All Posts Tagged With: "FDA"
Prohibitionists: Leave Us Alone!
Sometimes I drink Scotch and then, to wake myself up, I drink coffee. So what? Many people consume mixtures of caffeine and alcohol in drinks like rum and Coke. But recently some college kids started drinking pre-mixed combos of alcohol and caffeine with names like Four Loko and Moonshot ’69. Moonshot ’69 is a pilsner [...]
23Mar2011 | John Stossel | 5 comments | ContinuedAsk Not For Whom the Drug Tolls
“Fifty years ago, it made sense to assert that mental illnesses are not diseases, but it makes no sense to say so today. Debate about what counts as mental illness has been replaced by legislation about the medicalization and demedicalization of behavior. Old diseases such as homosexuality and hysteria disappear. New diseases such as gambling [...]
22Dec2010 | Wendy McElroy | 13 comments | ContinuedProtecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation
George Stigler once compared regulating on the basis of corporate misdeeds to an audition at which the second singer is selected after only the first has sung. When it comes to food and health, Philip Hilts, a veteran medical reporter, runs the same sort of abbreviated audition. His latest book is an eminently readable, amply [...]
7Jul2010 | Sam Kazman | 1 comment | ContinuedCapital Letters
Don’t Let the Court Off the Hook To the Editor: As a former wartime draftee — the Korean War — I’m of two minds re Aeon J. Skoble’s “Neither Slavery Nor Involuntary Servitude” piece in your September issue (“It Just Ain’t So!). No question, he did a very good job of picking apart the operational [...]
6Jul2010 | FEE Admin | 1 comment | ContinuedHealth Care and Radical Monopoly
In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argued that the versions of health care reform currently proposed by “progressives” all primarily involve financing health care and expanding coverage to the uninsured rather than addressing the way current models of service delivery make it so expensive. Editing out all the pro forma tut-tutting of [...]
23Feb2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 23 comments | ContinuedThe Myth of Unregulated Tobacco
On June 22, President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA), a law that gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over tobacco products. The law requires the FDA to develop a new tobacco-regulation center with all related costs to be covered by fees paid by the industry. [...]
19Aug2009 | Bruce Yandle | 0 comments | ContinuedRaw Milk and the Sour State
Whether it is an expensive organic brand or simply carries a mega-chain store name, that milk has undergone pasteurization and homogenization. There is a growing subset of consumers who would prefer not to buy their milk this way. They want it unpasteurized, unhomogenized—in a word, “raw.”
20Jan2009 | William E. Pike | 13 comments | ContinuedUnpleasant Economists
Economists are not the most pleasant people to have around when others are delightfully praising the benefits of this or that public policy. We acknowledge the existence of scarcity, the fact that to enjoy more of one thing requires having less of another, which in turn forces us into bringing up the unpleasant topic of [...]
1Sep2008 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – March 2008
- Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
by Bryan Caplan Reviewed by Dwight Lee - The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World
1Mar2008 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued
Pharmaceutical Profits and Health Are Inconsistent?
In a critical review of Richard Epstein’s book Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation, Arnold Relman (The New Republic, July 30) criticizes drug companies for their hypocrisy. Contrasting the companies’ message to stockholders with their message to the larger world, he quotes Pfizer President Jeffrey Kindler’s statement that his goal is “to create [...]
1Nov2007 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedMilton Friedman Is to Blame for Unsafe Food?
There is a “food safety crisis” in America and Milton Friedman is to blame, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman wrote on the New York Times op-ed page May 21. Friedman is responsible, Krugman wrote, because he legitimized a “sickening ideology” that rejects “even the most compelling” cases for government regulation of business. Krugman’s “crisis” stems [...]
1Oct2007 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 3 comments | ContinuedAbolishing the FDA
Larry Van Heerden operates the Free-Market Medicine website. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started out as a bulwark against snake-oil peddling. It has since swung back and forth between hostility and subservience to the drug industry. The FDA seems indifferent to the many deaths its own intransigence has caused and imperious when forced to [...]
1Mar2007 | Larry Van Heerden | 9 comments | ContinuedBig Government–Big Risk
In his Freeman column last June, “The End Run to Freedom,” economist Russell Roberts makes the following argument: As people get wealthier, they demand more security. Their demand for security leads many people to favor the welfare state or the nanny state. The welfare state refers to a government that subsidizes people who bear losses; [...]
1Jan2007 | David R. Henderson | 11 comments | ContinuedThe FDA Cannot Be Reformed
The past year or so has been tough on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In that time, the agency has taken heat over the discovery of a statistical correlation between antidepressants and “suicidal thinking and behavior.” It has also been accused of sitting on information regarding another statistical correlation, this time between pain drugs [...]
1Jul2005 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 0 comments | ContinuedThe New Drug War
Seeking to combine the failures of the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty, the U.S. government has now embarked on the War on (Expensive) Prescription Drugs. You see, grannies crossing the northern border in search of cheaper prescription drugs are causing fits at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). U.S. District Judge Claire [...]
1Apr2004 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedA Ton of Prevention: How the FDA Threatens Vaccine Supplies
After two troubled years, the supply of flu vaccine was plentiful in 2002. But toward the end of November, after nearly all flu shots had been given, one of the three companies making injectable vaccine said it was dropping out of the business, raising immediate concerns of greater scarcity in the future. The news was [...]
1Mar2003 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 1 comment | ContinuedPrivatizing Airline Safety and Security
The events of 9/11 underscore the importance of improving the safety and security of air travel. The government’s response to the terrorist attacks employs a command-and-control approach. That approach ought to be questioned. After all, it was the Federal Aviation Administration’s system that failed on 9/11. Why should we expect additional controls to be more [...]
1Nov2002 | and Paul A. Cleveland | 3 comments | Continued-
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