POLITICS - ephedra - should we license herbalists?

[Guest guest]

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>Licensing doesn't protect people from bad practioners, in fact it

>usually lowers quality because it gives people a false sense of comfort

>(thus they stop doing their own due diligence).

Please remember to preface political posts with the subject line tag

POLITICS. I realize there are some blurry areas, and this is one, but the

tag is not meant to address whether a post is on- or off-topic for the list

(a much, much more subjective judgement in many cases, though the

availability of herbal supplements is clearly on-topic) just whether it's

political or not, and your message was unquestionably political.

Furthermore, while I agree with you up to a point, there are two flaws with

your final conclusion and agenda.

First, you're suggesting that people shouldn't delegate their due

diligence. Sounds great, but in a complex modern world, it's _not

possible_ to perform one's own due diligence in more than a relative

handful of domains. Delegation is not only inevitable but required,

regardless of its inevitable shortcomings.

Second, you're assuming that in the absence of government-based delegation,

the quality of available delegation would be improved, but again, this is

most likely an unwarranted assumption, as even a cursory reading of _Trust

Us, We're Experts_ will show. Industry is expert at creating the illusion

of objective experts and at corrupting previously-objective experts, even

without their knowledge. For every " Consumer Reports " there's an entire

army pushing bogus information in far more domains than CR can ever hope to

cover, and that army will always have vastly more money to use in promoting

its products and services than consumers will be willing or able to spend

on their own defense because of the very nature of economic reality --

vendors make that money with every consumer purchase, whereas CR and the

like rely on essentially voluntary funds which will never amount to more

than an infinitesimal fraction of the opposition's money. In a market

sense, CR and its brethren are a handful of products generating a handful

of money competing against millions of products generating trillions of

dollars.

Government, by contrast, can level this playing field and offer substantial

civilian participation and oversight, something unavailable in the

marketplace, where " votes " are, effectively, dollars, and dollars are

highly concentrated. Of course, just like delegation, it has its own

shortcomings -- a vulnerability to corruption and a tendency to lag

progress -- but nothing is perfect.

The fundamental fiscal libertarian position on the issue is that none of

this matters, because taxation and regulation are simply wrong by nature,

but only a relatively few people will ever be swayed by that rhetoric. For

the rest of the populace, you must insist that libertarianism also works

better, but unfortunately, what evidence and science we have are against you.

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