Perhaps, but in the current situation where there are shortages and the military is airlifting small quantities from Europe, I suspect people would take what they could get. And if their choice was between "let your infant starve" and "feed your infant the formula made from the 100 year-old recipe fed to your great-grandparents that the dairy down the street is making" they might choose the latter.
I'm not against regulation; I simply think we should punish (including executing) those who do harm and leave those who aren't harming others alone. There's a very wide chasm between "safe" and "complies with FDA regulations"; I have direct experience with this.
Ultimately risk is dependent on alternatives, and if the alternative is "your baby starves to death" then bespoke formula made by the diary down the street sounds pretty good.
The FDA didn't exist until 1906: what do you think people did before then? My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers who if you told them that infants were at risk of starving in 2022 would have looked at you funny, because if they weren't breast-feeding they would have just given their babies some milk from their cows with whatever extras the local midwife suggested. None of which went through a multi-million dollar clinical study.
I agree that as the sphere of influence for companies to do harm increased the punishment for doing harm ought to have increased. I simply think that instead of trying to regulate the how of food production the government should have focused on punishing people who did harm. As it is all the government can do is regulate the "how" because it largely is incapable of punishing harm, because those who do harm will claim that because the government didn't tell them to not do the thing that caused harm they can't be held responsible.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was passed due to legitimate poisonings of the food supply: imagine if we had simply executed everyone who had knowledge that was happening and warned everyone who wasn't involved "if you do this from now on this is the punishment". How might things be different?
Perhaps, but in the current situation where there are shortages and the military is airlifting small quantities from Europe, I suspect people would take what they could get. And if their choice was between "let your infant starve" and "feed your infant the formula made from the 100 year-old recipe fed to your great-grandparents that the dairy down the street is making" they might choose the latter.
I'm not against regulation; I simply think we should punish (including executing) those who do harm and leave those who aren't harming others alone. There's a very wide chasm between "safe" and "complies with FDA regulations"; I have direct experience with this.
Ultimately risk is dependent on alternatives, and if the alternative is "your baby starves to death" then bespoke formula made by the diary down the street sounds pretty good.
The FDA didn't exist until 1906: what do you think people did before then? My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers who if you told them that infants were at risk of starving in 2022 would have looked at you funny, because if they weren't breast-feeding they would have just given their babies some milk from their cows with whatever extras the local midwife suggested. None of which went through a multi-million dollar clinical study.
I agree that as the sphere of influence for companies to do harm increased the punishment for doing harm ought to have increased. I simply think that instead of trying to regulate the how of food production the government should have focused on punishing people who did harm. As it is all the government can do is regulate the "how" because it largely is incapable of punishing harm, because those who do harm will claim that because the government didn't tell them to not do the thing that caused harm they can't be held responsible.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was passed due to legitimate poisonings of the food supply: imagine if we had simply executed everyone who had knowledge that was happening and warned everyone who wasn't involved "if you do this from now on this is the punishment". How might things be different?