How is the FDA useful?
From http://fdaissues.blogspot.com/2008/03/upton-sinclair-book-ju...
In "The Jungle", Upton Sinclair, "wrote about how dead rats were shoveled into sausage grinding machines. He explained, in nauseating detail, how diseased cows were slaughtered for beef; how guts and garbage were swept off the floor and sold as "potted ham."
Upton Sinclair even described how the occasional worker would fall into a meat-processing tank and be ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard."
The Chicago meat-packing industry was in deep trouble after Sinclair's landmark book, The Jungle, was published in 1906. It caused outrage in America and abroad and meat sales fell by half. The book forced the government to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration."
That's one of the things the FDA does right. I, for one, am glad I'm not eating rat sausage and meatpacker lard.
Another thing it does right is requiring food and drugs have all their ingredients listed on them. I am appalled when I buy other products, such as various cleaners and other chemicals, which are not under the jurisdiction of the FDA and could have all sorts of carcinogenic and dangerous chemicals in them without my even being aware of them, because they are not required to list their ingredients on their labels. I am glad that at least the food and medicines I consume do require strict labeling.
While many people may have died waiting for various drugs and medical devices to get FDA approval, there are also no doubt countless thousands saved because this approval was required. All you have to do is look at the days before the FDA existed to see the mountains of snake oil garbage that was peddled to American consumers (things like these radioactive quack cures: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm )
I am quite grateful to be living in the days of the FDA, and wouldn't want to go back to the pre-FDA era.
This is not to say the FDA is perfect, by any means. It's been affected by budget cuts and has a huge conflict of interest in its sometimes incestuous relationships with the corporations it is supposed to regulate.
These deficiencies are cause for reform (perhaps even radical reform) but not for elimination of the FDA altogether.
As for the complaints of your friend in the medical industry, I agree that the approval process takes too long. More funding of the FDA, and perhaps even requiring the FDA to conduct its own studies (eliminating the corporation from the loop, which have a conflict of interest in testing the safety of their own products anyway) would help.
I have a friend of my own, who worked as an internal safety inspector in a pharmaceutical plant owned by a major pharmaceutical company. He said that the plant should have gotten closed a decade ago because of its poor safety record (for which it had been sited by the FDA many times in the past), but it stayed open because the company's CEO had a lot of pull in the FDA.
This sort of thing calls for tougher regulation, not weaker regulation (much less the elimination of the FDA altogether).
As to your point about education vouchers, those are mainly used by right-wing religious fanatics, who are dissatisfied with the "liberal", desegregated education their kids would get in public school and want to get their kids in to religious schools and schools which are free to discriminate in ways public schools can't. I see no evidence that the voucher system would work for a wider segment of the population. Again, the people who would most benefit from this would be the rich, and religious, racist nuts.
See this report on vouchers from the Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/vouchers/vouchers_main.asp
which, among other things, notes that:
"Under a system of vouchers, it may be difficult to prevent schools run by extremist groups like the Nation of Islam or the Ku Klux Klan from receiving public funds to subsidize their racist and anti-Semitic agendas."
Finally, your point about libertarianism not suggesting concentration of power. On the face of it, this is true, since libertarians never actually come out and say they suggest concentration of power. However, it's not difficult to read between the lines and see that's exactly what will happen when the checks that the government keeps on corporations (the EPA and FDA being just two of many good examples) are removed.
In fact, we have already seen what this is like. It's happened in America during the days of the Robber Barrons, where child labor, an 80-hour work week, workers being literally chained to their desks in sweatshops, the abominable conditions described in Sinclair's "The Jungle", no worker safety regulations in the workplace, and no environmental regulations were quite common. I do not want to go back to those days.
Apart from increased concentration of power in corporations, which libertarianism is powerless against, there's also the concentration of power in individuals, which the US system as a whole does a piss-poor job at controlling. That definitely needs work, but libertarians have nothing to say on the matter. If Bill Gates managed to get his hands on all of the world's wealth (or even, say, all the world's water) and the rest of the people on Earth had none, libertarians would presumably not have any problem with that. But thankfully, many other people do have a problem with that kind of inequitable distribution of wealth and power and will work to prevent it.
Another example of the government doing good work is when it manages to break up monopolies. However, it doesn't do nearly as good a job at this as it should (else Microsoft would have been broken up decades ago, and the media consolidation that's happened in the last decade or so would never have been allowed to take place). But, again, I don't see why libertarians would have any problem with monopolies (unless they're government monopolies, in which case they'll raise a stink).
I believe that for most libertarians, the rhetoric of caring for liberty is a mask for not caring much about anyone who can't make it the rat race of the social darwinists. This is why it's really no suprise that many libertarians are wealthy, highly educated types that imagine themselves made in the mold of Randian heroes. Conversely, you're not going to find many libertarians in the projects (with the possible exception of the drug dealers). And the only libertarians you're likely to find out in the sticks are the militia members and gun nuts who believe in conspiracy theories featuring the UN taking over the US, and the like. Fortunately, the majority of Americans haven't bought in to this bleak vision (yet).