[ExI] Nobel laureates tell Greenpeace to stop, opposing GMOs

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 12:03 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I have utterly no objection to private business doing these things, but
nobody is
> - mostly.  CR does do a good job but they are very limited by money.  I
support
> them.

Who or what is not limited by money in this?

There's the issue here, if you're not really concerned about giving the
federal government even more power and you're not worried about its overall
competency, of whether the threat you're worried about is that big a deal.
What's a good reasonable range for estimating this risk?

> No, we aren't going to give regulators more money.  Repubs to blame.
Hell, they
> won't even give the IRS enough money to hire more people to make more
money
> than it would take to pay them.  Stupid stupid.

If the GOP were actually shrinking the federal government, that would be a
great thing IMO. They are not. I'd rather them have less power to tax --
not more. Yes, that would give less for your favorite programs here and
it's not costless. But the federal government is by no means shrinking even
in this area.

>> If terrorists want to poison our food supply to get us, they could do it
domestically just as easily.
>
> All the more reason to give the FDA more money.

I'm not so sure about that. The FDA already has a big budget. It already
does enough harm as it is, especially in attacking things like supplements
and in slowing innovation down to a crawl. As a libertarian, I'd expect you
not to ignore that actual danger posed by the FDA -- rather than worry
about the potential risk of terrorists poisoning the food supply.)

> I am not a conspiracy theorist - by a very long shot.

What does that term even mean? Do you believe no conspiracies ever happen?
The term is too loosely used, I think. There are valid conspiracies --
viz., ones that it would be unreasonable not to believe in. And then there
are ones that it would be unreasonable -- given the evidence -- to believe
in. But a tout court disbelief in conspiracies is unwarranted.

> But we are not being careful enough about our water supply, food supply,
drugs,
> power stations, and more.

Wouldn't another libertarian approach be much more reasonable here: stop
stirring the pot for terrorism by getting involved in all kinds of foreign
adventures and playing global cop? This would remove much of the incentive
for terrorism in the first place. Sure, some terrorism will still occur,
but it will likely be very low -- just like some theft still occurs.
(Actually, the base rate for terrorism seems really, really low. Were this
not so, we would so far more of it -- just not more of in well guarded
places. This is unlike armed robbery, where when they started better
securing banks, it switched to liquor stores and gas stations. So it would
seem the base rate for terrorism is much lower than for armed robbery.)

> Remember when someone, never caught, poisoned Tylenol, leading to the kind
> of packaging we have nowadays?  That could look like very small change.  I
> hope I am wrong.

But your suggestion here is something much larger: a more extensive and
more well funded FDA and not a change in packaging. Now, you could argue
you can't have one without the other. I doubt that. I think the coercive,
centralized state solution to problems, especially potential ones, is like
a scorched Earth approach.

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst
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