The Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw^®
Life Extension News^TM
Volume 6 No. 5 • November-December 2003

The second half of the [twentieth] century has been incomparably more peaceful than the first, simply by putting power into the hands of those people who wanted peace.

— Edward Teller

Ye have made the way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

. . . the agency [FDA] should avoid using expansive definitions of such words as "model" to bootstrap itself into new realms of administrative and regulatory authority.

In developing regulations, it is important that the Agency not allow rent seekers from one side or another to use the power of the Agency to raise barriers to entry or expansion against new products, companies, or processes.

In the final analysis, the consumer is the supreme regulator, and the Agency must be careful not to restrict the consumer’s access and choices for any reasons short of compelling issues of safety.

— Quotes taken from a letter by Chris Cannon, Member of Congress (3rd District, Utah) to Mark McClellan, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, concerning the FDA’s proposed new Good Manufacturing Practices for dietary supplements

Once Upon a Time . . . "Absence of Administrative Centralization"

Previously, I distinguished two kinds of centralization; I called one governmental and the other administrative. The first alone exists in America; the second is nearly unknown there. If the power that directs American societies found these two means of government at its disposal, and added the capacity and the habit of executing everything by itself to the right of commanding everything; if, after having established the general principles of government, it entered into the details of application, and after having regulated the great interests of the country it could descend to the limit of individual interests, freedom would soon be banished from the New World. But in the United States, the majority, which often has the tastes and instincts of a despot, still lacks the most perfected instruments of tyranny.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1831). Far ahead of his time, his predictions of the path of government growth and the loss of individual freedoms were uncanny. The United States now has "perfected" the administrative process, the instrument of tyranny missing in 1831, in the Regulatory State. The FDA is just one example of the results.