Thalidomide. Thalidomide marketed in the... Everybody's favorite example. Well, I may be leading with my chin on this one, but I'm going to lead with it anyway. 50s and 60s, it is marketed in Europe as a drug to help women get through the nausea that they sometimes...
experienced during pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration said it had been inadequately tested in the United States and forbade it to be marketed in this country with the result that thousands of children were born with horrible birth defects in the United States. in Europe, two mothers who had used thalidomide, but that didn't happen to American children. Because the FDA had intervened and kept that drug off the market. Thank God for the FDA, right?
Wrong. All right, why? This is a case in which they did save lives. This was a good case. But suppose they are equally slow in adopting a drug which turns out to be very good and very beneficial.
How would you ever see the lives that are lost because of that? You're right. you're an fb a official right you have a question of whether to approve or disapprove the new drug if you will prove it and it turns out to be a bad drug like the limit you're in the soup you're in your name is going to be on every front page i get hauled up to congress to testify on the other hand if you disapprove it but it turns out to be good well then later on you approve it four or five years later nobody is going to complain about the fact the fact that you didn't prove it earlier, except those greedy pharmaceutical companies that want to make profits at the expense of the public, as the saying goes, as everybody will say. And so the result is that the pressure on the FDA is always to be late in approving.
And there is enormous evidence that they have caused more deaths by their late approvals than they have saved by their early approvals. So your view is abolish the FDA? Absolutely. And what comes up in its place?
What comes up is that it's in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things. Do you think the manufacturer of thalidomide made a profit out of thalidomide or lost? I see.
And you have to have, people should be responsible for harm that they do. It should have been possible. So tort law takes care of a lot of this. Absolutely.
All right. If Lilly or Merck or somebody else comes up with a drug that does me harm. They have, I go after them, I do a joint a class action with everybody else who's taken that pill, and we sue them for billions of dollars and wipe out their shareholders'equity. Absolutely. Seeing that, they have every interest to be extremely rigorous in testing that drug before they make it available.
Let me give you a different example. All right. The rules imposed on airlines for safety, supposedly.
Who has the most interest in preventing airline accidents? After the passenger themselves, the airlines. Well, it's not the airlines. not even clear that the passengers have more interest in the airline because they included in the passengers of the pilots right of course why is the government going to improve airline safety how are they going to do it how do they had any incentive to anybody to improve airlines In recent years, it was very tough for a dieter to pick up a package in the grocery store and figure out what the ingredients were, what the carbohydrate content is, the fat calories, and so on and so forth.
So the government imposes quite modest rules for posting the nutritional values on packages in the grocery store. Now you can pick up and say, this has so much fat, this has less fat, I'll buy this. Now isn't that a modest and completely acceptable government intervention? Well, let's keep going. All right.
And the government also prevents. Useful information from being passed on. Let me give you the simplest example. All right. Aspirin.
You, I know, and I know that you're well advised to take an aspirin every other day to reduce the danger of heart attack. Right. but that's not allowed to be stated on an aspirin package.
On account of? FDA prohibits it. They control the information that can be stated on a label. Now, there are some libertarian...
manufacturers of drugs who have proposed, who have tried to push through the idea that they can put on their thing, this is what the FDA says and this is what we say, choose, and they are not being allowed to do it. They're not even being allowed to do that. So that if customers really wanted to know about the ingredients, it would be in the self-interest of the people producing it to put it on their packages.
Those packages that that had the ingredients on it would be more attractive to consumers than those that didn't. But now, it's always a mystery to me why people think that some experts in a Washington office who don't know you, don't know me, don't know our children, know better than you and I do what we want to have on our packages and what we want our children to know. Once again, on balance, get rid of the FDA. Absolutely.
Get rid of these government regulations. The FDA initially. had the requirement to assure the safety, but not the efficacy, of the drugs that they approved. With the so-called Kefauver amendments that came in as a result of thalidomide, which you brought up, the FDA expanded its mandate that it is required to assure both the safety and the efficacy of the drugs. And that has enormously raised the cost of getting drugs approved.
I see that. If you wanted to have a halfway house, you could go back to the earlier standard where the FDA had to certify the safety but did not have to express a judgment on the efficacy. The FDA simply ensures that pharmaceutical companies live up to the old dictum, first do no harm. Right. This pill may not change your life, but it won't hurt you.
Therefore, it may be marketed. Yeah. Okay. Now, let me move to another case, and this one I think is pretty tough for a libertarian.
All right. So you're allowed to take a deep breath before I hit you with the next one. with this one if you want to.
Civil rights. What do you mean by civil rights? What I mean by civil rights is to take a raw case, the South, under Jim Crow, in the 1950s. But that was a case of government, of too much government. It was?
Not of too little government. But I thought the South in those days had relatively low tax rates, relatively low regulation. No, but the government provided for separation.
It was the government that enforced separate areas for blacks. Who? whites.
It was a government that enforced the law that the blacks had to sit at the back of buses. Those were all government laws. In the absence of those government laws, it wouldn't have taken place? In other words, what... In the absence of government laws, you would have had a gradual development.
It would have taken place somewhere and not anywhere. And you would have... And look what happened in the North, where there weren't those government laws. Right.
There may have been, David. Undoubtedly, don't misunderstand me, there is prejudice. There's no question.
Right. And undoubtedly, it has bad effects on various people. people. But in the absence of the laws in the South, it would have broken down much faster and much earlier. If you could cite any case for libertarianism, that's it.