How do consumers pay the arbitrator? Is it like some sort of tax thing, or are you literally being billed by a food health organization every month?
You do this right now with annual tax bills. It could be something like that, it could also be a nominal fee paid at the time of transaction. Probably just pennies on the dollar.
So you're saying it's either a yearly bill or a sales tax.
If it's a yearly bill, the government would have to handle that, right? A bunch of private organizations couldn't bill me without my having bought a service unless the government authorized them to do so. And unless they're keeping track of all my sales records and billing me based on those (which I'm sure is quite objectionable under the libertarian worldview, and is quite inefficient and unnecessary to boot), they'll just have to charge me for each food arbitrator that exists. So now each American is supporting two (or many more) FDA's? It's identical to the system we have now, except it's a hell of a lot more inefficient.
If it's a sales tax, once again, the government will have to intervene to mandate it. This looks better than the yearly bill option, until you consider that everything's now a bit more expensive because you now have to pay food arbitrators for every single item you buy. The net effect here is that food which hasn't been approved by any food arbitrator is cheaper, meaning that the poor -- the people who are most in need of a guarantee their food is healthy -- will have to choose between an "approved" sticker or living a bit more comfortably. It's sort of analogous to the system we have now, where our massive corn subsidies are making unhealthy food far cheaper than healthy food, causing our poor to have to subsist on junk food.
What if one arbitrator charged substantially less than another? If that arbitrator is of lower quality than the others, then that means the poor are once again forced to get lower-quality food. It's a rather bad day in America when the only way to eat bacteria-free meat is to pay up to a shady, private company, isn't it?
Also, neither of these solutions actually do away with the conflict of interest. It's still there. The arbitrators aren't actually arbitrary whatsoever, since they're getting paid by the companies whose product they need to approve. The annual bill or sales tax from consumers is just gravy.
The only solution which avoids the conflict of interest problem is an organization with no financial dependence on the food companies. Because separate arbitration organizations imply separate standards of food safety for separate classes, we need
one organization which will hold all companies up to a single universal standard to which all Americans have a right. And we have that -- in the FDA.
Now, the FDA does have its problems. But you have raised none of those problems here. You made a wildly unsubstantiated claim about how the FDA has killed more people than it's saved (which you more or less admitted was BS when somebody called you on it), and then proceeded to argue that it must be broken since it's a monopoly and therefore doesn't have accountability. Honestly, I think you're so against the
idea of the FDA that you fail to see its practical usefulness.
