The government shouldn't regulate ineffective drugs

That assumption is wrong,

By contrast, if Patient swallows an ineffective drug, in willful ignorance of its effects, she does not endanger her life, because we're assuming that the drug does nothing.

...the FDA does the research so the 1000 people don't have to. That's the transaction cost it saves. Once the FDA has done the research, the 1000 people only have to go to its webpage, look up its advice, and follow it. (Except for the one who still wants to do her own research.) Alternatively, they could ask their doctor to look up the FDA's advice for them. Either way, it's a negligible transaction cost compared to doing the actual research---having producers run clinical trials, checking the results they submit, and whatnot. The additional transaction cost saved by the mandate is trivial.

Just to clarify this point - the FDA doesn't do research. The FDA reviews research it tells other folks to do in support of a product claim.

They approve products for specified intended uses and can pull the approval of a product post-market if there are indications of adverse effects.

Not so. Doctors have to be experts on thousands of conditions. It is inevitable that their expertise in each of them remain somewhat shallow. Patients, by contrast, only have to be experts in the few conditions that actually afflict them. They needn't be superhuman to be more proficient about those few than their doctors are about the thousands.

1) I hadn't heard of Laetrile until you started this thread. Since you're bringing it up in your own thread about ineffective drugs, I'll assume it's ineffective but not actively harmful. Please correct me if this assumption is wrong.

2) On the above assumption, my answer to your question is "not applicable", because I reject your premise that failing to prevent a death is to cause a death.

3) Assuming that I did accept your premise---I don't, but I'm not that interested in discussing it---my answer would be as follows: Patients have the choice to learn, or to delegate their learning to their doctors, or to delegate their doctors' learning to the FDA. If they refuse to do any of this, not even to save their own lives, I am willing to tolerate as many deaths as there are patients like that. It's their lives to play with, not mine. If it's legal for those patients to eat rat poison, it should be legal for them to eat Laetrile. Not everything that's bad for people needs to be illegal.

No. With or without the mandate, the FDA does the research so the 1000 people don't have to. That's the transaction cost it saves. Once the FDA has done the research, the 1000 people only have to go to its webpage, look up its advice, and follow it. (Except for the one who still wants to do her own research.) Alternatively, they could ask their doctor to look up the FDA's advice for them. Either way, it's a negligible transaction cost compared to doing the actual research---having producers run clinical trials, checking the results they submit, and whatnot. The additional transaction cost saved by the mandate is trivial.

The principle is that the government has a legitimate role in protecting people's life, liberty, and property against force and fraud by others. If Producer advertises his ineffective medicine as effective, he endangers Patient's life with a form of fraud. By contrast, if Patient swallows an ineffective drug, in willful ignorance of its effects, she does not endanger her life, because we're assuming that the drug does nothing. But even if the drug was harmful rather than just ineffective, it would not involve force or fraud, but rather be a voluntary action by Patient. I wouldn't be surprised if you disagreed with this distinction, but I would be surprised if you didn't understand it. This is very conventional classical liberalism.

Damn!!! You mean that cheese laced cardboard is unhealthy for me. Who da thunk it.

You're trapped in a burning building. You could phone for help, but you mistakenly believe that the phone is out of order. I am, consequently, the only one who knows you're there. I assure you that I will go for help, but instead I just stand around doing nothing, and when the fire department arrives, I tell them there's nobody in the building. As a result, you perish in the flames, even though prompt assistance could have saved your life. What is my responsibility for your death?

First you say that you know more about your own medical condition than your doctor, but then you suggest that attaining that level of expertise is simply a matter of reading labels.

If the FDA loses the authority to dictate which drugs consumers can and cannot take and is transformed instead into the "recommender-in-chief," then it becomes just one more bunch of guys with an opinion, no different from the proponents of Laetrile who think their drug can cure cancer. Yet for some reason you want taxpayers to fund one opinion over the other.

Doctrinaire libertarians understand that, which is why they think there's no reason for taxpayers to fund an operation like the FDA if all it would be doing is issuing opinions.

The difference is that the FDA's opinion is well-informed and independent.

You have killed me by actively lying to the fire department.

No I don't. You misunderstand what I said. Reading labels is not my way of attaining expertise myself. It's my way of deferring to the expertise of others, as I often do at my own discretion. The same is true of following doctors' orders.

The difference is that the FDA's opinion is well-informed and independent. It is well-informed because it has the budget to get accurate information, and is independent because it's funded by the public and can afford to piss off producers with deep pockets. This rightly gives it much greater authority than other organizations' opinion, with or without the power to enforce it against consumers.

Doctors have to be experts on thousands of conditions. It is inevitable that their expertise in each of them remain somewhat shallow. Patients, by contrast, only have to be experts in the few conditions that actually afflict them. They needn't be superhuman to be more proficient about those few than their doctors are about the thousands.

I don't know if Richard Posner's wealth-maximizing variant of Utilitarianism falls under your definition of "doctrinaire libertarians".

But if it does, at least some doctrinaire libertarians have a perfectly good reason to support an FDA funded by taxpayer money: The FDA produces independent, high-quality information. Competitive markets alone would underproduce that kind of information, just as they underproduce any public good. At least since Alfred Marshall (1890), Utilitarian strains of classical liberalism have advocated that government correct such market failure.

In other words, I want the FDA to be Consumer Reports with a better budget

Thomas wrote:

You have killed me by actively lying to the fire department.

So if I just sat there and said nothing, then I would bear no responsibility for your death?

I'm not sure I'm following you here. At first you said that you had developed an expertise that surpassed that of your doctor, and now you say that reading labels allows you to rely on the expertise of others. Well, which is it? Are you the expert, or are you just an expert at understanding experts?

Surely you can't be serious.

I'm sure they have developed good reasons for supporting institutions like the FDA. I just can't understand why you would.

If the Consumers Union doesn't have a big enough budget to do what you'd like, maybe that's because it's competing with the FDA. Remove the FDA, and independent outfits like CU or a similar watchdog organization would take its place and provide the same service