From the FDA's timeline someone posted above, they made their first consumer advisory 4 days after confirming bacterial contamination, 10 days after the first test showing possible contamination, and they pressed the company to voluntarily recall it 3 times in that 4 day period. If they'd taken action without hard evidence, in the US political environment, they might have gotten shut down entirely, they couldn't get the funding they needed as it was.

Now, if you want to argue that it should have been shut down months earlier when they found the first safety violations, I wouldn't disagree, but that would require much more aggressive laws. The way things actually work, with almost everything, is that the inspector goes out, says, "you'd better have these things fixed by the next time someone comes out here," and then leaves and doesn't come back for many months or even years. And then when they do come back if there's still a problem they can start thinking about issuing fines.

Unfortunately there's a massive difference between what economists know and what conservative politicians talk about. And the media will never admit that those politicians are clearly wrong and probably deliberately lying (as a practical matter, when that power doesn't go to consumers it goes to big business, and conservatives care about little else besides what's good for big business). So in any policy discussion we get huge numbers of people saying that the market will take care of it, and they're wrong.

How about we start with an actually effective windfall profits tax (not building in absurd loopholes), and go on to jail time for executives implicated in price gouging if needed. On this issue, there's so much more we should be doing on so many issues.

But if it's a free market then obviously there are no barriers to entry, so why haven't all the companies adopted this apparently better business strategy of pumping oil in Saudi Arabia? Obviously they can't, but that's the point. The Invisible Hand of the Free Market can only lead to the most positive results for society if consumers have perfect information, but we know almost nothing; have infinite choices, but we have at best a handful; and are totally rational, but humans are anything but. The market doesn't work in the real world, it just doesn't, and we have to stop pretending that whatever the market does must be right. We have to accept that government must intervene when the market fails.

You would if the free market were real. Profit margins are supposed to be miniscule because corporations have to compete for market share with the infinite number of other corporations making identical products, so they have to cut prices as much as they possibly can, and then find ways to lower costs further so they can lower prices more and get ahead. They're supposed to make money on volume when they come up with a way to do their business really well and get more market share. In that case low prices would mean a big innovation and more buyers, which would result in more profit.

But of course that's not how it works. There are only a handful of corporations in most lines of work, and they collude to set prices high together so they can all enjoy large profit margins. And covid and supply chain problems are giving them an excuse to increase those profit margins even further without people blaming them.

In all parliamentary systems, the Prime Minister is elected by the members of the legislature. It's like the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader in the US, but that position is given executive power. This frequently leads to coalition governments, with parties allying to form a majority that can elect a Prime Minister, which can allow for greater diversity than the US system where one person has to win the majority of votes from the whole country. And realistically a US Republican President wouldn't have resigned under these circumstances in the first place. In both cases you have to wait for the next scheduled election before the people get a vote.