Here is the excerpt:
ROBINSON: The Food and Drug Administration which regulates everything from the drugs that pharmaceutical companies may put on the market to the ingredients in items we purchase off the grocery store shelves. Let me give you an example- Thalidomide [FRIEDMAN Everybody's favorite example...] Well I may be leading with my chin on this one but I'm going to lead with it anyway. 50's and 60's it is marketed in Europe as a drug to help women get through the nausea that they sometimes experience 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 Europe to 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?
FRIEDMAN Wrong [ROBINSON Alright, 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 beneficial. How would you ever see the lives that are lost because of that? You're an FDA official, you have a question of whether to approve or disapprove a new drug. If you approve it and it turns out to be a bad drug like Thalidomide, you're in the soup, your name is going to be on every front page [ROBINSON cost me my job, I get hauled up to Congress to testify..] right. 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's going to complain about the fact that you didn't approve it earlier except those greedy pharmaceutical companies that want make profits at the expense of the public, as everybody will say. So the result is that the pressure on the FDA is always to be late in approving. And there's enormous evidence that they have caused more deaths by late approvals than they have saved by early approval.
As other people have pointed out, the professor's points apply to virtually all subjects and are not limited to algebra. Schools are too focused on details, facts that will be forgotten, and generally useless skills. Grades 7 - 9ish should focus on finding what students excel at and enjoy. It should do this by introducing them to many different topics and teaching them various life skills. As others have said, understanding basic finances, exponential growth, the basic uses and abuses of statistics, etc. are important but learning details such as knowing how to graph various algebraic functions and solve more complex equations is not necessary for all students. Some students should go down that path but requiring it of uninterested, ungifted students (in that subject area) is simply a waste of everyone's time.
Same goes for history. Knowing specific dates and the names of influential people is generally unnecessary and should not be required of all students. People should understand history in broad strokes and get lessons about cause and effect, not memorize dates and names they will forget the next day.
Same goes for [insert subject here].
I actually read the article, not just the headline. I also hate articles that omit facts like that, I don't like being misled. I don't have time to fact check everything I read everywhere, it's not possible. They did change the label and it was back in March 2010, maybe you should try reading links you bitch about other people not reading. They are bitching because the old boxes were labeled 13+ when they should have been labeled 14+ (or keep away from all children). The fact that they waste peoples time with this garbage still makes me hate them. Yes, less so than if they had outright banned the product as TFA implies.
I hate our government, seriously. Maybe I should forward the following list to the CPSC. I'm pretty sure most of the items on the list have caused more than 12 cases of choking and/or surgery since November. They've got a lot of banning to do!
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the following items are common choking hazards:
Hot dogs and sausages
Chunks of meat
Grapes
Hard candy
Popcorn
Peanuts and other nuts
Raw carrots
Fruit seeds
Apple chunks
Coins
Toys with small parts
Small balls and marbles
Balloons
Arts and crafts materials
Ballpoint pen caps
Watch batteries
Jewelry
You have confused "women should be allowed to be on the front lines" with "equal numbers of women should be dieing on the front lines and in dangerous jobs." The first has to do with equal opportunity (which I agree with), the second has to do with equal outcome (which should not be pursued). It is an important distinction.
equal numbers of men and women in the military and on the front lines. It's what feminists want right, equality? I wonder why I haven't heard many feminists protesting the inequality in deaths in the military and in dangerous jobs?
I agree with most of what you said but you aren't quite correct on Khan's idea/solution. The Khan Academy system is to have kids watch videos at home to learn the material, try their hand at some problems (online), and then ask the teacher and other students questions the following day.
You are confusing "Austrianism" with "some guy whose blog you found that follows the Austrian school." Austrianism did not predict gold would lead other commodities, it predicted inflation that would affect all commodities. As for currencies, it predicted our currency would fall without knowing most other countries in the world would also start printing money and that banks would stockpile money that was meant for distribution into the economy by Keynesians.
Austerity for Greeks, Irish, and other countries isn't some policy decision, it is an inevitability. To quote someone famous, things that can't go on forever, won't. The reason they are still screwed is because they need Austerity and to give their creditors massive haircuts. There is no way, with or without austerity, they will ever be able to pay off their current debt. Here is an analogy for our positions:
1) You find a man bleeding on the sidewalk and he looks pale
2) You conclude that he needs a blood transfusion because he doesn't have enough blood
3) Austrians (and I) conclude that you need to stop the bleeding and give him a blood transfusion
4) You disagree and say that we should not stop the bleeding because stopping the bleeding will not keep him from dieing
Yes, stopping the bleeding is insufficient. It is still necessary.
You are right about the hyper inflation prediction but wrong on Greenspan. Greenspan kept interest rates low and thus fed the dot.com bubble when he should have increased the discount rate. Go dig a hole, fill it back in, then print yourself some money for doing it. After all, that's what keeps the economy going right!?
You know what caused the housing bubble and ensuing credit crisis?
Deregulation. Which is what the Austrians keep pushing.
Wrong. What caused the housing bubble was, as usual, perverse incentives. The government, via laws, institutions, and regulations, set up a system where banks could see all of the upsides of risky investments while suffering none of the downsides of those risky investments.
Fannie and Freddie, empowered and backed by the government, bought bad loans from banks allowing banks to continue to make bad loans
FDIC insurance causes depositors to not care about what their bank is doing with their money.
The Federal Reserve provided cheap money and easy credit.
The government encouraged banks to make loans so every American could own their own home
All of this came to a head, people realized houses were over valued, and the market imploded.
During and after the housing bubble burst, what did the government do? They gave all of the creditors their money back, made money and credit even easier to get, and further reinforced the idea that banks can do whatever they want, benefit from all of the upside, and pass all of the downside onto borrowers and tax payers.
The systems we have built are fragile, provide the wrong incentives, and push against human nature. Removing small pieces from a fragile system (deregulation) can be a trigger to a collapse (so in that sense you are correct). Where you go wrong is that you conclude we should not have removed the small piece from the fragile system while Austrians conclude we should reform the fragile system (yes, laissez faire markets).
Thanks for supporting one of my points with the wikipedia info. It says that premiums will go up for everyone, different amounts for different groups. Some people will receive extra subsidies to help pay for their higher premiums ("over half" of 17% of people). That means the premiums for the other ~90% of people will go up. Those numbers are also based off CBO estimates which tend to underestimate costs and overestimate revenue generation and growth so it is likely to be worse than what they said.
As for the penalty, I concede the point that you are technically correct but I call bullshit on them not actually doing anything otherwise no one would ever pay it. They will start enforcing it or they will get rid of it, guaranteed.
At least you are aware of specific things he wants to do and you disagree with them, unlike most claimers of nuttiness. However, you didn't really say what is nutty about those ideas, just that you disagree with them (although...I did only ask what ideas, not why they are nutty). I am assuming that an idea being contrary to yours is not sufficient for you to consider the idea nutty.
With regards to regulatory bodies such as the FDA and FCC, his general philosophy is to look at the good they do versus the harm. The FCC and FDA certainly have done some good things (such as stopping a few instances of mouse poop in your food) but there is a huge heaping mound of harm they have done. Milton Friedman lays out a good case against those regulatory bodies and details some of the harm they have brought about. This includes sentencing people to death by not approving medication because their disease was too rare to deserve a cure because someone without the disease might accidentally take the medicine and be harmed by it. Spending $100 million (due to FDA regulations) to approve medicine to cure a disease only thousands suffer from isn't worth the risk to the FDA. They likely have saved hundreds or thousands of peoples lives by forcing stricter testing standards but they have likely killed or harmed millions, if not more, by preventing some safe and effective treatments from coming to market.
The FDA has tried to be better in this area (most of Milton's criticisms were from the 70's on back): http://www.fda.gov/ForIndustry/DevelopingProductsforRareDiseasesConditions/default.htm
but is still a good illustration of the types of serious problems these regulatory bodies create.
Could you argue against all of this and disagree with it? Certainly. Is it nutty, unfounded, and/or irrational? Hardly.
You missed these Cons
Cons:
3) Health insurance premiums will go up
4) Increases the costs for employers to hire people so they will hire less people and pay them less. As you would put it, DESTROY JOBS AND SHRINK THE ECONOMY
If health insurers are forced to pay out more, health insurance premiums will go up, not down. Whether it is worth it or not is a separate issue but costs will certainly go up.
The net effect will be more jobs lost and lower wages due to higher costs of doing business.
Lastly, yes you will go to jail if you don't get health insurance. You go to jail if you dodge taxes for long enough and the SCOTUS ruled that this is a tax. There are certainly lots of benefits but lets try not to live in a magical fairy land where everything in the bill will have benefits and no downsides.
Sounds like you are describing a situation with "too big to fail" monopolies propped up and supported by the government. That is not "conservative small government" agenda, that is the government bailing out corporations, not enforcing anti-trust laws, and the government creating regulations that prevent barriers to entry while failing to protect the consumer from the monopolies they created/propped up/protected. "small government" doesn't mean the government does nothing. "small government" has very important tasks and apparently Australia's government (like most) is completely failing to complete some of its most fundamental purposes. Your plan of giving a failing government more money and more power does not sound like a good solution to the problem.
Ummmm, everywhere a new store of any kind has ever opened that had cheaper prices than existing stores? Sooo...that would be pretty much everywhere. If you used to be able to buy one sponge for $2 and now you can buy one for $1, your purchasing power for that product just doubled and it is like you just got a pay raise. People don't shop at Walmart, Target, or Costco for the decor and friendly greeters. They go there because the mom and pop shops cost more. Being able to buy more stuff with the same amount of money == higher standard of living (in pure economic terms).
That is true, monopolies and trusts are a problem and the government should step in for those cases. However, you are mostly wrong about the invisible hand. The invisible hand is pretty much the only thing that corrects imbalances in the economy with the exception of trusts, monopolies, force, and fraud. It is the governments responsibility to prosecute those things because market forces are unable to do it (well...prosecute force and fraud, split up trusts and monopolies). As for the free market having not been proven stable, what that involves humans has proven to be a stable system? Not to mention that we don't actually have free markets and we haven't had one for over a hundred years.
That is a fair point and something that definitely happens. I think trust busting and punishing that form of blatantly anti-competitive behavior are some of the few legitimate roles of government when it comes to regulating business. Yes, that can be a flaw in capitalism and not all problems are government created.
There is nothing stopping another company from developing a more efficient business model and distribution system than Amazon or Walmart, particularly if they started jacking up their prices. It would certainly be bad if one of them was the only game in town but I don't see that happening (at least for long) outside of them getting some sweetheart deal with the government that actually blocks competition from forming. That scenario can, and has, happened but it is due to flaws in governments, not free market economics and capitalism.
People like bad mouthing Stallman (and, unfortunately, by association GNU/FSF) because he is an arrogant, condescending, overly confrontational, sexist, hygienically inept, eye sore of a man (I'm sure I missed about 10 more glaringly obvious, negative attributes). That doesn't make him wrong or FSF a bad thing but it does make him an easy target for bad mouthing. He is the type of man you want in the background of a movement, locked away in a server room, trying to push the movement forward. He is not the type of man you want to be front facing for any cause. It is just asking for ridicule and derision (deserved or not).
Definitely agree on the first two points. I'm not sure how you can say it is the US's fault if people in other countries die because the US doesn't give people in other countries free stuff. I suppose then it is also the US's fault when someone doesn't have a house, doesn't have food, or doesn't have medical care because the US didn't build everyone in the world a house, give everyone in the world food, and give everyone in the world medical care. You can rightly blame the US for many things, this is not one of them.
What are all these nutjob ideas I keep hearing so much about? I know you are just parroting whatever main stream media outlet you listen to but do you know what those ideas actually are and why they are nutty?
Citing a specific example of hard science that is encompassed within a science does not prove the encompassing science itself is hard science. (notice I didn't say anything about statistics...just as the OP didn't say statistics was a soft science).
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uncommon-knowledge/26936
Here is the excerpt:
ROBINSON: The Food and Drug Administration which regulates everything from the drugs that pharmaceutical companies may put on the market to the ingredients in items we purchase off the grocery store shelves. Let me give you an example- Thalidomide [FRIEDMAN Everybody's favorite example...] Well I may be leading with my chin on this one but I'm going to lead with it anyway. 50's and 60's it is marketed in Europe as a drug to help women get through the nausea that they sometimes experience 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 Europe to 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?
FRIEDMAN Wrong [ROBINSON Alright, 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 beneficial. How would you ever see the lives that are lost because of that? You're an FDA official, you have a question of whether to approve or disapprove a new drug. If you approve it and it turns out to be a bad drug like Thalidomide, you're in the soup, your name is going to be on every front page [ROBINSON cost me my job, I get hauled up to Congress to testify..] right. 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's going to complain about the fact that you didn't approve it earlier except those greedy pharmaceutical companies that want make profits at the expense of the public, as everybody will say. So the result is that the pressure on the FDA is always to be late in approving. And there's enormous evidence that they have caused more deaths by late approvals than they have saved by early approval.
Same goes for history. Knowing specific dates and the names of influential people is generally unnecessary and should not be required of all students. People should understand history in broad strokes and get lessons about cause and effect, not memorize dates and names they will forget the next day.
Same goes for [insert subject here].
I actually read the article, not just the headline. I also hate articles that omit facts like that, I don't like being misled. I don't have time to fact check everything I read everywhere, it's not possible. They did change the label and it was back in March 2010, maybe you should try reading links you bitch about other people not reading. They are bitching because the old boxes were labeled 13+ when they should have been labeled 14+ (or keep away from all children). The fact that they waste peoples time with this garbage still makes me hate them. Yes, less so than if they had outright banned the product as TFA implies.
I hate our government, seriously. Maybe I should forward the following list to the CPSC. I'm pretty sure most of the items on the list have caused more than 12 cases of choking and/or surgery since November. They've got a lot of banning to do!
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the following items are common choking hazards:
Hot dogs and sausages
Chunks of meat
Grapes
Hard candy
Popcorn
Peanuts and other nuts
Raw carrots
Fruit seeds
Apple chunks
Coins
Toys with small parts
Small balls and marbles
Balloons
Arts and crafts materials
Ballpoint pen caps
Watch batteries
Jewelry
You have confused "women should be allowed to be on the front lines" with "equal numbers of women should be dieing on the front lines and in dangerous jobs." The first has to do with equal opportunity (which I agree with), the second has to do with equal outcome (which should not be pursued). It is an important distinction.
equal numbers of men and women in the military and on the front lines. It's what feminists want right, equality? I wonder why I haven't heard many feminists protesting the inequality in deaths in the military and in dangerous jobs?
I agree with most of what you said but you aren't quite correct on Khan's idea/solution. The Khan Academy system is to have kids watch videos at home to learn the material, try their hand at some problems (online), and then ask the teacher and other students questions the following day.
Austerity for Greeks, Irish, and other countries isn't some policy decision, it is an inevitability. To quote someone famous, things that can't go on forever, won't. The reason they are still screwed is because they need Austerity and to give their creditors massive haircuts. There is no way, with or without austerity, they will ever be able to pay off their current debt. Here is an analogy for our positions:
1) You find a man bleeding on the sidewalk and he looks pale
2) You conclude that he needs a blood transfusion because he doesn't have enough blood
3) Austrians (and I) conclude that you need to stop the bleeding and give him a blood transfusion
4) You disagree and say that we should not stop the bleeding because stopping the bleeding will not keep him from dieing
Yes, stopping the bleeding is insufficient. It is still necessary.
You are right about the hyper inflation prediction but wrong on Greenspan. Greenspan kept interest rates low and thus fed the dot.com bubble when he should have increased the discount rate. Go dig a hole, fill it back in, then print yourself some money for doing it. After all, that's what keeps the economy going right!?
You know what caused the housing bubble and ensuing credit crisis? Deregulation. Which is what the Austrians keep pushing.
Wrong. What caused the housing bubble was, as usual, perverse incentives. The government, via laws, institutions, and regulations, set up a system where banks could see all of the upsides of risky investments while suffering none of the downsides of those risky investments.
Fannie and Freddie, empowered and backed by the government, bought bad loans from banks allowing banks to continue to make bad loans
FDIC insurance causes depositors to not care about what their bank is doing with their money.
The Federal Reserve provided cheap money and easy credit.
The government encouraged banks to make loans so every American could own their own home
All of this came to a head, people realized houses were over valued, and the market imploded.
During and after the housing bubble burst, what did the government do? They gave all of the creditors their money back, made money and credit even easier to get, and further reinforced the idea that banks can do whatever they want, benefit from all of the upside, and pass all of the downside onto borrowers and tax payers.
The systems we have built are fragile, provide the wrong incentives, and push against human nature. Removing small pieces from a fragile system (deregulation) can be a trigger to a collapse (so in that sense you are correct). Where you go wrong is that you conclude we should not have removed the small piece from the fragile system while Austrians conclude we should reform the fragile system (yes, laissez faire markets).
Thanks for supporting one of my points with the wikipedia info. It says that premiums will go up for everyone, different amounts for different groups. Some people will receive extra subsidies to help pay for their higher premiums ("over half" of 17% of people). That means the premiums for the other ~90% of people will go up. Those numbers are also based off CBO estimates which tend to underestimate costs and overestimate revenue generation and growth so it is likely to be worse than what they said.
As for the penalty, I concede the point that you are technically correct but I call bullshit on them not actually doing anything otherwise no one would ever pay it. They will start enforcing it or they will get rid of it, guaranteed.
With regards to regulatory bodies such as the FDA and FCC, his general philosophy is to look at the good they do versus the harm. The FCC and FDA certainly have done some good things (such as stopping a few instances of mouse poop in your food) but there is a huge heaping mound of harm they have done. Milton Friedman lays out a good case against those regulatory bodies and details some of the harm they have brought about. This includes sentencing people to death by not approving medication because their disease was too rare to deserve a cure because someone without the disease might accidentally take the medicine and be harmed by it. Spending $100 million (due to FDA regulations) to approve medicine to cure a disease only thousands suffer from isn't worth the risk to the FDA. They likely have saved hundreds or thousands of peoples lives by forcing stricter testing standards but they have likely killed or harmed millions, if not more, by preventing some safe and effective treatments from coming to market.
The FDA has tried to be better in this area (most of Milton's criticisms were from the 70's on back): http://www.fda.gov/ForIndustry/DevelopingProductsforRareDiseasesConditions/default.htm
but is still a good illustration of the types of serious problems these regulatory bodies create. Could you argue against all of this and disagree with it? Certainly. Is it nutty, unfounded, and/or irrational? Hardly.
You missed these Cons
Cons:
3) Health insurance premiums will go up
4) Increases the costs for employers to hire people so they will hire less people and pay them less. As you would put it, DESTROY JOBS AND SHRINK THE ECONOMY
If health insurers are forced to pay out more, health insurance premiums will go up, not down. Whether it is worth it or not is a separate issue but costs will certainly go up.
The net effect will be more jobs lost and lower wages due to higher costs of doing business.
Lastly, yes you will go to jail if you don't get health insurance. You go to jail if you dodge taxes for long enough and the SCOTUS ruled that this is a tax.
There are certainly lots of benefits but lets try not to live in a magical fairy land where everything in the bill will have benefits and no downsides.
Sounds like you are describing a situation with "too big to fail" monopolies propped up and supported by the government. That is not "conservative small government" agenda, that is the government bailing out corporations, not enforcing anti-trust laws, and the government creating regulations that prevent barriers to entry while failing to protect the consumer from the monopolies they created/propped up/protected. "small government" doesn't mean the government does nothing. "small government" has very important tasks and apparently Australia's government (like most) is completely failing to complete some of its most fundamental purposes. Your plan of giving a failing government more money and more power does not sound like a good solution to the problem.
"Up" doesn't mean "Sideways", "Up" has been ruled to clearly mean "Interstate Commerce".
Ummmm, everywhere a new store of any kind has ever opened that had cheaper prices than existing stores? Sooo...that would be pretty much everywhere. If you used to be able to buy one sponge for $2 and now you can buy one for $1, your purchasing power for that product just doubled and it is like you just got a pay raise. People don't shop at Walmart, Target, or Costco for the decor and friendly greeters. They go there because the mom and pop shops cost more. Being able to buy more stuff with the same amount of money == higher standard of living (in pure economic terms).
That is true, monopolies and trusts are a problem and the government should step in for those cases. However, you are mostly wrong about the invisible hand. The invisible hand is pretty much the only thing that corrects imbalances in the economy with the exception of trusts, monopolies, force, and fraud. It is the governments responsibility to prosecute those things because market forces are unable to do it (well...prosecute force and fraud, split up trusts and monopolies). As for the free market having not been proven stable, what that involves humans has proven to be a stable system? Not to mention that we don't actually have free markets and we haven't had one for over a hundred years.
That is a fair point and something that definitely happens. I think trust busting and punishing that form of blatantly anti-competitive behavior are some of the few legitimate roles of government when it comes to regulating business. Yes, that can be a flaw in capitalism and not all problems are government created.
There is nothing stopping another company from developing a more efficient business model and distribution system than Amazon or Walmart, particularly if they started jacking up their prices. It would certainly be bad if one of them was the only game in town but I don't see that happening (at least for long) outside of them getting some sweetheart deal with the government that actually blocks competition from forming. That scenario can, and has, happened but it is due to flaws in governments, not free market economics and capitalism.
Remember what happens when Walmart sets shop in a small town.
Prices on many goods go down and everyone in the community effectively has a higher standard of living?
People like bad mouthing Stallman (and, unfortunately, by association GNU/FSF) because he is an arrogant, condescending, overly confrontational, sexist, hygienically inept, eye sore of a man (I'm sure I missed about 10 more glaringly obvious, negative attributes). That doesn't make him wrong or FSF a bad thing but it does make him an easy target for bad mouthing. He is the type of man you want in the background of a movement, locked away in a server room, trying to push the movement forward. He is not the type of man you want to be front facing for any cause. It is just asking for ridicule and derision (deserved or not).
Definitely agree on the first two points. I'm not sure how you can say it is the US's fault if people in other countries die because the US doesn't give people in other countries free stuff. I suppose then it is also the US's fault when someone doesn't have a house, doesn't have food, or doesn't have medical care because the US didn't build everyone in the world a house, give everyone in the world food, and give everyone in the world medical care. You can rightly blame the US for many things, this is not one of them.
What are all these nutjob ideas I keep hearing so much about? I know you are just parroting whatever main stream media outlet you listen to but do you know what those ideas actually are and why they are nutty?
Nature always finds a way...
Citing a specific example of hard science that is encompassed within a science does not prove the encompassing science itself is hard science. (notice I didn't say anything about statistics...just as the OP didn't say statistics was a soft science).