Skeptic Ginger said:
For the eight billionth time, not that anyone pays attention, Theory. Prediction. Successful results.Better yet, start with the epilogue.
For the eight billionth time, not that anyone pays attention,
Theory. Prediction. Successful results.
Better yet,
start with the epilogue.
I'm not going to wade through that data dump to see if it supports your case. What I did look at does not address the need for a regulated free market with government subsidizing things good for society but not necessarily profitable.
And I've granted you, for the sake of argument, that such things are useful and proper. So what?
It's still just chewing around the edges of capitalism, "perfecting" it (to use a cloying term). It does not justify the massive, vast bureaucracy so burdensome.
John Stossel, whom I'm sure you're no fan of, just had a show yesterday with all kinds of small businesses that were tied up in regulations, causing them to go out of business (or never enter it) were it not for some friendly lawyers getting laws overturned.
The point was
not to run through the occasional sob story for rhetorical reasons, like the woman who braided hair who wanted to teach it to a few new hires so she could expand and devote her time elsewhere, but the laws required years of beauty school, followed by internships, none of which even once braided hair.
The point was these things were not just oppressive, but caused by politicians in bed with "boards" made up of people already in the industry seeking to limit competition. Overwhelming were the rationalizations to protecting "the people" that, ummm, coincidently, I'm sure, also protected the interests of the people who already in those industries.
And the point of
that was to show these weren't just the occasional horror story, but rather the common state of things.
For every sob story with a legitimate law behind it, how many are harmful, competition-limiting, rent-seeking things?
Which one of those chapters address greed and the failure of the free market to keep greed and cheating from leading to big meltdowns like the free market subprime loan debacle did? Which chapter addresses the problem of unprofitable drugs society needs? See the discussion below.
Both of these are chewing around the edges of the power of capitalism. I could grant you them and still not justify the vast, vast bulk of what massive government does.
Evasion and cheap shot noted. Now please address it properly. Precisely what am I misunderstanding? The only technical problem (aside from interaction) with multiple antibiotics is, transparently and obviously, the issue of side effects, which can be bad enough from just one at a time.
The R&D into antibiotics was put on the back burner because of the wild success. When resistance started to rear its head, there was a lead time in getting back up to speed in forging new ground.
So, what am I misunderstanding here?
First you are wrong about the cheap shot and evasion. You don't know what you are talking about. Period. Your post is absurdly off the mark again.
Then please continue and enlighten me.
In order for drug companies to invest their R&D dollars, they want as rapid a return on investment as they can.
That's one thing in the mix. They also want a big return. Wise corporations that could, say, invent an artery-clearing drug might have no problem extending the research in time and money, assuming they can secure a decent length patent right out of it.
Also, the longer the research goes on, the longer the money does not yield a return on investment. As in any industry, it's a running battle vs. inflation eating into the profits.
Tied up capital is not money generating capital. They also want maximum return on their invested capital. So it is very rapidly profitable to invest in a copy cat drug that has a known market. The drugs don't have to be better, they just have to be better marketed. (Marketing is another factor that distorts the outcome of true free market forces.) Thus new versions of Viagra and Lipitor are good bets for drug company R&D investments.
Yes. I heartily encourage creating things people want to buy. Profit from same drives this development much faster than it otherwise would happen, if it would happen at all. Is government gonna invest in Viagra, or better and better contact lenses? That's a huge benefit to freedom-based capitalism: You don't have to rely on government hirees sitting around rubbing their chins and declaring such-and-such is a waste and not in The Peoples' Interest.
Because pathogenic organisms eventually become resistant to ANY and EVERY antibiotic we develop, new antibiotics are conserved.
Hence my suggestion to use 2 or 3 different antibiotics instead of just one, for a given patient.
The "mutation" space would thus require a particular bacteria on it to mutate 2 or 3 different ways
within the same bacteria, more or less simultaneously. This is exceedingly unlikely.
About 12 years ago, I read about a researcher who was using a triple coctail of antibiotics to try to kill something.
It occurred to me that this might be more useful if you used it to begin with, because of the magnitudes even less likely chance of a bacteria mutating to survive all 3 antibiotics before any one of them killed it.
I mentioned this idea to friends. They said, "That's brilliant." I assume this concept is known to the medical community. I would be sad if it weren't.
That means they get saved for infections with organisms that are resistant to the other drugs. So a new antibiotic is going to have a very slow return on investment, thus tying up that R&D capital for an indefinite amount of time. And if it takes too long for a return on investment, the patent could expire.
In addition, while there is repeat business for antibiotics and a continual market, drug companies like drugs one has to take on an ongoing basis. So a statin or blood pressure medicine has a better market than an antibiotic one takes for 7 to 10 days.
New antibiotics are not something many drug company decision makers are going to want to invest in until the number of resistant infections reaches a cost-benefit cutoff point. That means thousands die first, then they invest. That drug company has a profit goal, not a 'best for society' goal.
And yet we're light years ahead of "best for society" but otherwise bash-the-economy counties.
Huh. I wonder why.
And if you're interested in saving lives, consider abolishing the FDA. All it takes is one cancer or heart disease drug that saves a good chunk of lives to be delayed 1 or 2 years, and bam! You've cost more lives than the FDA has saved over its entire run.
Compare those market realities to your uninformed guess and you'll see I was speaking the truth, not simply throwing out an ad hom.
I did, see above, and found your argument unconvincing.
BTW, the rate of death from antibiotic resistant organisms has climbed high enough recently that investment in new antibiotics has begun. Infections are one of the top causes of death. It would have saved countless lives had we begun the search for new antibiotics sooner, and there is no guarantee just how fast new drugs are going to come into the marketplace.
Correct, but government also made the exact same, erroneous decision: that it was pointless to spend the money.
Neither will do that in the future.
As for speeding drugs to market via private investment, well, how much would you invest with Hillary running around screaming about the "unconscionable profits of drug companies", with the attendant implication that, should she get her way, she'll do something about those profits.
It's the same with oil companies refusing to build new processing plants with certain presidents and senators screaming about their evil profits (including subsidies, as I'm sure you're eager to re-point out.)
Doesn't anyone find the following clownish?
Politician: I'm gonna trash your evil profits, Big Oil. Oh, and could you build another processing plant so as to ease gas prices. Try and do it cheaply since, if I get my way, I'm gonna shift the US off oil and your plant will quickly become a redundant waste of money.
Why are we surprised when "Big Oil" flips them the bird?
Of course it isn't the sole force, but it's is the major force. Socialized countries that restrict medical profits (for more reasons than just socialized medicine -- generally high tax rates and business-unfriendly climates may even exceed the socialized medicine itself as a drag on medical development) do indeed produce fewer innovations, per capita, than does the US. As such, they are not carrying their weight.
More bad guesses from someone not informed about the medical marketplace.
More unsupported claims severed from the reality of hundreds of century-long economic experiments with billions of test subjects.
Governments spend what the taxpayers want spent. The government is that tool of the people you described. If they don't pay enough for doctors, students don't go into medicine and doctors leave the county.
Evil Ayn Rand has a whole file of horror stories, such as Belgium, who, when faced with a medical "brain drain" (a
European word) as they fled
to the US, tried to make it actually illegal to do so.
So the market still operates the same when the government is the insurer.
Excepting for the incredible power to make things illegal that should not be.
Government has a monopoly, but so do the big insurers in the US.
No big insurer can point a gun at you and force you to buy their, and only their product.
No big insurer can point guns at their competition and say, "Go out of business. Now."
And they underpay doctors as well. I'd rather have a politician accountable to voters in charge than an insurance adjustor accountable only to the insurance company's profits.
Apparently you don't study human history and the big Fail of guns pointed at people.
Looking around the world, and through history, one would be
extremely careful, at best before even dreaming of introducing such a monopoly, even assuming the most rosie-colored scenarios with "the vote" keeping things clean and pure and updated.
Haven't you heard it is more profitable for the insurance company to let the sickest people die than keep them as customers?
Sure. It's why I don't support using fine print as a method of escaping things.
It's fraud. When a company
knowingly relies on people not knowing or understanding or considering the downsides 7 pages in, that's fraud.
Same thing for banks that charge outrageous fees, or credit card companies charging outrageous interest. It's buried in the fine print
and they know, indeed rely on, as part of their business model that people will not understand such things.
And how do I know this? Bank employees (perhaps managers) have screens that tell them how much profit has come in. The screens have at the top, literally, words like "DO NOT SHOW THIS SCREEN TO THE CUSTOMER", where "this" is a whole bunch of $35 charges for buying a $5.96 sandwich with your debit card.
Stopping fraud is a legitimate power of government.
And, immediately and obviously, their "free" goodies they give out are, more likely than not, not invented by themselves. Other, more capitalistic economies drive most of the innovation, and they just take advantage of it.
Like a parasite, I submit. Sad and sickening. Their very own populations would be better off in the long run re-organizing their economies to be more business friendly to drug and cure and treatment development. And that would include letting medical companies profit more.
Absolutely total myth, and I'll bet you 10 to 1 you have been explicitly told and shown evidence that this is a myth yet you repeat it and repeat it. You just cannot stop believing the myth you want to believe.
So let me shout it out to you in the most concise terms:
NON-PROFIT FOUNDATIONS AND MANY GOVERNMENTS ACCOUNT FOR A HUGE PERCENTAGE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH DOLLARS. IN ADDITION, MANY MEDICAL ADVANCES COME DIRECTLY FROM COUNTRIES WITH NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE.
Most, though? No. And when you consider some of what the government does would be done by private industry, were the government not to do it (more market distortion) the situation for big government is even worse.
Secondly, non-profit foundations are the results of free people. I support freedom. It's silly to presume it supports a government's side.
Third, I have already granted, for the sake of argument, that government investment in medical research could be a good thing.
Don't you want both?!?!?
I want lives saved. This is done best by advancing medical tech as quickly as possible. All human history shows that government taking it all over, removing profits, and saying, "We'll make up the difference -- indeed, we will actually be a little
ahead of the game!!" is a flat-out lie.
It's fraud, and should be dealt with accordingly, with jail time for the fraudsters.
The rest is just nibbling around the edges of the power of freedom-based capitalism.
Drug companies then take much of that government subsidized R&D and bring products to market with it. It is often the drug companies leeching off the taxpayers, not the other way around.
Whatever saves the most lives. If people profit from government spending, I'm fine with that, since everybody profits with better, longer lives.
Aren't you?
In any case, the public's "return on investment" is the supposed success of the R&D efforts themselves. Isn't that why the government asserts itself and dumps in the money? This is not an argument for government that I make, merely an observation of the status quo.
And, of course, "For example", most medical research in the US is done privately. Which says a lot because, it is true, the government dumps a ton into it. Why wouldn't you want both?
If greed can cure cancer a year earlier, there's millions of lives saved right there. Slowing development kills on the scale of major, ongoing wars. That is what I want to avoid because I get a kick out of seeing as much success as possible, and that's how I define it: most lives saved.
I ask you the same, why wouldn't
you want both?
I acknowledged it for the sake of argument above, noting government is hardly the core driver of advancing tech, and, by mucking about with profits and the market, can actually make things worse faster than all their investment could help.
Hence, at best, it is merely nibbling around the edges of the power of freedom-based capitalism.
Not being able to control others is scary -- they might hurt you!
But all hurt pales in comparison to the help -- so sayeth the hundreds of century-long economic experiments with billions of test subjects.
But I will address the question directly. Could government, as a sort of clearing house for centralizing money to spend on directed research, add a benefit? Perhaps. But it's hard to catalog the loss to economic dynamism from the taxes taken out of the economy. We just know it will be a loss, and that the government is operating by (deliberately and knowingly and admittedly) trading one good for another, and is crossing its fingers that it will come out ahead. But,
even net benefit for the item, the medical R&D that they are pushing is not necessarily a given.
I've softened in recent months on Europe's socialized medicine. Not because they produce anything like the US in terms of per-capita invention. Rather because I think the socialized medicine may not even be the main cause of the retardation in medical tech development. It could be more due to a generally hostile business climate. I don't know.
The problem you have is when someone says regulated capitalism you can't hear it. You hear socialism/communism. You can't hear the person saying CAPITALISM. You tune it out. Just like you tune out market forces you don't want to take the time to think about, or you don't want to think about dealing with.
I hope the above three huge posts have cleared up my position for you.
I could grant you some things would be legitimately and beneficially regulated, and you're still just kibitzing around the edges of powerful, freedom-derived capitalism.
It's the massive overbloat of taxation and regulation that causes harm. If what you actually care about are the measurable quality and length of lives.
So here you are with another false dichotomy. You are saying either we have private greed or slow progress. That's nonsense.
Is it? A simple glance at history shows that a secure, lawful, stable society that protects rights generates massive and rapid advancement over societies without.
I would be very careful before presuming there's something fundamentally wrong with such a system. Note that "polishing the edges" is not finding something fundamentally wrong with it.
People want to cure cancer for many reasons, greed is only one of those reasons. Profit is not the only efficient motivator in the human population.
Correct. I believe it was you, or someone else, who suggested we could reduce profits and have the government make up the difference. This, I submit, is ludicrous in view of history, which is to say, long-term economic experiments, blah blah blah.
And if you are going to claim that MOST medical research is done with private for profit dollars, you need to cite some evidence. Remember to count the investments of every country capable of investing and all the non-profit foundations vs all the for profit R&D dollars, not just company expenses.
We know private investment generates much, if not most, of it already. If you wish to claim government makes up a ton of it, it is you, as the touter of government intervention, to prove the claim.
Much like someone who claims they saw Bigfoot is expected to make the claim.
As for "my side", if you seek evidence of the power of capitalism, look about you. I have shoved government to the part of "nattering about the edges of capitalism" for a reason.
