Ugh, this one needs to go down in flames. I would hate to go back to the days where anyone could sell anything, caveat emptor, and injured people had no recourse. No safety standards for food products... no safety and efficacy testing of drugs... snake oil salesmen being able to make any scientifically baseless claim about their wares, while selling bottles of poison... NO, THANKS!
The Constitution mandates that the Federal government provide for the general welfare of its citizens. The FDA is a large part of that effort. There are plenty of federal agencies that don’t meet any Constitutional requirement—why doesn’t Rand Paul go after them?
As I read the bill, it strengthens the need to prove willful and knowing intent to cause harm AND it disarms the agency. It allows an oat cereal to state that studies show oat fiber can reduce cholesterol or that prune juice can be laxative. That is not wholesale allowing of snake oil. Oat fiber or prune juice will not kill or even injure you and if you want to drink raw milk, that is not the purview of government. Yes, the individual drinking the milk _could_ become ill, but they aren’t going to cause an epidemic. Millions of us have ingested clean milk direct from a bulk tank or from a cow and lived to tell the tale. I am one of those.
And, as I understand it, it did not pass.
OTOH, the fine print on many drugs is difficult to read and requires a medical dictionary to decipher. Drugs, devices and treatments are regularly passed by the FDA that later turn out to have debilitating and life threatening side effects. Recourse is expensive and class actions only benefit the attorneys. There is no real protection because of FDA.
Normal food production and processing inspections miss many instances where numbers of individuals are sickened, permanently harmed or killed by pathogens. These are failures of the food inspection process that are not addressed in this bill.
A government bureaucracy is not eliminating threats by regulating around the edges of the problem. They appear to go after relatively innocent practices while not being able to address the serious problems.
If your interpretation of the “general welfare” clause is correct then there are no constitutional limits on what the federal government can do.
“Ugh, this one needs to go down in flames. I would hate to go back to the days where anyone could sell anything, caveat emptor, and injured people had no recourse.”
The present “solution” to these concerns leads us to a government first presumes the power to tell me what I can and cannot ingest thus violating one of my may unalienable rights.
Second, it leads to a government that is willing to kill people who are selling unapproved vitamins or raw milk. Well, government doesn’t really intend to kill them, but during raids by machine-gun equipped SWAT troops, accidents can happen.
Third, it protects commercial interests who are favored by that same gun-wielding bureaucracy via regulatory capture.
Fourth, it leads to false claims of harmless substances when the bureaucracy that enforces its monopoly on competence tells us that there is nothing to worry about, we should just move on with our lives, when in fact a real hazard exists.
See for example: FDA claims no need to test Pacific fish for radioactivity.
http://www.adn.com/2011/04/16/1813982/fda-claims-no-need-to-test-pacific.html#ixzz1JlrzUS7x
Sixth: this bureaucracy becomes self-serving. Companies that work within the system and are cooperative with it get protection. For example, the CDC estimates that in 2011 contaminated food caused approximately 47.8 million illnesses, over 127,800 hospital admissions and over 3,000 deaths.
But we don’t send a SWAT squad to Jack in the Box when contaminated beef causes several deaths, we send a team of biologists. Had that same number of people died after eating organic beef from an organic farmer in Arkansas, the SWAT raid would have been broadcast live.
see: Spending Big at the Ag Department
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-05-27/spending-big-ag-department
Now certainly the public health is an important issue. However, government is only force and as George Washington observed, like fire in that it was a wonderful servant but a terrible master. The present structure of protecting the public costs a lot of lives and part of the media-government collusion is to protect government from the public seeing how much damage it does in the process of protecting us.
One solution is for government to set standards based on sound science and prudent practices but to limit its power to simply requiring labeling as to how well a product complies with the standard. We don’t have to threaten people with machine guns (and risk actually killing them) in order to stop their ability to sell to the public.
Even with my proposal we all must realize there are limits to government, another fact that government bureaucrats just cannot understand. This fact is proved by crack addicts every day.
To a gun-wielding bureaucrat every power of government is there for him to use and his budget only gets bigger when he can use those powers. Government only can grow at the expense of our liberty and prosperity. Our government is way too large and way too expensive as it is.