7 Comments

Excellent piece. We need to not only exit the FDA but also exit any system that supports it. Systemically that would mean making decentralized and transparent systems. We could build parallel ones like what Balaji describes in his book The Network State. Or we could build ones that plug into the existing systems and gives the control back to us. Like this:

https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/worried-about-voter-fraud-lets-build?r=7oa9d&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

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This piece is gold. I’d argue that regulations (which are laws passed by regulatory agencies like FDA or SEC) should include a section about implicit assumptions. In other words, the regulation should specify which problem this regulation will solve or help. And then automatically sunset if the regulation doesn’t reach its own goals within a set period, say 10 years.

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And yes making the assumptions explicit could indeed help, especially combined with a sunset clause. However I'm also okay going the opposite direction where regulations are easier to roll back and have a clause regardless, and give the pro/con assessment over to an external party who can scoe it similar to CBO.

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Thank you !!

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Well, generally in the US, laws means statutes passed by Congress, and regulations means rules passed by a regulatory agency. When you say regulations would be easier to roll back, who would be rolling it back? This new anti-agency? Because my understanding is that the agencies themselves can easily roll back regulations (if they want to).

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I was playing a little fast and loose with the exact distinction there, but yes the anti-agency is important. The reason I feel a con-case is needed is that though the agencies themselves have the power to roll back their regs, a) the inherent bias to add rather than subtract makes that less likely, and b) the quasi-inquisitorial model we have currently is biased against adequate fact finding.

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These agencies are generally rationally risk averse, though - people rarely blame the central bank for slowing GDP growth by 0.1%, but they do blame it for hyperinflation or bank crashes

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