That's why ice cream that is not real ice cream is called 'frozen dairy dessert' and cheese that's not cheese is a 'cheese product'.
I'm not for regulating all the products, but I'm also not going to carry a MRI scanner around and determine exactly what is what.
The system that actually exists and many people here want is that every new product has to go threw a state facility that does testing and finds errors. Such a system actually exists and performs badly.
If a system of law is in action you can trust what you buy because you have trust that mass products are at least up to a minimum of standard. Sure, such a system probably does not find every detail. No system is perfect, a law based approach is generalized and low cost.
This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court. Thousands of people shouldn't become addicted to or overdose from their laudanum infused snake oil. Children shouldn't have to die because their food, medicine or toys have easily prevented, harmful or deadly flaws. That was the norm before the FDA. People have a history of harming others for their own gain. Gone unchecked, it will happen regularly because the market will allow it. That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.
> That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.
We have regulatory agencies because somebody thought regulatory agencies were a good idea. That something exits, is not prove that it works. Its not like these agencies get closed when they are doing a bad job.
Generally these bureaucracies just keep growing and attempting to ever increase the amount of detailed regulation in order to justify higher budget.
This is basic, well documented and tested political economy.
> This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court.
I have argued in other posts that the legal system is what is most important. In the case of the US the class action lawsuit has lots of problems, legal scholars and legal historians have designed and found much better ways of doing it.
Also, lets not ignore the millions of people who did because of the FDA. They have (actually had) a long history of waiting a long time to let dying people have medicine. In some cases they band useful medicine.
There is a hole history of such things that is often ignored.
This is pretty much the libertarian solution: let the market handle it, maybe someone with the means to will care enough to look into it. Millions of people applied a mystery gel to their skin, some in an attempt to treat an ailment, for what could be years or decades.
I believe that the most important thing to regulate is transparency itself. It is almost as if market regulation as we know it causes gaps in regulation in other parts of the market, and things like this happen. The consumer should be able to verify the complete supply chain of every product they purchase.
The way I see it, the transparency itself would probably need to be regulated. If an organizition is not following transparency requirements, regulators sanction or whatever that particular organization. I have no idea what that would look like or how it would be implemented. That is still a long ways a way.
The market has decided that opaqueness is acceptable because consumers are uninformed and transparency is not required. The market has taken advantages of holes in regulation.
I believe a free market is the ideal market, but the only way it is ideal is if it is completely and truly transparent. Regulation exists in part because of lack of transparency. If the market was transparent, it would (in theory) regulate itself.
I'm curious on your thoughts of what sorts of things market forces incetivize that are negative, I'm just trying to get a slightly better grasp of some of those things.
Clearly we are not ready for an economy like this yet. But someday. I honestly think transparency plays a huge role in humanities survival. Maybe I'm crazy, who knows.
In other words - start with a perfect, transparent market with full and unbiased information available to all participants. Press the "Play" button. What happens? How soon will the market degrade itself, eschewing transparency and perfect information, because it's a more optimal point in the state space? Personally, I predict this is exactly what will happen.
The FBI and DOJ probably would not go anywhere any time soon... removing certain limits on class action and civil suits would be a start combined with truth in labelling and marketing regulations. Reducing IP protections and trade secrets would help too... as well as transparency requirements. Civil suit, with enforcement action if non-compliance would be a start.
Like I said, I'm pretty pragmatic about it, but would prefer to move towards more civil action, and less govt.
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Also, lets be real... even with more libertarians elected, the bulk of the govt won't be thrown out any time soon... but the goals should be, minimizing govt, encouraging competition and transparency. This can be done through more strategic legislation.
This sounds more like Goldwater Republican ideals than the libertarianism I've been exposed to.
What you propose is not efficient and no consumer would want to pay for this level of information, thus it would not happen.
The important thing is that if somebody claims something that is not true, its fraud, he can be sued, during a lawsuit investigation have to be made to verify and judge the case.
Voluntary groups could start labeling products that have all information available. Shops could require producers to do it.
There are many ways a free society can handle these problems. We don't know exactly what would happen, but we have lots or reason to assume that something along these lines would happen.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. --Robert Louis Stevenson
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. --whoever
if we were in the libertarian ideal, we would scoff at the fact that we hadn't chosen a brand vetted by the consumer product testing lab that we're obviously already subscribed to.
and practically directly contradicting you claim is the fact that a private entity is what unveiled this mishap, no government involvement. ,
It's common here(in the US) for "Greek yogurt" to mean Greek-style yogurt, and we would all ask "why!?" when confronted with that regulation. However, when you read stories like this - maybe that kind of regulation is needed. I've been buying aloe from walmart/target/etc for ages, and always assumed that the ingredient list wasn't a lie - now I realize that is not always true.
edit: typo
Among other things it was one of the point of contention regarding CETA/TTIP.
What I am talking about is that every product in EU has to be what it says on the label - so Greek yoghurt has to be from Greece. French wine has to be from France. Apple juice has to contains apple juice, not just apple flavouring, etc etc.
In short, we don't need laws limiting what you can call things, with regard to country of origin, as long as product labels clearly indicate the country of origin. I know full well the $1.00 Chobani "Greek yogurt" isn't actually made in Greece, but some Greek-named expensive yogurt at the fancy grocery store I can guess probably is, and then after checking the label a bit more closely and seeing "Product of Greece" or "Made in Greece", I know it is.
Now, if some lotion says "Aloe Vera Lotion", I expect it to be made with real aloe. I really shouldn't have to check the ingredients list (if it even has one; it's not a food so I'm not sure that's required).
As for your yogurt example, perhaps it's because it's less important to those of us who live really far from Greece. It might not even be desirable to have yogurt that was shipped halfway around the world!
Is it yogurt made from Greek people? Is it yogurt made by a Greek company located in Spain? Yogurt made from Greek dairy, outside of Greece? Yogurt made in Greece from Italian milk? Yogurt made in Greece from Greek milk, but in the Australian style? I can think of all kinds of reasons folks half a world away would care much more about what style the product is, than would care about where, precisely, it was produced.
Of course, when you're in a trade union with a country that has a vested interest in having a monopoly on a product, obviously they're going to be pushing semantics in order to come out on top.
For those of us not so close to Greece, having to call it Greek-style yogurt is just more word soup. (also, this happens all the time in the US; the 'Greek' would be written really large and then 'style' in much smaller letters)
OTOH, it's pretty clear-cut in the case of a product that claims to contain a natural ingredient, but have none of it, and not even have any semblance of the benefits of the actual product.
(I always thought "Greek" was a style of yogurt.)
I'd argue this isn't true. Greek yogurt has distinct style and ingredients which, when I buy Greek yogurt, I expect in my yogurt. Anything else is not what I want to spend my money on. It's like feta cheese. Real feta cheese is made from sheep's milk and not cow. It's completely different if made from cow's milk (not the same taste nor texture).
"French wine" -> everyone would assume it was actually made in France
I don't know if there's a hard rule that anyone can come up with about this sort of thing.
As a counterexample, these "Greek yogurt" [1], "Turkish yogurt" [2] and "Yogurt of Bulgaria" [3] are all definitely made in Finland.
[1] http://www.valio.fi/tuotteet/jogurtit/valio-kreikkalainen-jo...
[2] http://www.valio.fi/tuotteet/jogurtit/valio-turkkilainen-jog...
[3] http://www.valio.fi/tuotteet/jogurtit/valio-bulgarian-jogurt...
If a yogurt was labeled as "made in Greece" then it would be expected it came from Greece and would be pretty uniformly agreed as fraud / false advertising if it was learned the yogurt wasn't made in Greece.
You have the "freedom" to test Aloe Gel.
Did you actually read the article before you posted this comment? You do understand that these findings were brought to light by Bloomberg, a private organization, and not by a government agency, right?
This is a flawless example of libertarian market regulation in action.
Unfortunately it's true that there will be some "collateral damage" before fraudulent dealings come to light. But the only sure way to avoid it would be to bind the market with so much regulatory red tape that nothing new would ever be created. This is why we have one set of regulations for people looking to sell hand cream, and another for people looking to build nuclear power plants.
The idea behind modern democratic government is quite literally that this isn't true and that an organization that holds people's lives in its hands must be accountable to those people in a fair and equitable way. I have a vote in government. I do not have any reasonable sway over the behaviour of a multibillion dollar corporation. In so far as I place my trust in any organization (which I believe is prone to corruption), I place it in the one I have more voice in.
Sounds like Benjamin Franklin would agree, at least superficially. ("Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.") But if you read a little more carefully, what he's really saying is that a free society depends on the sort of people who don't need an immensely powerful government to micromanage their lives.
... and that an organization that holds people's lives in its hands must be accountable to those people in a fair and equitable way.
Which it is. Have you read the article?
I have a vote in government. I do not have any reasonable sway over the behaviour of a multibillion dollar corporation. In so far as I place my trust in any organization (which I believe is prone to corruption), I place it in the one I have more voice in.
Yes, I think we've all seen how much of a "voice" we have in government.
My voice may be limited in government, that still doesn't mean the alternatives are better. If you want to convince me otherwise have at, but aimless disappointment doesn't make things better.
And as a Canadian, I feel that it is pretty reasonable.
Maybe governments can only be effective at a certain scale. But also, some systems are more effective than others. And also "how much of a voice I feel I have in government" is a group-psychology question that is difficult to consider objectively.
shrug!
Government is not automatically fair and equitable because you vote. That's 1 grade level analysis.
> I do not have any reasonable sway over the behaviour of a multibillion dollar corporation.
Actually that is false. You spend all your money and you can choice not to spend on any particular object. For many companies, your $$$ are a bigger share of their profits then the share of your vote (consider that lots of products you buy are from the same company).
Additionally, something that you ignore, is that you share most of the same demands with all other consumers of the same product. While with voting you have totally different needs.
Plus, you can vote only a very limited amount of times and you have to consider 1000s of issues to consider. Can you tell me what the presidential candidates positions on Souther California Bean subsidy program are? Did you no that this program existed?
Government spends about 30-50% of the GDP and you get to vote a couple of times per year at most. While with the rest of your money, you are literally making more choice every day.
Lets get back to the shared interest point. All buyers of a product the same demand for correct labeling, good quality and so on. Thus collective action happens automatically without coordination. In case of fraud collective action is far easier as well. Coordination for collective action is also possible in the form of legal action.
What do you do if the FDA does you wrong? Send out letter of complaint?
Just imagen if all the products you want to consume in the next 4 years, you get two shipping containers and you have to pick one. Neither of the containers has much you like in it, but if you don't pick you will just get one at random. Also when you pick one, about 50% of the time you will not get that one anyway. Have fun eating eating vegan gluten free hamburgers the next year.