What do all the Minnesota programs in the news have in common? They are all mainly funded by the federal government and administered by the state.

Stuart K. Hayashi I have heard people say, “I’ve never seen an isolated atom, and yet I know atoms exist. Therefore, you can know something exists even if its existence has never been confirmed by sensory evidence.” But the truth is that atomic theory is indeed confirmed by sensory evidence. Chemical formulae in a compound — such as how, in water, for every one atom of oxygen, there are two

A Rebel in Eden: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism, by Robert Bidinotto, explains the philosophic foundations of the modern political movement, theories that, in some cases, go back centuries.

Venezuela has a chance at revival. America has removed a security threat. And autocrats everywhere just learned that no palace provides immunity from justice.

Regardless of the evidence of “state capitalism” not working, many still consider the combination of statism and capitalism – the mixed economy – the ideal system, “the best of both worlds.”

In my previous Substack, “Who Owns You, Part II,” I explained why the very idea behind the Food and Drug Administration is horribly immoral. The FDA was set up to subject medical science and technology to government control — in order to protect those who cannot be bothered to think.

What the FDA forbids is not unsafe food or drugs — not at root. What it forbids is acting on your own judgment. Not content to give advice, supply information, persuade through reason, the agency issues decrees backed up by physical force. The FDA exists to stop your mind.

In order that some people don’t have to think, no one is allowed to.

Well, people are allowed a kind of fantasy substitute for thinking. Researchers can daydream about what they could discover and devise if they were free. Pharmaceutical company heads can imagine the money they could make if they could bring the results of the laboratory to market. You and I could fantasize about what health and vigor we could have if there were no FDA. But none of us can act upon those ideas, courtesy of the FDA.

Thinking that you cannot act upon is sham thinking.

The function of actual thought is to guide your actions in the real world; but acting on your own decision is precisely what the government stops you from doing.

There’s a moral principle designed to protect your ability to act rationally: the principle of individual rights.

Rights today are regarded as entitlements, as claims to be taken care of (at whose expense?). But in their original and only valid meaning, rights protect the individual’s freedom to act on his own judgment. (See “Man’s Rights” by Ayn Rand).

Rights make rational action possible.

The individual has a right to act on his own judgment. And that right covers his decision to put a substance into his body. He has a right to buy any such substance from any willing seller under whatever terms they each consent to.

The government has no legitimate role in medicine. None. Not in regard to what people take into their bodies, not in regard to who sells what for people to take into their bodies (absent proven fraud).

Accordingly, we know what to expect from the FDA’s attempt to protect the irrational at our expense: bureaucracy, obstacles to progress, sand in the gears. But it’s worse . . . far worse . . . than even the FDA’s opponents realize.

Many people know that the FDA stifles medical innovation, because of its incredibly lengthy, expensive, and onerous testing requirements. Not only does a new drug have to be proven safe it has to be proven “effective.” The $1 billion price tag and the 8-to-10 year delay certainly put tremendous roadblocks in the path of progress.

But many times worse is that which is not seen: the knowledge that was not acquired, the large-scale data that were not captured, the selection for success that has not occurred.

Without the FDA, thousands upon thousands of ad hoc experiments would have been going on continuously on all fronts: researchers trying out new ideas on themselves (forbidden today) and their colleagues, ordinary people trying out new concoctions and new dosages of existing medications, doctors free to try new surgical procedures, to use new implanted devices, administer new chemotherapies, immune-system boosting therapies, genetic repair via CRISPR, stem-cell therapies . . . and more.

Innovations are proceeding today, drip by drip, when under medical freedom they would be a torrent.

From the liberation of the private choice would arise Big Data. And what is exactly suited to extracting the gold from all that data? AI.

We are searching for the radical improvements, medicines whose effect is pronounced and obvious, like penicillin, the Salk vaccine, and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. And with massive public experimentation, sifted through by AI, even incremental improvements can play an important role: they can point the way to more radical advances. When some drug is identified as bringing a minor improvement, finding out its mechanism of action frequently provides leads to how the disease works and how to completely reverse it. Knowledge builds upon knowledge.

The mass experimentation I’m talking about is just a large number of independent, private decisions to try something. lt’s a Darwinian process: the more “mutations” are tried, the better the success rate overall.

Even the unwise or downright irrational could have been contributing to our knowledge base: you learn things from failure, including things about bad and good side-effects.

As to good side-effects: many drugs developed for treating one illness are being found significantly helpful in combatting entirely different maladies. For instance, the GLP-1 drugs developed to fight excess weight are being found to have anti-inflammatory and anti-aging properties.

We had that kind of mass experimentation in computers and computer software in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The intense competition led to unpredictable advances. No Federal Digital Agency could have predicted the quick disappearance from the “microcomputer” field of such hardware and software leaders as: Radio Shack, Northstar, Digital Research (CP/M), Magic Pencil, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker, Atari, Osborne, Altair, Wordstar, QBasic, Commodore, KayPro, Sinclair, Xerox, and even IBM.

If a government committee had required a billion-dollar investment and a decade of testing for each new computer product, we would still be in the age of the adding machine.

But in medicine that’s the hobbled pace we’ve accepted for a century.

The path to genetic cures and radical life-extension begins with the abolition of that servant of death: the FDA.

Here’s a first step: disarm the FDA. Take away its coercive power and make it an advisory agency.

End the infamy of watching millions die of diseases, including aging itself, that would be cured by the liberated mind of man.