I didn’t address your point because it was irrelevant to the post. You obviously don’t understand what the post was about, or you may have noticed that. My argument that market funding works reasonably well as a mechanism for absorbing the risk associated with drug devleopment is no way implies that doctors should be unlicensed or that the FDA should be shut down.

To answer your irrelevant question though, no. The FDA should not be shut down. One proper role of government is to correct for externatlities not reflected in the market price of goods that can be complex to evalute. The best way the government can do this is to provide information to all parties involved in the transaction, instead of legislating their actions. The FDA provides important information to consumers. If the FDA did not exist, I am sure a service would pop up to rate the safety of drugs, much like companies do for bonds, credit scores, etc. and much like a Consumer Reports. It would be a good thing though, if the FDA would allow people with severe cases of fatal diseases to elect to try more early stage, unproven drugs. Provided of course that they understand the risk involved.

If you would like to ask other random questions unrelated to the post, please do so through email.

As long as the govt keeps tight controls on who can and can’t call themselves doctors and what is and is not medicine the free market does not exist. If the free market does not exist then all we are fighting about is who gets regulated how and where. I understand that you are pro business but there are a lot of people who are pro human. Neither of you is arguing for a free market solution. You each want to tilt govt regulation in your favor.

By the way, do you have any evidence that the medical industrial complex conspires to keep prices high? I’m sure there are some bad apples, but I know too many people in the industry to think they are all evil.

You see, when my regular readers disagree with me, they have this tendency to leave reasonably intelligent comments, and point to educational links, even when the comments are negative towards my post. So forgive me if I’m not good at responding to ad hominems. But I’ll try to think up a witty comeback to “bozo.”

You try to make a point with a bad example, but worse is your initial assumption that the world think that companies are evil per sé. It all is about the jurisprudence of Salomon v. Salomon & Co. (1896), [1897] A.C. 22 (H.L.) or in layman’s terms “How can I as effective as possible avoid any juridical accountability for what the firm I invested in did wrong”. That decision made the world rumble on it’s foundation and it is still rumbling.

Anyway I am not going to lecture here about how evil or not the world is, people have eyes and ears for them selfs and the mass can move any direction.

Same question, same answer.

The medical industrial complex conspires to keep prices high and this bozo says it’s our responsibility to pay whatever they want or suffer and die.

I tell you what let’s let the free market decide. Let’s allow anybody to practice medicine any way they want. Let’s get rid of the FDA so that anybody can perscribe anything to anybody and sell it at any price and see what happens.

You game?