Reading through the specifics, you are right, it seems that the FAA is not doing as good a job as it should be, with episodic laxness in safety checks. It's a leap to say that the industry would be safer or otherwise better off without it though.
Claiming that the FDA has caused more deaths than prevented is, I'm afraid, utterly mindboggling. I can't really entertain the notion seriously, and can only think that this is more selection bias. Do share the evidence, though I feel it'd be a difficult thing to quantify concretely.
Ingredients lists is a throwaway example. More difficult elements to police are things like pesticide usage, hormone usage, presence of disease causing bacteria or molds. The reason Mad Cow Disease is no longer relevant is due to quick identification of the problem and suitable regulation to rectify it. 4.4 million cattle were killed to eradicate the disease, which is difficult to imagine happening quite so thoroughly by the individual volition of the farmers involved.
As for boycotts, it comes down to a separation of belief and behavior. Say a company with production in the third world sometimes uses slave labor. I'm confident that the majority of consumers would agree that this is not a morally acceptable thing for the company to be doing. However, this doesn't necessarily translate into changes in purchase decisions, if the consumer even finds out about this fact in the first place. Immoral corporate action is only rarely confronted by boycott, and only rarely does that boycott then work. Personal preferences are beside the point, and it's disingenuous to compare cartoons to human rights abuses.
Codification of standards can and is done without privileging special interests over the commons. In most other Western countries, this is pretty well understood. The political structure in the US (low voter turnouts require excessive campaign funds which require pandering, for one) means that regulatory bodies may be more susceptible to capture than most, but the fault does not lie with the existence of the body in the first place, nor in most places, does it wholly negate what good the regulator does do.
It does look that way, of course. "Fluoridation of Water Saves Another Ten Million Cavities" is unfortunately a headline I've yet to see.
I don't know what exactly the parent poster had in mind about FDA, but a commonly seen argument is that delaying a drug for a year by requiring more tests saves X expected lives (more chance to discover adverse effects), but also costs Y lives (those who would've been saved during that year), and that FDA are motivated by political reasons to act to ensure safety even in cases when X is significantly less than Y - thus, in effect, killing many people.
But that's not my point to make, so I can't give specific examples.
Claiming that the FDA has caused more deaths than prevented is, I'm afraid, utterly mindboggling. I can't really entertain the notion seriously, and can only think that this is more selection bias. Do share the evidence, though I feel it'd be a difficult thing to quantify concretely.
Ingredients lists is a throwaway example. More difficult elements to police are things like pesticide usage, hormone usage, presence of disease causing bacteria or molds. The reason Mad Cow Disease is no longer relevant is due to quick identification of the problem and suitable regulation to rectify it. 4.4 million cattle were killed to eradicate the disease, which is difficult to imagine happening quite so thoroughly by the individual volition of the farmers involved.
As for boycotts, it comes down to a separation of belief and behavior. Say a company with production in the third world sometimes uses slave labor. I'm confident that the majority of consumers would agree that this is not a morally acceptable thing for the company to be doing. However, this doesn't necessarily translate into changes in purchase decisions, if the consumer even finds out about this fact in the first place. Immoral corporate action is only rarely confronted by boycott, and only rarely does that boycott then work. Personal preferences are beside the point, and it's disingenuous to compare cartoons to human rights abuses.
Codification of standards can and is done without privileging special interests over the commons. In most other Western countries, this is pretty well understood. The political structure in the US (low voter turnouts require excessive campaign funds which require pandering, for one) means that regulatory bodies may be more susceptible to capture than most, but the fault does not lie with the existence of the body in the first place, nor in most places, does it wholly negate what good the regulator does do.
It does look that way, of course. "Fluoridation of Water Saves Another Ten Million Cavities" is unfortunately a headline I've yet to see.