We’re entirely in agreement with the argument that matters need to be regulated. Our differing from the usual story here is that we ask “regulated by whom?” Regulation doesn’t have to be by a bureaucracy, markets and consumers and prices and revealed preferences and all those things are also a form of regulation, often one more effective.

We would though go on to say that if a bureaucracy is going to regulate then it has to actually, you know, regulate:

When a court-set deadline for "premarket" review of nicotine vaping products came and went on Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had received millions of applications but had not approved any. As a result, the agency says, every vaping product sold in the United States—including myriad e-liquids, devices, and parts—is now "subject to enforcement action at the FDA's discretion."

Seven years after the FDA officially declared its intention to regulate e-cigarettes as "tobacco products," in other words, the entire industry remains in legal limbo, existing solely thanks to the agency's enforcement discretion and limited resources.

Seven years to decide whether the world’s greatest smoking cessation tool is legal to sell. The inaction, at this point, leaving the entire market in a legal limbo.

C. Northcote Parkinson did point out that eventually all bureaucracies become merely bureaucracies. They might start out (Pournelle made comments on this point as well) attempting some real world task but in the end they become paper pushers for the sake of protecting the paper pusher budget. Merely a costly sink of uncertainty that is.

The answer, at this point, is to simply close them down. They are not retrievable. It might even be true that drugs and food do require regulation from a government bureaucracy. But this one is broken, is not sufficiently reformable, so the solution is that Carthaginian one and start again.

This applies to rather a lot of things - we’ve made the same point about the British planning system often enough. Blow it up and start again from a blank sheet of paper. As a certain American journalist once pointed out:

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

Quite so, quite so.