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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

How Bad Government Policy is Fueling the Infant Formula Shortage

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/05/13/how-bad-government-poli...

Not only is this pretty thin and not really recognizing the main issues aren’t government-created, it’s a libertarian rag trying to blame the government when private industry on their own puts out contaminated formula. If this isn’t exactly the kind of problem that shows why a pure libertarian position can go wrong, I don’t know what is.

> not really recognizing the main issues aren't government-created

Quote from the article:

"Bad U.S. policy surely didn't cause the infant formula crisis, but it just as surely made the situation worse than it needed to be."

Much of the article seems to be making the argument that the FDA is preventing importation of formula from other nations during the crisis because the FDA hasn't done all its bureaucratic work wrt certification of those sources. This seems a relevant point to raise when we're talking about food shortages for infants.

And why is the FDA preventing imports? From the article, because the dairy industry convinced the previous POTUS to do so. It’s not like the FDA just decided out of thin air to ban Canadian formula - the decision was made higher up.

Which isn’t to say the current POTUS shouldn’t tell them to relax that rule. They should. I’m objecting to laying so much blame on the FDA - our federal agencies are acting on laws and policies enacted by our politicians.

That was a terrible thing for Trump to do but now we have a different POTUS who is (supposedly) not beholden to the dairy industry, yet it's not been changed.

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