Archive | safety

Under Laissez-faire Capitalism, one would expect products to be safer and to work better, for the simple reason that a company who produced unsafe products would lose out to the competitor who sold safer products. 

The concept involved here is reputation — a doctor with a reputation for killing his patients in surgery won’t be in business for long.

One would have private certification boards which would rate product safety — such as Consumer Reports does today. The difference is that the consumer would be free to disregard this information — if they thought it was inaccurate, or did not apply to their situation. Furthermore, such boards would not be subject to political pull and lobbying that goes on in today’s government system. Lastly, no certification board would be able to use the power of the police to force their opinions down anyone’s throat — the board would have to earn the citizen’s respect by providing consistently good decisions over a number of years.

Consumers could then use this information to make their own judgment regarding product safety — as opposed to some bureaucrat charging consumers thousands of dollars to make the decision for them.

This is not the case in the U.S. where the FDA bans drugs used in other countries that could save millions of lives.

Statists view the citizen as an idiot who cannot make a decision for himself, and therefore demand that a government official — selected by that same “idiot” through the democratic process — must make it for him. This begs the question: If an individual is not capable of making a simple decision effecting their own life, how is that same individual able to make the decision to elect an official to public office, as such a decision presupposes that he is able to judge how the elected official judges? (Another argument is: does that same “idiot” magically become a genius when he becomes elected?)

Furthermore, if the citizen has no right to choose what goods are safe, where does the government official get such a right to prevent others from acting in their own judgment in the purchase of goods, as all powers delegated to government are those that belong to the people, i.e., such as the right to self-defense.

In other words, what citizen has the right to force others to obey their decisions against their will?