...but then the other flip side is the government does things that result in contamination, dangerous chemicals in food, cookware, people dying, whatever.
You can't be "not convinced" that things would be better - "we" have a free market and that market produced sunscreen in the first place, without which we would have worse health outcomes. There's nothing to imagine - it happened. Things are better for us.
Not all things the free market produced actually have resulted in better health outcomes than if they had been disallowed (many result in the opposite, in fact) and certainly not better economic outcomes for the people who bought and used them. Regulation, as always, is a balancing act between enabling those who would do good and stymieing those (who with the best of intentions or outright sociopathy) would do harm.
So yes I remain unconvinced. Free market maximalists tend to highlight their favorite part of the story while ignoring history.
Regulation has not always resulted in better health outcomes than if the product had otherwise been regulated either. We don't need to set up this false dichotomy between markets and regulation and then bash markets over the head with the negatives aspects while ignoring negatives outcomes as a result of government action which you seem to be insinuating.
So to remain unconvinced doesn't make sense here. Though I guess I can just say I'm unconvinced of government regulations because why not? Same line of reasoning that you're using here.
Sounds like we just agree then. Regulations are necessary and should be tuned, and the Free Market can operate within those regulations, the best of all worlds is where these things work together.
Sure but then I'm not sure why you disagreed with the OP? I don't think they said anything different than what I've written.
Note that I'm not even explicitly disagreeing with OP, you interpreted my "flipside" as a disagreement.
> If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.
The original does not read to me as a call for tweaking regulations, it reads like an anti-regulation Boogeyman post. Forgive me for possibly over indexing on patterns I've observed from HNers making this type of comment.
They are of course free at any time to come in and declare that my characterization is unfair, at which my point about the flipside is still completely valid.