Getting it right, getting it wrong

I'm not the biggest fan of the job the FDA has been doing, so when I see them catch a problem, I'm going to applaud them for it. Ranbaxy, a generic drug manufacturer, has 2 of its plants in India that were not documenting their processes well enough. Mainly in sterility and cleaning of parts. Sort of important you would think. There is now a ban in place by the FDA on their imports.

The FDA did a good thing here. Now, it also brings up other issues. Generic drugs are by and large safe. They are the same formulation as the namebrand and having been part of different drug studies on the time release of generics (brain fungus free here!) know they are required to test them rigorously. Then its off to our overseas facility to make them! Yay!

It still seems odd to me we can't buy drugs from Canada, which has its own FDA style agency, because the FDA isn't overseeing it, when there are thousands of plants around the world the FDA can't police. One would think that buying drugs from Canada would actually make the FDA's job easier as then some of the workload would be taken off of them. Oh well, good work FDA on picking up this problem and stopping it.

Now for a bit of government gone wrong. Is there anyone still out there that thinks total deregulation is a good idea anymore? Things are ugly in the financial sector. While that doesn't directly effect all of us yet, it will. Just do the math on how long it will take to earn back what your 401K has lost lately. Just remember, if it goes down 15% in a year, you'd need to make back about 20-22% the next year just to be where you would be. Depressing huh? But that's what you have to do to a certain extent, just ride it out.

So are we through with business policing themselves please? I know the government is incompetent, so here's what I propose. Do this for all industry. Have each one pay a fee (tax, but fee sounds better) to a semi-private watchdog agency that reports to whatever government agency oversees the sector, financial, energy, food, etc. The money comes direct from the companies, but from ALL the companies without any option. No lobbying would be allowed as its semi-private, but neither would "informational calls" from companies. These agencies would exist solely to watch what is being done.

They would be run as either a non-profit or as a service company. They would NOT be federally funded, the money would go directly to their budgets. I guess I'm thinking of something like a GAO for business. We have so many little agencies that cannot do their jobs without massive political interference its effecting our country greatly. Ah well, I can dream right?