Yesterday morning, a line of hundreds of people wrapped around the U.S. Health and Human Services Department headquarters— the agency that oversees the FDA, CDC, NIH, and CMS. It wasn’t everyday Americans waiting for appointments, or applying for services, or the hottest pop-up food truck, or anything like that.
No, yesterday hundreds of researchers, scientists, doctors, support staff, and others were lined up outside their workplace waiting to hear that their service to their country had just been terminated.
Some mused aloud if it was a cruel April fool’s day joke. But it wasn’t a joke.
It was the moment America pulled the trigger and blew its brains out.
Here’s what I mean.
Free market idealogues continuously complain about government regulation and government agencies. They claim that faceless bureaucrats stifle production and destroy the free market. It’s a belief that a lot of billionaire-funded politicians agree on, from classic Koch-funded global free traders to protectionist domestic free traders like JD Vance, who recently proclaimed to a packed house of tech bros that we ruined America when “we over-regulated our industries.”
These billionaires and their political lackeys describe a free market utopia where no government ever interacts with them and market-based decisions rule all interactions. They claim that getting rid of government and all regulations and oversight is the key to unlocking infinite prosperity and happiness for all.
Besides the obvious faults with this logic, a real irony of it is that eliminating bureaucrats in the name of the free market actually destroys the ability of the free market to function at its most basic level.
One of the foundational principles of their free-market economy is that accurate market-based decisions require all market participants, like buyers and sellers, to have accurate or equal information to base their decisions on. If they don’t, and information is asymmetrical, then “correct” economic decisions won’t be made, the free market loses its “magic hand” efficiency, and ultimately fails.
Taking it back to our HHS employees, let’s say a company starts selling a drug, we’ll call it Snoo-Z, for nausea, anxiety, and trouble sleeping. It’s cheap and effective, so word of mouth spreads like wildfire and soon people everywhere are talking about and taking Snoo-Z. The company and its shareholders, who have the best and cheapest product on the market, are rewarded for their innovation and investment by profiting marvelously and outrunning all of their competitors.
Its precisely the free-market utopia the billionaires are talking about and, according to them, why we shouldn’t have organizations like the FDA getting in the way of or slowing down the free market, consumer decision-making, and everyone’s happiness.
Incidentally, as Snoo-Z is flying off the shelves, doctors start noticing tens of thousands of serious birth defects and miscarriages more per year than ever before. They suspect something is wrong, but can’t connect the dots. When the drug company is occasionally asked, they reply that their studies show all of their drugs, including Snoo-Z, are completely safe, so the public keeps looking for the cause and sucking down Snoo-Z pills.
Of course, in this scenario, Snoo-Z is the cause of the defects. But, since consumers don’t have that information and have no way of figuring out on their own, they keep buying and rewarding a company that is killing their children.
This is an example of how the free market fails due to lack of information on the consumer side. And a lesson in how regulators and the government, rather than suppressing the free market as our billionaire idealogues claim, they actually serve a critical role in making it work by serving as consumers’ information equalizers and breaking the information asymmetry between consumers and corporate megaliths.
This isn’t even a hypothetical, the above scenario actually played out exactly like that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with a drug called thalidomide, that caused tens of thousands of birth defects around the globe.
Except, it didn’t cause them in the United States of America.
Because an FDA pharmacologist, Frances Oldham Kelsey, refused to let big pharma bully her into approving their sale of thalidomide in America. Her reason, something that none of us normal consumers would have come to without her expertise, was that the drug company testimonials lacked proper scientific methodology. Which she based on recognizing that the drug company study authors had published suspicious articles in the past.
In fact, as we all discovered later, the company had discovered in its internal studies that birth defects were discovered in testing on rats, but didn’t disclose those findings and instead pressured the FDA, who stood firm, to approve the drug on the basis that it had already been approved in most of the world, including Europe, and that it would be bad for America and Americans to not approve it here.
As consumers, who can never have information parity with massive companies, Frances Oldham Kelsey and her colleagues served as our information equalizers and led Americans to the proper free market decision on whether or not to buy Thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s. Without these regulators, the market would have failed spectacularly in its supposed purpose: using market incentives to create correct decision making that rewards the deserving.
There are thousands of examples of this throughout recent American history. Asbestos, round-up, listeria outbreaks in contaminated food.
Without the people like Frances Oldham Kelsey, like the men and women lined up around the HHS building yesterday morning, and the thousands more across our country who are being fired this week in the name of the free market, we would not know how to make the right decisions as consumers.
The former, or soon-to-be former, employees waiting to be fired outside HHS HQ yesterday did not inhibit the free market, they made it function by giving us information parity. They were literally our brains in the free market.
The saddest part for me is that we all instinctively know we don’t personally have enough information make good consumer decisions. It’s why we obsess over reading reviews of trinkets restaurants. But while our fellow consumers are incredible sources of information and experience multipliers for many things, we need real expertise to fill in the gaps when dealing with massively complex, opaque, or deeply scientific products and industries and the armies of scientists and PR folks employed in the service of corporate America.
Without our own scientists and experts, knowing that we don’t have enough information to make educated decisions on our own, we will turn more and more to the only place left to us: the internet.
A place where, much like the top levels of HHS, conspiracy theories on everything from vaccines to fluoride abound.
April Fool’s Day has never seemed more aptly named.
Lucas
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