Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2020 6:46 am
What if government regulations were facilitating companies being bad actors? My example is something near and dear to my heart, protein powder. Independent lab testing (which comports well with libertarian principles, IMO) has shown that many brands of protein powder contain less than half of the protein on the label.
The companies found a loophole in the FDA regulation that lets them substitute cheap amino acids in place of complete protein. So now they're being sued because people are buying protein powder that should contain all the amino acids, not individual amino acids. One company's defense is going to be that they are fully compliant with FDA regulations. My guess is that their lawyers/PR people have figured out that they will probably win the lawsuit, and they'll take less of a reputation hit because most people won't bother to figure out what they were doing, and since they never admitted they did something wrong/misleading, pointing to the fact that they complied with all FDA regulations, they'll come out ok.
One tactic they'll use is one that Tim Pool has made us all aware of, the "lying with facts" one. Where you can say something that's technically true, but you're really lying in the human-interaction sense of the word:
Similarly, a lab test of MusclePharm’s “Arnold Scharzenegger Series Iron Mass” revealed that just 19 of the promised 40 grams of protein were present, according to exhibits in the lawsuit. Prior to the lab test results, MusclePharm denied over Twitter that it spiked its products.
@JakeHenderson39 Those are fake then. We don't do anything like that. All products legit and scientifically backed — MusclePharm® (@MusclePharm) June 13, 2014
IE, they are legit (according to the FDA regulations that don't jive with meathead expectations), and scientifically backed (meaningless phrase, in this context).
Link.
This is a specific case of a more general issue: Minimum government standards often become maxima as well, because people assume that if it's "government approved" it must be good.
Here's an example of a private solution to the question of standards.
If I'm going to buy a product with certain characteristics and Costco carries one that matches my requirements, I'll buy it from them. Why? Because I can return it if I'm dissatisfied.
I've done this with products that are over 10 years old, for which I no longer have the receipt, and which they no longer carry.
I'm thinking about a carry-on suitcase whose frame broke after such a timeframe. We tried to get it fixed at a luggage repair shop and they said it wasn't fixable.
We hadn't abused it, using it exclusively as carry-on, so we know the luggage handlers hadn't been slinging it around. We didn't think that was an acceptable level of durability.
So we took it back to the store. It took them a fair amount of time to figure out what to do because the purchase was so old that it was no longer in their system.
However, they could tell that we had bought it from them because it was their store brand, Kirkland.
What they eventually did was look up the last price they had sold it for, and gave us a store credit in that amount, $99 if I recall correctly.
Is there any conceivable government regulation that would mandate that? I can't imagine one that wouldn't totally destroy the economy.
So why do they do it? Because their customers will buy from them if they carry what the customers need. I don't even have to think about it.
