Because the results get published. The government doesn’t do the study, the drug company does. There are also a lot of people involved - and if competitors found out …
Certain drug companies can try to influence certain regulators with money or job offers. Got any examples of this actually happening? Remember, if the drug turns out to be dangerous and there is an investigation, bribes will come out.
Nitpick: Close, but the terms originated during the Revolution. Which was precipitated in 1789 by the first Estates-General to be summoned since 1614. This quickly (after the Tennis Court Oath) morphed into the one-house National Assembly (nobles and clergy merged in with the bourgeoisie), with left-right seating as you describe
Alright then, I think we’re on the same page here.
Understood.
Depends on what you mean by “protecting” them, and who qualifies as less fortunate: the crippled? Orphaned children? The idle?
“The idle”? Interesting word choice there, it implies much more than it delivers. Who, perzackly, qualifies as “idle”? The retired? The unemployed? The willingly unemployed, the slackers and layabouts? Lot of rich folks are “idle”, too, do they count?
What did it imply to you?
The willingly unemployed, the slackers and layabouts. Should they be “protected” as part of the “less fortunate”?
I ask not to start a tangent, but because it goes to my point though: saying that the right-wing puts “protecting the less fortunate” as low on their priority list misses the point that not everyone has the same ideas of what “less fortunate” or “protecting” means. I think policy should be discussed on this level, rather than confronting whole ideologies at once.
And how do you propose to separate the undeserving from the deserving? if your granddaddy was a greedy, grasping sumbitch and left you a buttload, you are not “idle”? Its defined by whether or not you can afford it?
Can you point to any time in our history when an unemployed person could simply go get a job, any time he chose?
If you don’t like being called out to define your terms, my recommendation is that you don’t use them.
We all know how it works. “Rich” = deserving, “everyone else” = undeserving.
Where did I say anything about “deserving” or “undeserving”? The term used by Voyager that I responded to was “protecting the less fortunate”.
So, you are using the word strictly in a mechanistic sense, as the hammer in my tool box is currently “idle”? And was unaware that the word is somewhat loaded, implying a parasitical laziness? If you have big brown innocent eyes, that would probably help. Or, you could simply clarify.
Clarify? I’ll do my best. Sadly, my eyes are blue, so I’ll have to rely on my modest eloquence.
The statement at issue, from Voyager was:
My reply was:
My intent was to illustrate a fundamental disconnect that occurs when the left discusses the right’s views, or the right discusses the left’s views, or any such situation: the other side’s ideas pass through your side’s filter.
In the case at hand, I have no idea exactly what “protecting the less fortunate” means to Voyager. It might mean a guaranteed minimum income, such as a negative income tax. It might mean short-term assistance in the form of a monthly check. It might mean job training programs or subsidized education or economic protectionism or prohibiting offshoring or public housing or medical assistance or drug rehabilitation or any of a thousand ideas. It might apply to the crippled, the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, the unintelligent, the laid off, the drug-addicted, or any number of categorizations.
So, the point was this: To person A, “protecting the less fortunate” might mean that every resident is guaranteed a minimum income of say, $15,000 per year. To person A, opposition to that idea might constitute being uncaring of the less fortunate: the lack of that minimum income is harmful.
To person B, “protecting the less fortunate” might mean keeping direct assistance to the able-bodied short-term, based on the idea that such assistance is shaming, removes initiative, and is partly to blame for the urban underclass. To person B, opposition to that idea might constitute being uncaring of the less fortunate: long-term assistance is harmful.
Both A and B in this case are tying to protect the less fortunate. Neither is “uncaring of the less fortunate” or anything like that. They simply have radically different ideas as to what protection means, and who the less fortunate are. It’s thus inappropriate for one to dismiss the other as uncaring of the less fortunate; instead, one should argue over the merits of the ideas and the impact they’d have.
That’s what I meant by “I think policy should be discussed on this level, rather than confronting whole ideologies at once.” None of this is revelatory or novel, just a personal bugbear of mine.
Note: Persons A and B are entirely hypothetical, and are not meant to represent any poster’s views, including my own.
Consider Romney, painting with a broad brush as parasites everyone from lazy bums to the retired to some active servicemen.
Your use of the term “idle” was telling. Like I said, the right sees people unemployed in times like these, and says things like it is only because they are lazy. They seem to act as if taking away unemployment compensation would suddenly create jobs, or that there are jobs people like this can do which are going begging. Or, sometimes, that they are at fault because they didn’t get a degree in petroleum engineering.
They also say that welfare checks provide a life of luxury to these people, so that they never, ever want to get work. (Whereas the data shows that most people go into and out of welfare, and so do work.) These are the people who say that since they have a TV, and that Louis XIV didn’t, they are richer than kings and should shut their yaps.
If we all agreed that everyone was deserving of some minimal support, we could then argue policy. But we know that many on the right don’t even think that everyone “deserves” decent health care. Anyone not just like me is an idle loafer.
I’m guessing you’re referring to me, among others. I know I’ve certainly made the case against the FDA before, although I’m not in favor of abolishing it - merely changing its scope. For example, it could go back to the pre-Kefauver days of ensuring safety and not efficacy. Or it could become an informational agency.
But the root difference between us is that libertarians generally believe that the market is largely self-regulating, and liberals do not. Liberals see the choice as being one of regulation vs anarchy. Libertarians believe it’s more about choosing where our regulations should come from government or from the aggregate choices of free people in the market.
Liberals always claim that people are not capable of determining what’s safe and what isn’t when it comes to complex products. How could a consumer possibly know that a drug is safe? The answer is that the market provides many mechanisms for determining exactly that, and in the internet age they’re getting stronger, not weaker.
An example I’ve offered in the past is SCUBA equipment. SCUBA gear is almost completely unregulated by the government (only DOT stamps on pressure vessels, from what I can tell). In addition, SCUBA equipment is complex, and the inner workings are completely hidden. And SCUBA diving is done in harsh environments where faults can kill you. So you’d think divers would be dropping dead right and left from all that unregulated hardware out there, wouldn’t you? But they’re not.
In fact, SCUBA has become incredibly safe, and the equipment is generally of very high quality and rarely fails. How come? Because in the absence of government regulation, it is in the interests of the industry to demonstrate how safe the sport is, so numerous private organizations have arisen to certify divers, to validate equipment, etc.
Or look at the computer industry. Aside from the basic electrical connections of the equipment or radio-frequency certification for communicating devices, there is almost no regulation. But would you say computers sold today are of generally high quality? Or are they all shoddy, dangerous pieces of equipment that fail regularly while the shoddy builders of them rake in the money?
For that matter, look at all the regulated industries where the actual level of safety is far above what regulations demand. This is true any time the market demands more safety than the government does. Cars today generally have more airbags than the government mandates. Almost all of them have ABS, despite its not being required. The car companies provide these things because the market demands it. Release a car today with only two airbags and no ABS, and the various insurance underwriters will trash it in their ratings. Car reviews will pan it. Competitors will gleefully point out the safety features their cars have. The market is a strong regulatory force for safety.
Liberals are in complete denial about the power of the market to disseminate information about safety and to regulate the safety of products. Does some shoddy crap slip through? Of course. But then, a lot of shoddy crap gets past government regulators, too. We’re not talking about utopia here - we’re talking about on balance regulation through the free market being preferable to government regulation, and to only accept government regulation where there is a clear market failure.
Liberals are big on pointing out the failures of capitalism. But they almost never admit the massive failures of government, or if they do they always blame it on the specific people involved. Especially if they are Republican. If a capitalist screws someone over, it’s used as a denunciation of capitalism itself. But if a government official is caught in a cronyism scandal, liberals refuse to accept that government itself corrupts because it centralizes power and maintains a monopoly on the legal use of force against others.
When a Democrat proposes a new regulation, liberals immediately glom onto the stated justification for it, and never seem to look behind the curtain to see the crony capitalists who funded the politician, lobbied for the change, and stand to make a handsome profit from it. But they see powerful shadowy forces everywhere they look in the capitalist economy, and refuse to consider that even the most powerful people are slaves to the market if they want to keep their power and money.
Of course you do. A court of law is a state actor, and a powerless one unless it can call on the executive branch to enforce its judgments.
No. Judge Roy Bean is a famous example of a “court of law” whose power didn’t really rely on any central government. Plaintiffs are free to hire assassins or other rogues to enforce judgements, without recourse to any “state authority.” (And of course, in a further example of free-market efficiency and flexibility, plaintiffs are free to bypass the trial phase of the trial/conviction/execution process.)
This is interesting and something I’ve been chewing on. Between reading CNN and listening to “conservative” AM radio, I don’t know if politicians always believe what they’re saying, along with their constituents.
From what I glean from the news, there are a lot of judgments with conflicting social values. Free market interpretations conflict with some of the tenets of Christianity, historically interpreted to embrace the poor, a religion which is to be given prominence at a societal level above other religions. On the other hand, the left promotes social works projects yet has a significant tolerance of the results of our current economic system - after all, pharmaceuticals, clothing, and food is more affordable at Walmart and the like: very important for those on a fixed income. Despite all of the hypermarket bashing.
(Frankly, I’m not sure if my mainline Protestant church and the others we have agreements with could feed a hundred homeless people every Sunday without our Big Box Store.)
A few examples from my biased (and a little cynical) interpretation of the media. Again, not sure what people really think - just making assumptions.
I suspect the free market is what people in general want, or at least with which have a love/hate relationship. Few in the left like any of the variants of true socialism. Ideas found in socialism, like collective bargaining and some semblence of a health care system, are attractive to many in the left. Dismantling private insurance? Politics being a part-time gig rather than a career? Eliminating class? Not as much.
At the end of the day, we like to vote people in so we can talk politics when it’s convenient, buy cheap stuff, choose from five brands of cough syrup - two of which are imported from India, and utilize our bootstraps. It’s what we Americans do, and it would be a tough thing to shake. The right is probably a bit more honest about it, and the left probably wants to reign it in a tad.
On the plus side, we seem to have awoken a lull in the general public’s interest in politics. It’s a good thing, even if the results are unnerving at times.
Was it, now? Telling of what?
I don’t think these views are typical of “the right” as a whole.
Sam Stone, those were excellent points.
I disagree, arguments should be at the level of policy.
I think enforcing contracts and prosecuting fraud are appropriate powers for the state to have; it just depends on how “min” you want your minarchism. Certainly arbitration is a choice both parties to a contract or suit can make as an alternative to a government court. Fraud would seem to be more difficult to handle without a state actor.
Bolding mine. Do what now? What do you mean by “given prominence”? And “is to be given”? Because no religion is to be given prominence by the state.
Actually I was not thinking of you as an example, since I didn’t recall any cases where you claimed that high school dropouts were able to make sophisticated drug choices. I’m not interested in safety vs efficacy - we can always argue about the limits of government involvement once we agree that government should be involved.
Actually, no. Liberals don’t want to totally control the market, but see the market as usually moving within reasonable bounds until something happens to make it oscillate out of safe territory into unsafe territory. The financial crisis was a perfect example of this - when lenders no longer had much in the game, market forces drove them to make more and more dangerous loans until the inevitable happened. The market is like a mesa with particularly nice grass on the rim. If you have cows grazing up there, you don’t need to stake them to one section of grassland. You do need to put up a fence, so that the cows heading for that good grass on the edge don’t fall off. I think this is a pretty common liberal view. The cows of course object to being kept away from that good grass, and say that no cow will ever be stupid enough to fall off. Until the edge gives way.
It is absolutely true that most people are unable to understand the safety of complex drugs. My wife has an MS in Biology (and could have had a PHD if she had like lab work,) worked for a drug company, and is a medical writer, including a Biology textbook - and she doesn’t pretend to be able to determine the safety of a drug. Sure there would be many review sites - how do you suppose the average consumer would determine which is honest and which is secretly supported by a drug company? In the US, since “supplements” are unregulated (liberal Congressman did that, by the way) plenty of people spend plenty of money on stuff that is totally useless, if usually not harmful.
In any case the big expense and delay in regulation comes not from the FDA directly but from the requirement to do studies before a drug is released. Do you object to these? Do you think that drug companies would never release dangerous drugs in the absence of these? I used to live around Princeton, where there are lots of drug companies, and I knew some scientists who work for them. Not a monster among them, but they were very excited about a new drug which offered the chance of curing something awful. People try to push new drugs out the door for the best of reasons sometimes, and sometimes it backfires.
Not nearly as complex as a drug, which might have subtle side effects. If SCUBA gear fails, you know it right away. Even if someone dies, you could pull the equipment with minimal damage. Now, if a million people have been taking a bad drug with dangerous side effects after a year before we become aware of the problem, we have a much worse situation.
I’m not sure, but the people I know who skin-dive get training first. My brother is a jumper, and anyone who jumps from a plane with an unregulated chute gets training. Damage is not going to be widespread with a limited number of reasonably trained participants. So, bad analogy.
You know why computers of today are high quality? The Japanese. And I was there. Around 1980 chips were junk. People in the Teletype plant at Little Rock used to keep track of the serial numbers of memories they got from Intel, since lots they rejected had the tendency to come back. Then the Japanese companies told American companies that their product were junk. In fact the quality revolution came from industry pressuring industry, with end customers having little to do with it. I was at a meeting where AT&T told our suppliers that they were going to adopt a new testing method if they wanted to sell to us. And of course no one dies from a bad computer - parts which could kill someone due to shock have UL approval - a monopoly in a sense with almost the force of law.
Quality doesn’t always win. Jack Tramiel shipped the first C64s with a known bug to be ready in time for Christmas, and was willing to replace any bad ones later. A fine business decision, but not so fine if the sparkle bug could have killed people.
But the first airpbags, and the first seatbelts, were put in due to the government. That was important because it leveled the playing field based on price.
And conservatives are in denial about the ability of industry (and people) to cloud the information market. There are now companies out there which find and purge libels against a company (or maybe the inconvenient truth.) Amazon is now working to delete reviews of books by the relatives of the writer. That is all pretty amusing. But when the choices are a site which gives PDR-like information on efficacy and side effects and links to studies, versus sites which are full of smiling people testifying how the drug helped them, who do you think is going to win?
I don’t know if you got Enzyte and Smiling Bob ads in Canada, but there was a perfect example of a company selling tons of junk until they got shut down. Again amusing - but if it were a fake cancer drug, not so amusing.
Yeah, people who bought that stuff were boobs - but maybe the real difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals think even boobs shouldn’t get poisoned or robbed by unscrupulous companies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re all socialists. We’re not against capitalism - only totally unconstrained capitalism. Regulations preventing the excesses keeps capitalism strong.
Telling of denigrating those less fortunate than you.
Nothing is typical of the right as a whole, but do you deny that there is a significant “the unemployed are lazy” faction? I could probably dig up quotes galore, and not from just bloggers. As for Sam’s points - taken care of.
It is pointless to argue policy without examining policy goals. If one thinks that it is okay for people to not have access to healthcare, it is pointless to debate about how best to provide this access. If one thinks that a certain subset of people are not fully human, rejecting slavery based on human rights is hard to argue. One argument against extreme free enterprise is that it inevitably destroys some workers and others for the profit of the capitalist. Safety is expensive, as the WalMart guy in China said. if you believe this, free enterprise makes a lot of sense - just hope you never lose your job or that your kid has to work in a sweatshop without fire exits imposed by that pesky government. Because then you might change your mind. But it will be too late.
Yeah, Christian politicians want to impose abortion restrictions on everyone base on their faith and their reading of the Bible, but aren’t so hot about helping those less fortunate no matter what Jesus said directly and clearly.
The problem with WalMart is not that they forced smaller retailers out of business by being more efficient (A&P did that too) but that they reduce their prices by the indirect but clear oppression of workers overseas. That buck you save on a shirt comes out of the hide of a Bangladeshi woman. That’s why I don’t shop there. Among other reasons.
That’s rather a broad assumption to make.
True, “the right” consists of millions of Americans and multiple factions and groups. I would say that the “some unemployed are unemployed by choice, and this matters” faction outnumbers the “all unemployed are lazy” faction by a wide margin, just based on personal experience.
I’ll allow Sam to address your remarks.
Yes, but it is equally pointless to examine policy goals without making an honest attempt to grasp the other sides’ reasoning and positions. This is where policy discussions often fail; you provided a useful example yourself. If you’ve already decided, because I used the word “idle”, that I’m contemptuous of those less fortunate than myself, then any ideas I put forth must be opposed, as they’re clearly motivated by this contempt. Once you decide others’ motives for them, there’s no debate to be had, just a shouting match.