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Yes, it's against their will. The people dying because the FDA doesn't let them access lifesaving treatments that are available in other countries are not committing suicide. They are dying because doctors and pharmacists would go to prison if they tried to save their lives. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to live and would have lived if they lived elsewhere, or if the FDA did not have the power to stop them from accessing treatment.

I'm sorry for what happened to your sister. As I said earlier, the US health insurance system is extremely dysfunctional. I do however think you are grossly overestimating the effectiveness of contacting members of Congress. They neither have any reason nor any ability to help with the FDA or most other things. I doubt most members of Congress could even do anything (except travel aboard) to save their own life if they needed a drug the FDA had not approved, and they did not qualify under the very limited right-to-try law (that was still a step in the right direction).

Unless you are wealthy enough to compete with the pharmaceutical companies that lobby to maintain the current rules, you can have no real influence over the FDA. You might as well write the insurance company's shareholders, and get the same polite version of "no, we like money" back.

No, I'm not a fan of something just because it's a market. A market is a morally neutral concept.

I don't think Somalia is an example of when states get out of the way. I think it's an example of one extremely bad state collapsing and being replaced by many less (but still very) bad states fighting each other in a civil war. It was however a significant net improvement, and I'm glad Barre's regime collapsed, even if it lead to more piracy.

I don't think Somalia can properly be considered to have been stateless, but as you seem to think so, maybe you can explain why life expectancy, immunization, birth weight, infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, access to sanitation, access to at least one health facility, extreme poverty, access to radios, telephones, and TVs, and fatality due to measles all improved after the fall of Barre's government?[0]

Somali privacy is extremely profitable because of the geography and shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden, and the pirates certainly operate on a market system, even if they don't respect outsiders property rights. It's not like the US government does either. The people who have their homes destroyed by the US military have no more chance of getting compensation than the owners of cargo hijacked by Somali pirates. If we also consider governments use of asset forfeiture, taxation, fines, licence fees, etc. I think it becomes a little ridiculous to focus on the Somali pirates. There are more piracy in the Gulf of Guinea anyway, so why single out Somalia?

[0]: https://www.peterleeson.com/better_off_stateless.pdf

I don't think the FDA has saved nearly as many people as it has killed, but it's going to be impossible to get good statistics on either variable. "Saving" someone against their will is not a good thing, so even if the FDA had saved more people than it killed, it wouldn't justify its coercive powers.

I agree that the medical insurance industry in the US is extremely dysfunctional (in large part because of regulations), but people have much more recourse when they are harmed by an insurance company compared to a government agency. I doubt more people die as a result of insurance companies decisions compared to the FDA's decisions. I can't find a good estimate for the number of deaths caused by insurance companies, one study from 2009 estimated 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage in the US (these would be more comparable to those who die because of the FDA because they similarly lack recourse)[0], this is probably much lower than the FDA's death toll. FDA was also likely a contributing factor in the deaths of many of those who died due to lack of health coverage because the FDA's licencing costs and the slow and arbitrary way it processes applications are a significant reason for the high drug prices in the US.

[0]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...

There are many different kinds of laws that are supported under the banner of "right to repair", even some that I support, such as limitations to IP, even though I'm generally very sceptical to any proposal that is advised as "pro-consumer" as such proposals are usually intended to help prevent competition and allow big and established companies to form and maintain oligopolies.

Sure, a group of experts is generally more likely to make a good decision when an objectivity good decision can be made (which is often not the case because individual preferences vary). If however, that group is able to enforce its will by violence, it will probably make worse decisions because it has no incentives to make good decisions, and corruption can give it incentives to make bad ones.

The defining characteristic of the state in this situation is undoubtably it's capacity for violence. That is what creates the entire situation. If it were not for the state's superior capacity for violence, it would not be able to enforce its decisions by violence, and everyone would be free to decided whom to trust. To describe the state as "representing the collective will and interest of the people" is simply incorrect. Even if the state represented the will of the majority, it would be wrong to equate the majority of people who live in a particular place with all the people who live in that place. Just as might doesn't make right, neither does being more numerous. In reality, the state doesn't even represent the interest of the majority of people, but only a tiny fraction of people with sufficient wealth to lobby effectively.

Even if you had a hypothetical state that only existent to enforce the will of the many on the few, such a state would probably be wrong more often than an individual because while the wisdom of the crowd can work, it can be easily undermined under conditions I think would be inevitable in such a scenario[0]. A million people who can't tell the difference between psychology and psychoanalysis won't be able to choose between electing a psychologist or a psychoanalyst, any more than they can choose between believing a psychologist or a psychoanalyst. The only difference is that under the majoritarian model, everyone is forced to accept the choice of the majority.

The situation I described happens all the time. It's the rule, not an exception. The link I posted includes several examples. The FDA has become a little better in the last few years, but it continues to kill people by refusing to allow them access to drugs and medical devices. Here is a more recent article specifically about the delay in approving the covid vaccines: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/fda-delays...

This is not primarily about people who diagnose themselves, although they should have the right to do that as well. It's about people who are diagnosed by a doctor who knows how to help them, but would go to prison if they tried. Often the drug has been used in other countries for years, and the company has simply not paid the FDAs exorbitant licence fees. One example from the link I posted in an earlier comment:

> Pharmacologist William Wardell concluded that the five year delay in allowing the hypnotic Nitrazepam to be used in America (after Britain’s approval) cost 3,700 lives. He believed that the FDA also cost thousands of lives by preventing the sale of the first beta‐ blocker Propranolol for three years after it was available in Europe, and another seven years before it could be used for its most useful purposes. Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) figured the annual beta‐ blocker toll at 17,000. Overall, he wrote, “as many as 100,000 people may have died waiting for FDA to act.”

[0]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1008636108

Market-like structures predate humanity[0], nobody invented or created markets. States only exist because of force. The state is literally the warlord who won, so it's you who are pro-warlord.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-biological-markets/

Under the "opt-in regulation" system, a requirement could be to have insurance or other contingencies, but I think the main problem here is that it's proprietary. If it was open-source, I think anyone would have been able to take over and provide updates.

It depends on how burdensome they expect the law to be. Apple did decide to comply with the USB-C law, but I'm sure there are hypothetical laws they would not comply with. In such a case, I expect apple would be willing to spend enough money lobbying against the law to make sure it never becomes law in a large market. I'm not sure who lobbied against and in favour of the USB-C, or who is harmed and helped by it.

Of course I'm against the war on drugs. I'm not a fan of industrial pollution, whether it's regulated or not.

No, I don't think the state should play any role in making markets, in this case or others.

That's frankly a ridiculous straw man. A person can likewise not have enough knowledge, understanding, or time to make informed choices for other's survival. The difference is that when someone makes the wrong choice about their own survival, they die. When someone makes the wrong choice about other people's survival, other people die.

Nobody is arguing against listening to experts or using processes to make safety decisions. I'm just saying that you should not enforce your judgement on other people. I don't object to the state or anyone else making recommendations or to other people following them. Everyone is ultimately responsible for deciding whom to trust. If you trust the state, you should be free to defer to their judgement, as you will be the one to pay the ultimate price if you are wrong. If I trust some other organization, I should be free to do the same. The state's ability to enforce its judgement by means of violence doesn't make it more likely to be correct. Might dosen't make right when it comes to science or individual trade-offs.

If I'm in the shop buying shampoo, I can look for the name or logo of an organization that I trust to determine the safety of products. If I need a medical product that the FDA has not approved, and I'm unable to travel aboard? What I'm I supposed to do? Die like thousands of people before me[0]? Is that just "Tough luck buddy" to you because your ideology is more important than my life and freedom?

[0]: https://www.cato.org/commentary/end-fda-drug-monopoly-let-pa...

I don't support state enforced "truth in labelling", but if a company can lie to the state in order to put "cancer-free" on the label, it can also lie to the state in order to put banned carcinogens in the product.

I would support allowing companies to opt in to regulation (and pay the full cost of it) and only allow companies that have opted in to claim to be regulated by the relevant agency. That way, those who trust the state can choose to only use things the state has approved and no-one else will be harmed when the state is wrong.

My reason for my first sentence is my last sentence, which I do hold as self-evident. I probably think it's wrong to take choice away from individuals and give it to the state, in part for a similar reason you think it's wrong to take choice away from individuals and give it to me.

You are assuming they would sell a version of their product the state want them to sell (and that such a version would give you more options), rather than not sell it at all. That's not necessarily true. There are many products that are not available in different countries because they are incompatible with various regulations.

Replacing consumer choice with state choice leads to less freedom for the consumer. There are often trade-offs that need to be made with regard to the repairability of a product (e.g. a phone's thickness / water resistance / ability to replace the battery), and for the state to interfere in those decisions by force leads to fewer options for the consumer.

Additionally, we should keep in mind that the state has no incentive to help consumers, as they don't have the resources to lobby effectively. I think "right to repair" laws are primarily about helping some companies at the expense of their competitors and customers.

The state telling people they have to be blind or move to a different country is unquestionably controlling their bodies. The FDA kills thousands of people by not letting them access drugs and medical devices. I cannot understand wanting more of that. Even if we ignore the consequences, it's simply wrong for anyone to override a consenting adult's choices over their body. It doesn't matter if it's about implants, drugs, abortions, carcinogens, etc.

No, the solution is not to give the state even more power over peoples bodies. I would never put proprietary software in my body unless I absolutely needed it to live, but that's a personal choice. It's wrong and contra productive to take that choice away from individuals and give it to the state.

I feel like people would quickly demand the repeal of this law if Apple refused to comply and was banned in the UK. The average person (and the average politician) may not care about privacy or security, but they like Apple products. If I was the decision maker at Apple, I would call the government's bluff and refuse to comply.

I don't know anything about him besides him having been a "Surveillance Officer" for 15 years. I feel the same about that as I feel about someone who has been a member of a crime gang or terrorist organization for that long. As long as the individual joined voluntarily and had the option to leave, I don't think it's unreasonable to judge them for the actions of the organization (or even organization type) without knowing what that individual specifically did.

My objection is not really that they hired him. I believe that people can change and no one is irredeemable, but I don't think they should advertise it like this. It's like hiring an ex-con who used to use your product to victimize others and then bragging about it and getting upset when people are unconformable with it.

If nothing else, I think they should show more respect for people who are victims of the police and state-sponsored surveillance.

Braking the law doesn't mean doing anything wrong, and a lot of the people these people harass haven't even broken the law. These people infiltrate and destroy innocent people's lives.

Imagine meeting someone you love and having a child with them, just for them to disappear one day. Imagine finding out that they actually never existed and were actually a government agent who was assigned to infiltrate your life and possibly frame you for daring to speak against the state. Imagine being that child. Or anyone else in these peoples lives for that matter.

Or imagine finding yourself abandoned in a foreign country by your closest friends of several years who were actually government agents you met on a holiday you won in a fake competition created by the government, then find out that the company you worked for was also a fake company set up just to try to entrap you in some elaborate plan, so now you are unemployed, and everything you said in your own home or car in the last several years probably exists forever on a government server somewhere. Imagine then opening a newspaper and reading that the police claim to be underfunded...

Imaging what it does to a person to find out that their life for years has been a real life government conspiracy. That their friends, neighbours, co-workers, partner, etc. are not real and that they have had no privacy. It may not even be you they are after, but someone close to you.

These are both real cases, one from the UK where this cop is from and one from Sweden where I'm from, and they are far from unique.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/25/activist-dec...

https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nyheter/a/dwwdlO/p...

I don't see any problem with this. Buying a building for £15M doesn't make you £15M poorer because you can sell the building later. Additionally, as the funding came from a grant specifically for this purpose, it's not money they could have spent on other things, but the money they save by not paying conference centres can be spent elsewhere.

The media should not be on the same team as the government.

Of course the state is also just people. All organizations are comprised of individuals. The law is not an organization, so it's not itself people. The law is a statement made by people.

Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.

Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.

But that would not make any sense if one person held all the dollars. The creditors would have no use for dollars, and the US would need to switch to another currency in order to be able to pay its employees. They could print however many dollars they wanted, and could pay back the debt that way, but that would not solve the problem of the dollar no longer being useful as a currency. The government's employees would have no reason to accept the dollar because nobody else would accept it. The dollar is primarily valuable because it's used as a currency. If it stopped being used as a currency, its value would be zero. This is no different from Bitcoin.

If I owned all the dollars, the US would simply decide to start demanding taxes in something else because it could not use those dollars for anything. If it refused to switch to another currency, it would not be able to pay the people who would force me to pay taxes, so there would be no reason for me to pay taxes.

Cryptocurrencies like Ether are backed by the network's virtual machine. You have to pay Ether to process a transaction on the Ethereum virtual machine and as transactions can do arbitrary computations, Ether is useful for things other than transferring Ether.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't have that feature, but that just makes them more like fiat currencies. You could argue that fiat currencies are backed by the force the state is willing to use to get its population to pay taxes in the currency, but that's not a stable backing, as the state could decide to accept another currency at any time. Some states do allow for tax payments in other currencies, which means that some fiat currencies have no backing by that mechanism. Some people are also forced to pay in Bitcoin, for example to ransomware, which should have a similar effect in forcing people to use the currency.

Ultimately, I don't see why a currency would need backing. There is nothing wrong with a currency gaining value purely from its value and utility as a currency. Many other valuable things such as precious metals and art gain a large part of its value in the same way.

That's still ultimately targeted at the individuals who control and benefit from those assets. If a married couple own a car together, you can threaten to damage their car to influence their actions. The same is true if those two people own a business together and that business owns the car, and it's still true if instead of 2 people, it's 2000 people. The distinction of it being a corporation doesn't make any practical difference. You would still be trying to influence the actions of individuals in the same way as if the corporation did not exist, and it would still be individuals who are adversely affected.

NDAs and non-disparagement clauses are consensual and can be agreed between individuals as well. They have nothing to do with corporations as such. Laws and regulations are ultimately enforced by means of violence against individuals. When the government is sending a national security letter, it's not threatening to lock up the paper the corporation's articles of incorporation are written on, it's threatening to lock up individual human beings who will remain in prison no matter what happens to the corporation afterwards.

No, it's not possible to use violence against a corporation. It doesn't have a body, it can't feel pain, fear, etc. Ultimately, the violence needs to be directed at an individual. The government may (or may not) have declared that the corporation is dissolved before then, but that itself doesn't change anything because the corporation is just an abstraction. The action the government want to stop or compel can only be done by individuals.

It's ironic that you accuse me of wanting to enforce my views on others when that's precisely what you are arguing for, and I'm arguing against.

Freedom of speech is the freedom from violent consequence. When the government enforces a law, it does that by using or threatening individuals with violence. It cannot use violence against a corporation without using violence against an individual, for the same reason you cannot burn down a forest without burning down a tree.

Regardless, it's not like you can avoid these laws by not incorporating. An individual who runs a site with user-generated content in a way the government doesn't like would be in even more trouble.