Socialist icon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) raised eyebrows recently by saying politicians must free the sunscreen industry — from the clutches of the government.

In a TikTok video posted last week, the New York congresswoman joined esthetician Charlotte Palermino on camera to make the case that government regulations have hindered the industry.

Unlike other countries, the United States regulates sunscreen as a drug, not a cosmetic, and AOC says this has resulted in inferior sunscreen options for consumers. Moreover, despite “far more stringent standards, far more testing, far more scientific and clinical trials that are required,” AOC said it’s unclear that Food and Drug Administration-approved sunscreens offer more protection than European options.

“When we compare U.S. standards to European standards in 2017, a Sloan-Kettering study found that only half of U.S. sunscreens met European protection standards,” AOC said.

AOC isn’t wrong. U.S. sunscreens are actually much worse than those in other countries, but this is old news.

More than a decade ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on the backlog of sunscreen ingredient applications, many of them up to a decade old, before the FDA, which prevented people from using effective and affordable sunscreens available to, well, pretty much everyone else in the world.

"The U.S. is an island by itself on this one," Henry Lim, chairman of dermatology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and a member of the American Academy of Dermatology, told the paper. "They're available in Canada, available in Europe, available in Asia, available in Mexico, and available in South America."

Economist Alex Tabarrok, a professor at George Mason University and blogger at Marginal Revolution, has been writing about the FDA’s war on sunscreen for more than a decade. Tabarrok says the FDA is “increasing skin cancer” by banning affordable, superior products that are available in other countries.

Year after year, however, nothing changes; the same ingredients remain unapproved.

“The FDA was supposed to be fast-tracking these ingredients for approval, because we have the safety data and safe history of usage from the European Union,” Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist who teaches at the University of Toledo, told the Atlantic in 2022. “But it seems to continually be stalled.”

Whether this inaction is because of protectionism or government incompetence is unclear. What is clear is that AOC is talking sense by admitting the FDA is hurting people with its senseless war on sunscreen.

Some people, however, are not having it.

Grace Fors, writing at Socialist Alternative, takes AOC to task for saying the sunscreen industry should be deregulated. Interestingly, Fors doesn’t even bother with the pretense that the FDA is “protecting people” from harmful products; she’s concerned that AOC is helping profiteers in the $110 billion-a-year skin care industry.

“The beauty industry is fundamentally sexist, racist, and anti-worker,” she writes. “Ever-evolving methods of psychological warfare via advertising convince us to buy an endless stream of products that promise freedom from the insecurities the CEOs and strategists planted and exacerbated.”

Fors might sound like a socialist crank, and there’s something grotesque about being more interested in sticking it to capitalists than allowing consumers to purchase sunscreens that offer more protection against skin cancer. Yet Fors is right that these regulations have little to do with safety or protection.

I won’t claim to know AOC’s motivations for calling out the FDA’s bureaucratic dysfunction, but it’s clear she recognizes that the U.S. is completely out of sync with the rest of the world when it comes to sunscreen. As a result, Americans annually descend on beaches with sunscreens that, according to the Washington Post, “dermatologists and cancer-research groups say are less effective.”

So props to AOC for saying something about it and encouraging citizens to take action. The representative looked genuinely excited to be exposing a political problem, and she seems to believe she can even get it fixed.

I have my doubts, but I hope she can; it will reduce skin cancer and save lives.

I also hope AOC will take a look at the many other life-saving products the FDA is holding up, starting with baby formula — one of “the most tightly regulated food products” in the U.S., according to the New York Times — and ending with generic EpiPens .

If we’re really lucky, AOC might even realize that, to paraphrase Ludwig von Mises, bureaucracy is the opposite of innovation, and it does far more harm than good.

Jon Miltimore ( @miltimore79 ) is editor-at-large of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education. Follow his work on Substack .