Of course you are correct, even though some have chosen to take issue with your statement. I wonder if your detractors were the same folks who blasted government for allowing China to export melamine in food to the US, and not doing more to stop it.
I'll be the first to say that the FDA is a huge, overreaching, and bureaucratic nightmare. I know because I used to deal with them on a regular basis. However, most people don't have a clue what it was like prior to its formation, because they haven't bothered to read about all the deaths and illnesses that occurred from our food supply due to the reasons you cite. The FDA could be a much better organization, but it is a hell of a lot better now than it was before it came into being.
If ever I wonder how we let Leviathan grow to such gargantuan proportions, I’ll only need remind myself that even Freepers defend the elastic, if not unlimited, general welfare clause. The rest of us wonder why there’s even be a Constitution if it worked like that, meanwhile you’re content to sit content with the hope that now you won’t ne poisoned.
“they haven’t bothered to read about all the deaths and illnesses that occurred from our food supply”
Read what, The Jungle? Pffft. Thank God for the government, for now we have clean food and eight hour workdays, children don’t work in factories, and the air and water are cleaner than ever. Pay no attention to how things were improving right before governmemt swooped in to fix them. Regulations must be assumed to have maximal impact, and it must be forever the dark ages without them because...well, some reason. Pay no attention, either, to all the bad things monstrous agencies pile on top of the good results we don’t know wouldn’t have happened anyway, because, come on, that’s just mean.
By the way, what is with all the easy macrofying? Since when is it THE food supply, instead of the millions of little interactions food production and consumption is actually made up of? They like you thinking nationally like that. Then it’s only a matter of the government grabbing control of the thing that’s already national in your mind.
We have, for instance, this purported simultaneous national hunger and national obesity problem, somehow, which we mostly care about “for the children.” Food safety has already been established as in the interest of the general welfare. Why not “food security” and healthy eating? Will you let children be fat and go hungry, like how we used to let people be poisoned by tainted food? The answer is clear: we must nationalize the food distribution system. We must force parents to follow nationally designed food plans at home. Food is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market. Look what the free market has given us so far!/s
This may sound like reductio ad absurdum, but it’s only a matter of time. The only reason, I guess, most people think the feds controlling food safety is natural and constitutional, and that life without it is unimaginable-—aside from the usual socialistic arguments—is because it has been around for so long. Time covers a multitude of sins.
Indeed. I remember quite a few threads here on Free Republic about the melamine problem, and I don't recall seeing a single poster claiming that free market forces were adequate to handle the situation. The sentiment that government should have done more seemed almost unanimous at the time. I even see posters complaining about food imports from places like Mexico, because they don't think Mexican produced foods are as safe... they apparently take the function of the FDA so much for granted that they think a safe food supply occurs all by itself.
I'll be the first to say that the FDA is a huge, overreaching, and bureaucratic nightmare. I know because I used to deal with them on a regular basis. However, most people don't have a clue what it was like prior to its formation, because they haven't bothered to read about all the deaths and illnesses that occurred from our food supply due to the reasons you cite. The FDA could be a much better organization, but it is a hell of a lot better now than it was before it came into being.
I don't deal with the FDA, but I have plenty of experience with other government agencies (especially the CDC). Being in the Army myself, I've come to realize that we all work together and depend on each other. And yes, I know how unwieldy a bureaucracy can be. The ideal government agency would be one that is ruthlessly pared back to its constitutional functions. Unfortunately, when agencies like the FDA or EPA overstep their constitutional bounds, the reaction of many people here on FR is to call for them to be eliminated--which really is not a solution at all.