The United States Pharmacopeia is updated and published to this day. The organization has remained a privately funded nonprofit for over two centuries, but it does now currently cooperate closely with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is interesting to note, however, that it took the government 86 years longer than the USP to address the same issues of drug quality through passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (PFDA) in 1906. The FDA itself was established in 1930 by renaming a related federal agency. When the government finally took notice, it adopted the USP wholesale.
The FDA
At this point, a question should arise. Can the private USP simply replace the governmental FDA? The answer hinges on the purpose of standardizing food and drug information. Two separable purposes are education and enforcement. If the purpose is to provide information so people can make better choices on how to self-medicate, then the USP filled this role long ago. A Cato Institute white paper entitled “Drug Reformation: End Government’s Power to Require Prescriptions” by Jeffrey A. Singer and Michael F. Cannon offers a fascinating insight. The PFDA “codified the privately created USP and defined a drug as ‘adulterated’ if it failed to meet the USP’s standards. Those provisions had little apparent effect, as the USP was already the widely recognized standard of practice.” In short, the free market had already solved a social problem for which the government passed laws many years later. Of course, government assumes the credit for this solution as evidenced by the fact that very few people have heard of the USP while everyone knows about the FDA.
On the other hand, if the purpose of standards is to enforce them by law, whatever the wishes of consumers, then the USP cannot replace the PFDA. It might have been possible in 1906, when both shared a respect for self-medication. Singer and Cannon explain, “Rather than infringe on the right to self-medicate or limit medical autonomy, the PFDA attempted to provide more information to consumers and physicians…. The PFDA also defined the crime of ‘misbranding’, stating that a drug was misbranded if it contained alcohol, opium, cocaine, or any other dangerous or potentially addictive substance and failed to list those ingredients (and their proportional inclusion) on the product label.” Arguably, the laws against “misbranding” were simply laws against fraud.
The authority wielded by the current FDA has expanded vastly, however, and its main mission is no longer information; its mission is law enforcement and regulation. Moreover, additional “purity” legislation, such as the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (FDCA) of 1938, have been passed and embedded into society. The FDCA is largely responsible for federally mandated prescription practices that persist to this day.
In short, there has been a dramatic mission drift from the PFDA’s original respect for people making their own informed choices toward enforcing government authority upon them. This loss of personal freedom is an underestimated cost of government involvement in public goods, like healthcare: there is inevitable drift from utility to authority.
The superiority of the free market
Privatizing as many functions of the economy as quickly possible may be the most pressing economic goal of our day. From roads to education, from pharmaceuticals to banking, from communication to travel … the superiority of the free market over government control needs to be demonstrated with reason and real-world examples. Three of the most powerful ways are to present the superior utility and superior morality of the principles underlying the free market and to offer a proof of concept in as many cases as possible. A proof of concept is especially important because no evidence of a theory is stronger than pointing to historical examples of it having once functioned and flourished. Or how it is flourishing now.
Superior utility
The most basic reason why freedom has superior utility is clearly stated in an article entitled “Who Should Decide What Goes into a Can of Tomatoes? Food Laws from a Voluntary Perspective” by co-founder of the Voluntaryist movement Carl Watner. Watner writes from the perspective of Misean praxeology — the study of human action:
We do not maintain that market solutions would solve all of humanity’s problems, but neither can we assume that because markets and other social mechanisms produce imperfect results that a central monopolistic authority will produce better ones. “Markets are desirable not because they lead smoothly to improved knowledge and better coordination, but because they provide a process for learning from our mistakes and the incentives to correct them.” As voluntaryists, we conclude from examining human nature, human incentives, and human history that a stateless society would not be perfect but would be more moral and practical.
This article was originally published in the July 2024 edition of Future of Freedom.
