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.
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.
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.