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Originally Posted by gjw
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Employees, investors, and independant charities can all direct research as well or better than the government can.
It wasn't the government that created the Polio vaccine.
It was the March of Dimes.
And an executive who pushes his own agenda ahead of profitability and results can only do so because the current system allows it.
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I'd say it would be correct if you said, "as well, sometimes better, sometimes not." Because that's really the truth.
Just because the government does it doesn't make it automatically incompetent. All organizations large enough to finance research are besieged with bureaucracy of exactly the same sort as the government. The difference is that the expense is spread on the whole of society to benefit the whole of society. Presumably.
And there are certainly a lot of areas in life where no amount of money invested in research by anyone can speed up the pace of scientific progress, because you need a higher general level of technology to accomplish it. However, it has been shown in the past that government investment in research that was ahead of technology actually accelerated technology.
As well, the government has invested in private research and development that has resulted in patents. I think that's wrong. If the government is funding the research, the government gets the patent and can license it for the public benefit. And the license fees can go into the general fund to keep taxes low. It just never seems to work that way, except when it comes to general contracting for military aircraft.
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If the profit is not being made on the backs of the taxpayers then it will have to earned.
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Profit is always on the backs of the taxpayers. Assuming taxpayers are also consumers. It really depends on how broadly you look at the economic scale. And if it's something that's a medical necessity, society often has the choice between letting people die, letting something become an epidemic, or helping them at taxpayer expense complete with excessive profits.
For many of us, it's hidden by medical insurance. But if we pay our own medical insurance, we know how expensive the medical system really is. And part of that expense is that we are paying for the system to recoup their money, at a profit, from uninsured and indigent patients.
Medicine, in many cases, is not an option, open to typical market forces. It's a matter of life and death. I'm fine with companies making a decent profit on production of medicines, and think, based on the price of generics, that such profit can be reasonable. OTOH, what I'm against are lengthy patents on medicines, which are often applied to new medicines which are an improvement on the patented ones because they were granted utility patents (how a medication affects the mechanics of the body) instead of design patents (a very specific and narrowly defined chemical composition).
There are a lot of issues here. I'm more in favor of large scale charitable successes than either government or enterprise successes. But Americans are incredibly cheap when it comes to charity, considering how little they pay in taxes compared to the rest of the world.
And if you want to go by cost/benefit analysis, the number of lives saved by our investment in tax dollars by anti-terrorist efforts is tiny compared to the lives that could be saved by successful investment in curing life threatening illness. In all our history, we have never invested as much money in anything with a general benefit to society as we have in the last 3 years in the "War on Terror".
Heck, we spend more on the "War on Drugs" than basic scientific or medical research.
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Prices will not go beyond the means of ordinary people because that would be cutting their own throats.
What non-subsidized corporate entity prospers without customers?
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Prices are already well beyond the means of ordinary people if they didn't have employer provided health insurance. That's becoming less and less common. When it reaches a threshold where most people don't have health insurance and can't afford it, the US will join the rest of the industrialized world in socialized medicine.
And that non-insurance thing is a major bugger looming on the horizon. As fewer people become insured, more unpaid medical bills are racked up, and the real costs are piled on the remaining insured. Driving up the price of insurance and making fewer employers willing to pay the price. It's like a snake eating it's own tail or a downward economic spiral. It started about two decades ago with the weakening of the union movement, but like all economic crises (besides typical business cycles), it's gathering momentum logarithmically.
Medical insurance is a form of private enterprise socialism which only works when the risk is broadly spread. The smaller the pool of risk holders, the more the true cost of the system is revealed.
The people who are not indigent are finding that they have to dip into money saved for retirement for their medical care, at a cost level that they could not have predicted (since it outstrips ordinary inflation by a large margin). That has large scale economic consequences as well, when those people don't have the money for their planned retirement and have to rely on social security, which some are more than willing to destroy, because it's yet another thing that smacks of socialism.
When the politics and economics hit a certain point, and private insurance is unobtainable for a significant enough portion of America, it will shift politics. For better or worse, nationalized medicine will be more attractive than closed hospitals and no medicine at all. I give it less than 10 years.
Those who decry any form of socialism and think private enterprise is the solution to everything, will find themselves (figuratively) beaten to within an inch of their life.
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And your AIDS analogy, though heart tugging, is completely inaccurate. We could give them all of the drugs in the world and they would still be dying.
They need drugs, eduction, and a willingness to be educated.
Numbers 1 and 2 aren't worth a damn without #3.
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There are a huge number of snowballing problems that all feed the others. For one thing, AIDS doesn't kill people quickly. It not only takes people out of the economic cycle that supports their families, as poorly as it does that. It also absorbs resources that could have gone to education.
I also think your claim that people are unwilling to be educated may be based on false assumptions. Education might not be available on the scale it needs to be. This is a problem in a lot of the world, especially the Middle East, where a lot of uneducated people are being given education in Madrasas, from religious charity. Those Madrasas are teaching a lot of the male youth to become insurgents and terrorists. That's what happens when you don't have public education.
In any case, when you have a large scale epidemic of a slow killing disease, it takes whatever problems there would have been and magnifies them. You have a lot of surplus children left as orphans, which also puts a strain on charity. You have children that have to go to work much earlier in life and leave schools, because they can't work and go to school at the same time. The calamity of one thing makes everything else much worse.
If you could stop the dying and wasting from AIDS, it doesn't fix everything. It just makes it less bad.
Ironically, the balance was thrown out years ago when treatment improved for childhood diseases, leading to a population explosion since it wasn't followed with intensive birth control information. A large epidemic which kills children quickly simply isn't as damaging to a civilization as one that kills mostly adults.
The fact is, that some governments did make copy cat AIDS drugs available to treat their people. And our drug companies went to our government, who subsequently went to those governments and shut down their treatment programs. Essentially, sentencing tens of thousands if not millions to death, on behalf of our pharmaceutical companies. And consequently, also exacerbating all of their other economic and sociological problems.
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And who's that on your Today screen?
:approve:
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That is the infamous Tara Armov, captain of the "Fight Crew". A woman's roller derby team in the
LA Derby Dolls league.
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