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: Before I start, let me describe to whom you will be writing to. : I am 42, very much a free-thinker independantly minded individual who abhors authoritarism in all its form wether political, religious or idelogical. : I have benefited immensely of being born in a (relatively) capitalist country (Canada) and enjoy greatly the freedom that market choice provides. Thus I tend to be very favorable to liberalism in all its form (Von Mises, Hayek, Friedman). : But I have never been dogmatic, and my positions in many subjects have changed over the years (sometimes even back and forth) as new arguments or evidence is provided to me. I have no turf to defend nor am I member of any idelogy, religion or political party. : I am well educated (md) and at the top of iq scales. : Thus if someone takes the time to write to me with interesting arguments, it will not be (I hope) useless. : Here is my problem. : 1) : Virtually all of successful industrialized countries have currently a mixed economy with government spending oscillating close to 50%. This was the result of the votes of millions of individuals shaping the type of government they wished. In virtually all the countries there is ususally a right-leaning party (usually but not always) more market oriented, and a more left-leaning party wanting an increase of government presence in the economy. Clearly the individuals citizens have expressed their desire for more government in their life, or otherwise more and more liberal government would have been elected until we reached a very low level of government intervention. : Now since liberalism strongly argue for letting the individuals decide, why is it not aknowledging that people have (to paraphrase Mr Friedman's book) "freely choose" an expansion of that unique institutional organisation called government? Can 400 millions individuals (among them highly educated and knowledgeable people) be that wrong? : 2) : Now let's see why most people (including me today) are favorable to some governement intervention. Let's take an example: the FDA (food and drug agency) responsible for the safey of our food. I have read elsewhere that Mr Friedman advocates the dismantlement of the FDA so this makes it the ideal example. : If the FDA would be effectively dismantle than a few things can happen: : a) Nobody test the food for safey. The customer is responsible to make an informed decision: This does not conform to reality, because although one may indeed choose not to go a restaurant that result invariably a few hours later in diarrhea (although one would have preferred to know this BEFORE and avoid this anoying disability), one clearly cannot make any decision when the health risk is delayed over many years (like the real example of england's contaminated beef with "mad-cow" disease). Thousand would die because of this, and indeed nobody would ever know why because nobody would be testing the food and the effect being so delayed would not help in establishing the cause. : b) A private organisation test the food for safety and publishes the result. Something like an expanded Consumer's Report. While consumer's report may have sufficient month to purchase a few cars every years, it has by no means the funds required for testing most food (the laboratories required would likely cost billions). Futhermore its source of money could be typically of two kind: : i) independant: price of subscriptions, web-page info. This could hardly be sufficient to raise enough money. : ii) industry-dependant: food providers would purchase a "approval stamp" from the organisation that would test them regularly. Is that really different from what the FDA does? Yes, in a significant way. Real-life experience in many fields (including pharmacological) has shown that whoever pays for the research or approval tends to get considerably more favorable studies then he would otherwise have. There are myriads of way to conduct a truly scientific study that obtain a "pre-determined" result as any epidemiologist can attest (the current favorite is to repeat the study many times and only publish the favorable studies). : c) have you anything else to suggest???? : I think government is ideally suited to perform food inspection because: : - its constituents are the customers of the food in its region of control, so every person benefits it : - independenat funding would likely not be available for any private organizational because the expected revenue stream is likely to be insufficient to justify mive investment (and the conclusion of a study would be given in a newspaper headline - why pay what you can get free?) : - it is the only organisation to have the power to prevent the contaminated food to appear on the shelves: the alternative is to get a "mad-cow" type of disease simply because you haven't had the chance to read the lastest private industry report in the morning! : Or maybe am I wrong? : But then, where? : (Whoever responds can you also send a copy to: fmartel@cnwl.igs.net )

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