Woven Webs of Mendacity
An acquaintance, familiar with my circumstances, recently belched a verbal broadside against the mendacities of the "international conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies." I answered him pretty much as follows:
I disagree with you about the strangle-hold the pharmaceutical industry has on our lives. I know it's real but don't think it's quite so Satanic as you do. Some of the meds they invent do prolong our lives. I take four prescribed pills a day, and all four seem to be working, so far without evil side-effects. (That sound you just heard was me knocking on wood.) These four pills cost me about $2.75/day and Blue Cross/Blue Shield four times that much. I pay BC/BS $265/month and the taxpayers match that. So, my overall cost for those pills is somewhat more than the amount immediately visible. (I never see the insurance premiums.) But as it stands, BC/BS will never get even with me and milady. The recent treatments she has received for lymphoma would have cost us about $55,000, most of that for the prescription drug the docs dosed her with. As it was, we spent about $2200. I haven't asked her lately -- didn't think I needed to -- if she thought the treatment was worth the price. It also seems to be working.
The problem, you see, is not with the pharmas. It's with the system we all seem to cherish, capitalism. I was thinking this morning as I was swallowing the generic BP med, quinaprill (which costs less than half the brand name counterpart), that the shenannigans the pharmas go through to try to re-patent their best sellers, is exactly the sort of thing you would expect any sane capitalist to be doing -- use every twist of the law to maximize profit.
Same goes for the moaning and groaning we're hearing about Wal-Mart. Again, those guys are good. They know exactly how to operate a retail business, and they do so within the limits of the laws of the land.
Same goes for those companies exporting jobs overseas. Anyone who passed freshman economics (and half of those who failed) would understand that everything happening in that arena is absolutely predictable by basic capitalist theory. Labor, just like bananas, is a commodity, and when political barriers are removed, its price will seek a level, and given the vast supplies of talented labor in the far east, the price is bound to be lower.
I'm told, also, that this business with the UAE running our ports is not about security at all. It's about fair trade. If the U. S. puts up a barrier for security reasons, the free traders claim, the precedent set by the barrier will inhibit the corporations' ability to exploit foreign markets and labor pools just as effectively as tarriff laws. (Think China market.)
So, don't whine about the price of goods. If you want to complain, aim your barbs at the right level . . . the system itself. As I recall, you claim to have voted for the bought-and-paid-for George W. Bush. Reap what you've sown. Did you notice that Bush threatens to veto any attempt by the Congress to stop the UAE ports contract? The only way to undestand that threat is to recognize that in the mind of your so-called "security-conscious" president, security is not the highest priority. That place is reserved for corporate interests.
I disagree with you about the strangle-hold the pharmaceutical industry has on our lives. I know it's real but don't think it's quite so Satanic as you do. Some of the meds they invent do prolong our lives. I take four prescribed pills a day, and all four seem to be working, so far without evil side-effects. (That sound you just heard was me knocking on wood.) These four pills cost me about $2.75/day and Blue Cross/Blue Shield four times that much. I pay BC/BS $265/month and the taxpayers match that. So, my overall cost for those pills is somewhat more than the amount immediately visible. (I never see the insurance premiums.) But as it stands, BC/BS will never get even with me and milady. The recent treatments she has received for lymphoma would have cost us about $55,000, most of that for the prescription drug the docs dosed her with. As it was, we spent about $2200. I haven't asked her lately -- didn't think I needed to -- if she thought the treatment was worth the price. It also seems to be working.
The problem, you see, is not with the pharmas. It's with the system we all seem to cherish, capitalism. I was thinking this morning as I was swallowing the generic BP med, quinaprill (which costs less than half the brand name counterpart), that the shenannigans the pharmas go through to try to re-patent their best sellers, is exactly the sort of thing you would expect any sane capitalist to be doing -- use every twist of the law to maximize profit.
Same goes for the moaning and groaning we're hearing about Wal-Mart. Again, those guys are good. They know exactly how to operate a retail business, and they do so within the limits of the laws of the land.
Same goes for those companies exporting jobs overseas. Anyone who passed freshman economics (and half of those who failed) would understand that everything happening in that arena is absolutely predictable by basic capitalist theory. Labor, just like bananas, is a commodity, and when political barriers are removed, its price will seek a level, and given the vast supplies of talented labor in the far east, the price is bound to be lower.
I'm told, also, that this business with the UAE running our ports is not about security at all. It's about fair trade. If the U. S. puts up a barrier for security reasons, the free traders claim, the precedent set by the barrier will inhibit the corporations' ability to exploit foreign markets and labor pools just as effectively as tarriff laws. (Think China market.)
So, don't whine about the price of goods. If you want to complain, aim your barbs at the right level . . . the system itself. As I recall, you claim to have voted for the bought-and-paid-for George W. Bush. Reap what you've sown. Did you notice that Bush threatens to veto any attempt by the Congress to stop the UAE ports contract? The only way to undestand that threat is to recognize that in the mind of your so-called "security-conscious" president, security is not the highest priority. That place is reserved for corporate interests.
posted by Benedict S. at 8:30 AM
4 Comments:
For every need, there is a capitalist that will come along and fill that need, for a price of course. But of course we are talking about individual needs in the here and now, and that seems to be a fairly general rule as long as nobody looks to far into the future. For even the stock market shows
that anxiety is a predominant factor in the thinking of traders and
speculators, and this anxiety takes them only a very short way into the
future. The capitalist focuses on emotions, and the needs of individuals, however they might be taken in the collective sense, fulfill the consumer side of the economic equation. Yes, yes, the producer is king, and without
him the consumer would be next to nothing, because somebody, including those who produce only ideas, had to invent the products that built civilization.
The great men who came before the time of a genius certainly helped with the process by lending him their own ideas; however, the idea itself is the epitome of one man, one great genius "at a time," and not of any collective in the past or present.
Advertisements offering products to consumers use various irrational
techniques, such as "bandwagoning," to incite emotional responses in their audience.
The good lady (Miss Ayn Rand) who wrote so volminously on the notion of "producer-kings" had the right idea, or at least I thought so when I first started reading her in the late 50s. (I named my second child Dagny Ayn.) My later readings of her work have confirmed my mature judgment, that she spoke not so much in defense of capitalism as of human freedom. Capitalism just seemed to her to be the only economic system compatible with her libertarian beliefs.
Miss Rand's "good guys" were ultra-good and her baddies lacked ethical qualities of any sort. They were all caricatures of polar ideals. Can anyone spontaneously like a man named "Ellsworth Toohey" or dislike a "Hank Reardon"? But real people are qualitative mixtures. I suspect that our ambivalence traces to itself, in a paradoxical circle. We are all existensially free, but in our freedom have not found, try as we might, a way to square the ideals of liberty with the realities of economic forces.
My critique of capitalism, brief as it was, presents the best evidence of the problem. When a self-proclaimed genius like me can find fault in a system, how much easier will it be for the truly brilliant?
How can one argue with the most brilliant man on the internet?
What I do say is that the wisdom to know what to do in the face
of tyrants if found in inner stillness, not in exceitable anger, even repressed excitable anger. Too often the political revolution business is used by the cynical opportunists and psychopaths in order to obtain priviledges expanded even beyond those of the older ruling class. Wisdom is the key. I will leave my thought there.
And a good place to leave it it is, my friend.
Now all we have to do is find some way to know when we are wise.
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