By the way, you say that the drug and food companies would screw people without the FDA, but
1) If they want to stay in business they won't screw over their customers because then customers won't buy their products
To stay in business, you only need to do as well as everyone else. It's what they call "the industry standard." Drug manufacturing is very costly. To make a profit, you can either burn a lot of money to make a superior product that has to be sold at a high price, or you can cut corners to make a subpar product and sell it for cheap. If more people buy the cheap product, then you make more money by cutting corners. It doesn't even have to work. If people buy it, you make money.
In just about any industry, you'll find companies using either of those two approaches and succeeding. Some companies go for quality to sell to one market/demographic; others will go for cost effectiveness to sell to another market/demographic.
The intent of capitalism is to screw people just enough without going too far and having it come back to hurt you.
Buying pharmaceutical drugs is not the same as buying other goods. People don't just throw out their fluoxetine generic and switch to Prozac the way they might throw out bad Nikes and buy Addidas. For one, unless you have a medical lab in your backyard, you may not know that a product is bad for you until it kills you. You can see when your shoes start to wear out, but when your body wears out, it could be due to any number of reasons. It takes no education for a consumer to figure out if one brand of shoes lasts longer than another. Sometimes, it's just a subjective opinion of liking the way a product looks. That takes no education. But it takes a lot of education to understand pharmacology and biology. It also takes time for symptoms to show in a lot of cases. If your blood pressure doesn't go down after taking medication, is it because the med is ineffective, or is it because of some change to your diet? Or is something else affecting your metabolism? Often times, it takes weeks to see results or to get chemical levels high enough such that they would show in a blood draw, and that is a long enough time frame for a person to suffer permanent damage or even die. And since healthy people generally don't take meds, sick people do, when a patient dies, how do we know if it a matter of the illness or the treatment?
2)they're already screwing people now in many ways, like high fructose corn syrup and trans fat, and people evidently don't care about that (which isn't that bad if the consumer doesn't care about it, although many do like me)
I guess you mean the FDA when you say "they." Don't know if I mentioned it before, but the FDA has two heads, the drug head and the food head. They are separate departments; food is handled by its own office within the FDA. The standards for the food industry are not the same as that for the drug industry. The standards for drugs are much more strict. I think if we lessened the restrictions on drugs, we'd see the same things from the drug companies as we're seeing from the food companies.
If we can agree that bargain brand food is bad for you, I doubt we'd want to see bargain brand drugs. It'd be like the analysis that Ford was caught doing when it refused to fix a problem with the Pinto that caused the car to catch on fire during a collision. Ford found out that the projected cost of lawsuits was less than the projected cost of a recall, so it did nothing. However, collisions did happen, and people did die or were badly burnt as a result. If drug companies worked the same way, we'd see more of the same, but it would happen to a vulnerable population, people who are already ill or in bad health. And when someone in bad health dies, your immediate thought won't necessarily be to blame the medication they were on. The illness would shield drug companies from blame.
I think we'd get further if we set similar standards for the food industry as we already have for the drug industry. There is or was a new bill in consideration to make food producers maintain a paper trail for quality control procedures, something that drug companies have had to do for a long time. Regulations like that might improve food quality, as well as restrictions on artificial additives that lead to health problems. This might raise the costs of food, but it might also work as an incentive for food companies to invent other cost effective additives without those health risks. They don't like losing profit anymore than anyone else. But there's no incentive to change what they're already doing unless they are pressured in some way.
I would actually like to see the FDA dissolved and replaced by private companies that rate the safety of food and health products, like how Bonds are rated by S&P and Moody's. Private companies would probably do it much more efficiently than the FDA does.
One thing to keep in mind when you're considering things like that is that public institutions are held accountable to the citizens. The FDA is overseen by a government of publicly elected officials. This gives citizens some form of indirect control over what the FDA does. A private company has no such accountability. This is dangerous.
The current FDA commissioner was chosen by the president because she has a pharmaceutical background but no ties to industry. However, the FDA's separate office that deals solely with food is headed by a guy with ties to Monsanto. The speculation that some people draw from this is that the FDA is industry friendly when it comes to food, even though it is tough on drug companies. I don't know how real that is. I just know that the current standards for food are not as strict as they are for drugs.
The one most famous historical case involving the FDA concerns the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster:
The Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster of 1937 was one of the most consequential mass poisonings of the 20th century. This tragedy occurred shortly after the introduction of sulfanilamide, the first sulfa antimicrobial drug, when diethylene glycol was used as the diluent in the formulation of a liquid preparation of sulfanilamide known as Elixir Sulfanilamide. One hundred five patients died from its therapeutic use. Under the existing drug regulations, premarketing toxicity testing was not required. In reaction to this calamity, the U.S. Congress passed the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which required proof of safety before the release of a new drug. The 1938 law changed the drug focus of the Food and Drug Administration from that of a policing agency primarily concerned with the confiscation of adulterated drugs to a regulatory agency increasingly involved with overseeing the evaluation of new drugs.
http://www.annals.org/content/122/6/456.abstract
Diethylene glycol, used to prepare the medication, is a chemical relative of anti-freeze and is poisonous.
More on how events unfolded here:
http://www.ashp.org/import/news/HealthSystemPharmacyNews/newsarticle.aspx?id=1443
I don't think pharmaceuticals can be treated like other consumer products. They are biochemical in nature, and that alone makes them far more dangerous than other products. Bad shoes are unlikely to kill you. Bad drugs can.
The purpose of a government is to protect its citizens, even if it means regulating businesses. Too much regulation would negatively impact the economy, but no regulation or ineffective regulation puts lives at risk. A government based regulatory institution is without a doubt less efficient than a privately run institution, but only government has the authority to do what a regulatory body needs to do in order to safeguard the public in the current political/economic system in place in the U.S. (and other countries). A private institution cannot force another private entity to recall a product, and it cannot force a company to shut down. A private institution has no authority over another private organization. It can only ostracize that company by withholding support, removing it from some list of approved companies, and/or notifying the public when a company is non-compliant. Only a government can force a company to shut down or take direct action to address a dangerous problem.
You can't benefit from a good economy if you're dead.
Edit: Sorry for that wall of text. I don't know how I ended up writing so much.
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