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Friday, March 30, 2007
Repeal The Laws Of Economics!
That seems to be what this pathetic paean to socialism and degeneracy was demanding:
Twenty years ago this week, ACT UP, the AIDS-activist movement, held its first protest, shocking lower Manhattan's buttoned-down lunchtime crowd when hundreds of gay protesters stormed the streets demanding lifesaving AIDS drugs; seventeen were arrested when they lay down "dead" in the street at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, stopping traffic. ("Homosexuals arrested at AIDS drug protest," read the Times photo caption.) Today, ACT UP was back, this time rallying for the group's bigger-than-AIDS demand for universal health care, and about two dozen protesters were arrested when they stopped traffic on Broadway, alongside the famous statue of a bull....A sea of signs in classic ACT UP black-and-white block letters screamed DEMAND DRUG PRICE CONTROLS NOW and ACT UP FOR SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE FOR ALL. Many bystanders said they weren't familiar with ACT UP but supported the health-care-for-all rallying cry. One of the cops making the arrests averred that the NYPD's health plan was only "okay." Even the truck driver heading the stopped-up traffic, a guy named Robert, retained a good mood. "As long as I'm getting paid, I'll stay here all day," he shrugged.
Nothing is quite as fearsome as ignorance in action...unless it's ignorance in defense of self-destructive behavior.
You have to be pretty ignorant not to know that nearly all the anti-AIDS drugs to emerge since the disease was first recognized were developed by American pharmaceutical firms. As it happens, the United States is virtually alone in the First World for having left medicine and the development of medical products in the private sector. You have to be pretty stupid not to grasp the implications.
"Single-payer" systems (also known as "national health insurance") and outright socialized medicine abound. Not one such system can meet its own bills. That's because reality is rather unforgiving about the practice of pandering to the greedy -- the real greedy. Individuals and companies that work for a profit aren't the greedy; that title belongs to persons who want to indulge themselves at others' expense.
What's that? These poor protesters aren't asking to be indulged, you say? They only want health care, a basic human right? Come, come! What is health care? Is it some sort of ethereal mist that should be free to all? Would it be freely available to all, could we but expel the nasty capitalists from our mist, er, midst? NO! It's a collective name for products and services that have to be produced and provided by human beings. He who demands that goods and services produced by others are his by right has claimed to own those others. He's asserted a right to the fruits of their labor, without having to bear the cost -- an exact definition of slavery.
Were the ACT-UP idiots to get what they've demanded, twenty years from today there wouldn't be an AIDS sufferer loose anywhere in the world. They'd all be dead or quarantined awaiting death. Were Washington to wrap its arms around the health care sector, either by nationalizing it or by imposing price controls on it, it would discover at once what AIDS sufferers are determined not to recognize: the drugs are expensive because they cost a lot to develop and a lot to make. The market for those drugs is relatively small, which results in a high per-sufferer cost for treatment. Someone is going to pay that bill; if not the sufferer, then who?
In the nationalized-health-care scenario, political reality would drive attention and funding away from AIDS toward other, more "popular" diseases. AIDS sufferers would go on "waiting lists" that would shorten only as they died off. They probably wouldn't have the option of going to the private sector for treatment. National health services are always hostile to private alternatives, and do their best to ruin or ban them, as they have in Canada.
In the price-controlled scenario, a number of eventualities are possible, but all of them would be unpleasant. If the price of AIDS drugs were set lower than the cost of making them, distributing them, insuring their safety, and administering them, they'd vanish from the marketplace. If the price were set adequate to cover that aggregate cost but too low to amortize the drugs' development costs and provide their makers a profit, no new AIDS drugs would be developed. Finally, if the price were set adequate to cover the drugs' aggregate cost, amortize their development costs, and provide a profit...we'd have today's situation, against which the ACT-UP loonies are protesting.
Either nationalized health care or price-controlled health care would shift the cost of this expensive-to-treat disease at least partly onto the shoulders of persons who don't have it. Since it's almost always acquired through anal intercourse or intravenous administration of illegal drugs, the reaction of the non-suffering populace would be negative in the extreme. There would be calls for the quarantine of AIDS sufferers at the very least. Public reaction against establishments that cater to homosexuals would be likely. Pogroms would not be impossible.
The consequences of trying to nullify the laws of economics are always unpleasant.
What makes the situation particularly poignant is that AIDS is a disease that must be actively caught, by specific, freely chosen behavior. It's not an aerosol virus, or something one can catch from a toilet seat. The HTLV-III virus is quite fragile outside the body; it dies in a few seconds at standard temperature and pressure. Transmitting it requires blood-to-blood or semen-to-blood contact. Yes, there have been a few cases in which a sufferer has contracted AIDS from a transfusion, and a few in which a woman with vaginal lesions has caught it during ordinary intercourse with a bisexual man. Everyone else -- the overwhelming majority of AIDS sufferers -- has it because of a highly risky discretionary act. He caught it not because of something he had to do, but because of something he chose to do...something deadly dangerous.
Mankind could extinguish AIDS in a single generation, without drugs, without therapies, and without any political unpleasantness, if we could extinguish those destructive behaviors. But of course, that's the last thing the ACT-UP types would want to hear. Those destructive behaviors are what they live for -- and die for.
Sometimes it's no fun seeing and thinking clearly.
Comments
I have no complaints with your economic assessment, my dear Curmdugeon. But I think you’ve misjudged the status of AIDS victims by a long shot.
Here, I’ve turned over another piece of the puzzle that is glaring at us.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 03/30/2007 at 06:16 PMRe: the fact that AIDS must be actively caught:
I’m always amazed at the convoluted morality that leftists contrive for themselves (and, sadly, for us...at least, so they wish).
Various behaviors and actions are lumped into “good” and “evil” bins based on nothing more than a mishmash of sentiment, fashion, bubble-headed thinking, and confused science and economics.
Drive a minivan (because you have dogs and three kids, and they each have friends, and bikes, and soccer balls) ? You’re hopelessly declasse, and you’re destroying the environment by outsourcing the “true cost” of your “indulgences” on others.
Like engaging in unprotected anonymous anal sex, and you’ve now caught a deadly disease? You’re quite hip and praise-worthy, and only stingy old white men could possibly object to working 60 hour weeks at demanding jobs to pay for your medicine and home health aids.
I truly don’t understand leftist morality - it’s not a simple reversal of decent morality, where everything praiseworthy is scorned, and everything scorn-worthy is praised...no, that would be too “simple”. True leftist morality is more sophisticated and nuanced than that ... which is to say, it’s incoherent.
Posted by TJIC on 03/30/2007 at 09:33 PMAbout AIDS, has anyone read “Kicking the Sacred Cow” by James P. Hogan. The book looks at several questionable things being done to science in the name of politics and political correctness.
Posted by on 03/31/2007 at 06:02 PM
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