And so these activists along with their allies in the FDA join their paternalistic conservative counterparts in supporting the hypocritical position that while you may have a limited right to your own life, you don't necessarily have the right to end your life, at least not before receiving a sufficient level of counseling. We wouldn't want Mommy and Daddy to feel like they didn't do enough protect their children from the freedom to live and die as they choose.

I add this argument to another excellent one in support of dismantling the FDA that my friend Stella Daly posted on her cleverly named blog Stellavision. She questions the FDA's right to protect women from the miracle of a birth-control pill that would do away with the monthly period. Imagine the hubris she has to suggest that she alone should have the right to weigh the risks of such a treatment and to suffer the consequences of her decision should it not pan out. "But who", ask supporters of the FDA, "Who will put a gun to the collective head of the food and drug industries, and force them to tell us everything we need to know about their products?". Let's look at the fictions that are "everything we need to know" and the so-called "right to information". The idea that some piece of legislation could magically compel manufacturers to tell every individual every piece of information they might need to properly weigh the risks and benefits of a given product. It is ultimately the individual's responsibility to seek out information about a product in order to determine whether they should partake, all crowing about the "rights" of consumers to "safe" and "risk-free" products notwithstanding. Manufacturers lie about their products, to be sure, and the government should certainly pursue such fraudulent activity, but as my friend Lou Esposito points out over at the Stellavision debate, forcing all manufacturers to comply with politicians' and regulators' arbitrary idea of what information should be provided ultimately implies that they are guilty until proven innocent.

Furthermore, as Alan Greenspan points out in "Common Fallacies regarding Capitalism" in Ayn Rand's collection of essays "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", the artificial standards created by government regulators distracts and drains resources that manufacturers could otherwise put towards responding directly to consumers' needs and desires. It gives the false sense that if manufacturers comply with the regulations set up by the FDA and the like, that their products are "safe", when in fact safety is contextual: a product that is perfectly safe for you may threaten my life.

The best provider of information is the private sector, which has long been providing the relevant information that consumers ask for, if not directly from the manufacturer, then from the media. Journalists make their careers on exposing cover-ups and lies and are much less likely to be corrupted by money than politicians are to be corrupted by special interests. And under Laissez-faire Capitalism the private sector does not have the legal use of force at its disposal to cover-up its lies and silence its detractors. They may be able buy off a few unscrupulous types, but in the long run, the truth is always more profitable than shysterism.