When I hear people like Rand Paul argue that all you need is a free market, and public pressure will push companies to make positive changes, I think of the elixir sulfanilamide crisis of 1937: Sulfanilamide was the original antibacterial drug, still new, and growing rapidly more popular, in the late 30's, when Harold Watkins, a chemist who worked for the S.E. Massengill Company, got the idea of making a sweet-tasting, drinkable version to be given to children. He combined sulfanilamide with diethylene glycol (It's the ingredient that makes antifreeze so toxic; there was information that it was dangerous available at the time, but unfortunately Watkins hadn't seen it.) and sweet raspberry flavoring, and little kids drank it and clamored for more. Unfortunately, right after that they all started getting kidney failure and dying.
It was standard procedure at the time to test new medications before marketing them, but there was no law requiring companies to do it, and in this case Massengill had made no tests before marketing product. They also weren't the ones who conducted tests after it started killing people, to see if why they were dying. The FDA did that, then they told Massengill the results of their tests. Massengill sent out a recall notice, but they neglected to mention that the elixir was toxic. They also did nothing to go bring back the elixir that had already been sold. The FDA did the best it could with the legal authorization it had. It put out a radio warning (which was not available in some areas), and sent out all the inspectors it could spare, to collect bottles of elixir. And once they finally had them all, the FDA prosecuted Massengill for misbranding, on the grounds that they'd said the elixir contained alcohol when actually it contained the diethylene glycol instead, because it was the only thing they'd done that was actually against the law.
Overall, Massengill's new elixir killed 107 people. When he found out what had happened, Harold Watkins committed suicide, but as for the company, their response was to say, "We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part."
So much for the responsibility of corporations, which only works to help consumers when the corporations bother to feel some responsibility. So much for the public making informed decisions in the marketplace, which only works when the information gets to the public who need itI might mention the fact that tobacco companies actively worked to hide the risks of smoking from the public for 50 years here). On the other hand however, the government's record isn't all that much better, and for every story about heroic government officials taking action to protect the consumer, you can find several more, where laziness, ideology, or active corruption have put consumers at risk.
Take the Armour Company for instance, that I mentioned at the start of the article: True, it was a government inspector who finally checked the beef Armour had supplied for Army use, and found out that it was inedible. But before it got to him, another government inspector, from the Bureau of Animal Industry, had already checked it over, and not bothered to notice that there was anything wrong with it. Take arsenic: We've known it was poisonous for thousands of years, and people have been warning about its use as a pesticide for decades. It was only in the 1990's that the EPA classified it as a carcinogen; it is still legal for use as a pesticide; and it is still being added to the feed given to our Thanksgiving turkeys.
Take the Ford Pinto, for that matter: Ford was completely within the law, and following standard legal precedent, when they made their infamous cost-benefit analysis, and decided that it was better to put the Pinto out with a design flaw that made eight out of the ten vehicles they tested explode upon impact (and the two that didn't had been modified before the test), than to spend the $11 extra it would have cost to change the design. There was no law against what Ford did, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had no leverage to require that Ford show them their research on the Pinto, so they had to do their own, which took them four years, and who knows how many more cars rolling off the assembly lines (and into the accident reports in local papers) before the Pinto was finally recalled.
The government is basically powerless most of the time, when corporations take steps to screw us over. They're powerless because officials take bribes to ignore abuses, and because corporations scream bloody murder and bog down any positive changes that get made with a lot of legal appeals, and because ideologues in Congress would rather cut our public safety than raise taxes. Corporations of course, do only what they are made to do, which is less and less, as enforcement budgets shrink, and new Supreme Court decisions leave them free to spend as much as they have to, to get a government that will allow them to do whatever they want. A person starts to wonder where we can turn, to get some protection.
In the end, the people who come out best in this story are the cranks and the activists: Upton Sinclair, for example, was a doctrinaire Socialist, who ran for public office repeatedly (and was repeatedly defeated), but his muckraking novel The Jungle, based on his own firsthand investigation of the meatpacking industry, played a big part in convincing Congress to pass the first Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Another activist who played a part in getting the Act passed was Dr. Harvey Wiley, who generated public attention for his crusade against artificial preservatives in foods, when he got a dozen able-bodied volunteers, whom the press called his Poison Squad, to agree to eat large doses of various preservatives and find out with their own bodies, whether or not they were safe. It is thanks to Dr. Wiley that formaldehyde was outlawed as a preservative for milk. Another more recent activist is Ralph Nader, mostly known nowadays as the guy who can't stop running for President, even though his candidacy helped get George Bush into office in 2000. Nader was a public advocate for auto safety in the 1960's, who's pressure is a good part of why the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act got passed in 1966. It is thanks to this Act that nowadays all cars come equipped with safety features such as head rests, energy-absorbing steering wheels, shatter-resistant windshields, and safety belts.
So I guess this is the lesson I want you to take away after you read this: Corporations don't give a sh**, and the government slacks off before the job's done; if you want something done to make your country safer, go out and join the activists and the cranks in making some noise, and pressuring the government to do it.
HyperSmash
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