He argues that the FDA did more harm than good, and that society would be better off without a governmental supervision for health care in general.
-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6t-R3pWrRw
btw, in the end he makes a strong argument for negative income tax. This surprised me, as my model of his world-view was apparently more simplistic that it ought to be.
FDA also love stating that they prevented a drug that causes birth defect a while back unlike Britain.
Another example of government regulation working is cars. Death relating to car crashes have fallen every year with safety regulations.
It's not perfect but there are many cases that it works and there are laws and rules set in place.
The free market is not the panacea for everything.
Things like truck under-ride guards likely wouldn't be on commercial trucks if they weren't regulated. Consumers aren't going to all voluntarily coordinate to buy vehicles which have crash-compatible bumper heights. Antibiotic misuse would be even more out of control if it weren't regulated.
Mexico is a good example for road regulations. They do not have the same crash regulations as the US, and many old model vehicles are still legal for sale there. Things like the 1950's VW Beetle were still sold there into the 2000s. They have the highest death rate per distance traveled in the world.
Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" advised Augusto Pinochet in Chile and used his dicatorial powers to ram through changes into the Chilean economy. I don't think Friedman is someone to admire.
It is willful or reckless ignorance to believe that the absence of the FDA will not have serious consequences. There already exists a segment of the drug industry that is nearly completely unregulated by the FDA, as a matter of law. I am of course speaking of the health or dietary supplements. And the experience here does not bode well: there are a sheer number of "miracle" pills and cures that come out of it, unhelpfully promoted by snake oil salesmen like Dr. Oz. And investigations have found that many companies can't even be bothered to put the active ingredients into their products.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not arguing for or against here, I just stated another option - so thanks for that downvote whoever the lazy person was did it.
Libertarian logic I guess...
And this creates multiple points of competition, unlike regulation which is somewhat anticompetitive. Transparency, efficacy, cost, reviews in the age of the internet, all combine as a form of emergent regulation which may outperform explicit agencies in some cases.
Committees Of Concerned Citizens On The State Of Toothpaste will pop up and dissolve like mushrooms, some of them funded by this or that corporate interest, some being incompetent to evaluate state of anything, and the rest drowned in all the noise.
Emergent anything only works if there is an explicit external force pushing things towards a specific organization or a set of laws of nature that produce outcome you happen to find satisfactory.
I guess your point was that current state is worse than that already, and that's a valid point, although I don't think this is the case.
The Libertarian capacity for ignoring Chesterton's Fence is nothing short of astonishing. Free markets require free information - the FDA was created in large part to enforce accurate labeling.
It turns out we can directly compare pre-1962 FDA with the current FDA and find strong harms outweighing any benefit of the current regime.
If all the FDA did was "enforce accurate labelling", they wouldn't be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from delayed approval of drugs. Maybe that's not the part people are complaining about.
I find this kind of motte-and-bailey stuff ubiquitous in discussions with libertarians, as the "philosophy" amounts to anarchy which most people realize is bad.
Anyway, the Milton Friedman talk linked explicitly mentions the same beta-blockers example as my link discusses and cites it as causing tens of thousands of deaths. He says it's been a disaster over "the last 20 years" - the talk was in 1978, so this is roughly the 1962-1978 period. And the "governmental supervision for health care" mentioned is broader than the FDA.
Drugs quality testing could also conceivably be performed by a non-government regulatory agency (e.g. Underwriters Labs)
--Ron Paul, noted libertarian and advocate for the abolishment of the FDA, who is apparently ironically ignorant of the phenomenon of "snake oil".