The answer is one word: Thalidomide.
Mods if someone has a better place for this response, feel free to move it.
Thalidomide is a great example, but here’s my cut:
1. Government has a Constitutional authority to establish justice.....promote the General Welfare and secure the blessings of Liberty.
2. We have a system where the following is supposed to happen: Congress passes laws with their authority provided by the Constitution, companies abide by them, lawbreaking is punished civilly or criminally, etc.
* Thalidomide was developed by a private company.
* That company had a responsibility to test appropriately to make sure it was effective & not harmful.
* Instances where companies do not produce good products, have unintended consequences, etc should get punished by mechanisms already in place without having extraordinary regulations & massive government bureaucracies.
- Severe instances they lose customers & go out of business- sued & assets seizes and given to those harmed
- Perhaps their conduct was criminal- Execs in charge get prosecuted & jailed
What happens is businesses, because of political shenanigans perpetuated by a corrupt system get off with little to no accountability.
What if the Execs at the company that made Thalidomide were jailed for life & all their personal assets were seized/company bankrupted as damages? Wouldn’t companies behave differently? Why does government have to create a myriad of rules to prevent companies for doing stuff like this? A bunch of disgraced, jailed & penniless Execs whose families are ruined should be enough to promote proper behavior.
Smaller government would drastically reduce politically motivated decisions & generate a much higher of marketplace derived decisions. Who was pressuring the FDA in the case of Thalidomide? I’ll tell you: a person(s) with huge power & little accountability. Who are they bribing, politicians? If the politicians had greatly reduced authority to intervene, the hugely powerful businessman would have no one to bribe to attain a favorable decision. He’d be left to making a decision & suffering the consequences.
You’re advocating a system with increased propensity for graft & corruption, I’m on the other side of the spectrum. You want more politicians, being bribed by more companies in more instances due to more expansive regulations the politicians are voting on, etc. Makes no sense to me that any rational individual would want that type of system or more of it. Think how insane that is- the east qualified person on the face of the earth to make a decision is a politician & you want more of them making more decisions. The second least qualified person to make a decision is a career government bureaucrat. You want more of them making more bad decisions. Crazy.