Health Canada couldn’t stop tainted medical cannabis from reaching patients.
Let that sink in for a second.
A billion-dollar black hole Canadians apparently can’t live without, yet unable to fulfill even the most basic of tasks.
The federal bureaucracy told the Globe and Mail that they do not test cannabis. The federal “regulator” leaves that up to growers. In other words, the LPs are governing themselves.
Far from proving that private companies (like LPs) will harm consumers without government regulation, this Health Canada scandal demonstrates that government regulations don’t work.
I mean, they trusted the LPs to do their job for them. If this were a privately-owned regulator, that seal of approval would take a beating in the marketplace. A competing accreditation or quality assurance agency would take its place.
But this is Health Canada we’re talking about. Screw-ups are awarded with increased funding. After all, we can’t let LPs ship out medical cannabis with fungicide on it, and so the problem must have been lack of resources on Health Canada’s part. We’ll just increase their funding by a few million here and…
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We have over one hundred years of socialist calculation to compare with free markets. We have a solid economic argument that has yet to be discredited.
Do you still believe that commerce can’t function without government regulation? That to advocate for free and fair markets is an unfettered libertarian fetish?
The LPs put all their eggs in the “safe, regulated, quality medicine” basket as not only the reason why patients should purchase from them, but as the reason why “unregulated” competitors should be legislated out of business.
But it’s bunk, all of it.
LPs shipped out medicine with a fungicide on it that, when burned, produces hydrogen cyanide. Health Canada can give you information about why that’s bad, but so can the internet.
So why do we fork over billions in taxes each year? So overpaid bureaucrats can retire on pensions better than anything in the private sector? Why increase the number of hospital beds when you can pay an inventory clerk $55,000 a year?
Health Canada’s so-called “regulation” is non-existent. How large is your confirmation bias to think that this is not a government failure, and that, somehow, the free market would be worse.
Governments offer goods and services that apparently can’t or shouldn’t fetch a price on the market. In what world does accreditation and quality assurance fall under this category?
Absent government’s ineffective monopoly, competing accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory licensing and regulation.
Absent a “national standard,” consumers would make more discriminating choices about who they purchased from.
Absent government’s monopoly regulatory “services,” the costs of doing business would fall. The free market would essentially force consumers to act in accordance with their own — rather than the government’s — risk assessment.
Competing entrepreneurs, to safeguard against liability suits and to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees.
Health Canada give the illusion of regulation where there is none, and that is worse than no regulation at all.