The Binary Circumstance

What would Jesus do?

If Jesus had billions in taxpayer money to spend on treating people with HIV/AIDS, would he buy cheaper drugs that have been approved by organizations like the World Health Organization so that more people can be treated, or would he buy only the more expensive, non-generic drugs, thereby limiting the number of people who can be treated while artificially inflating the profits of U.S. drug companies.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn what Jesus would do, but I do give a damn what George Bush is doing with taxpayer money; once again shoveling it into the pockets of his friends while restricting political and economic freedom.

This article from The San Francisco Chronicle is by Washington Post reporter David Brown.

The Bush administration is requiring that foreign-made generic AIDS drugs undergo further evaluation before they are used in its $15 billion global AIDS program, even though the same pills have passed muster by the World Health Organization and other international health groups.

[…]

Practically speaking, the main drug that U.S. relief program recipients will not be able to use immediately is a “fixed-dose combination” of three anti-retroviral drugs — stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine — made by several companies in India.

Sold as Triomune, Triviro and other names, it comes in a single pill and is taken twice a day. A year’s supply can cost from $136 to $263. Taken as separate pills bought at a discount, this combination costs $559 a year.

What this article does not mention is that a non-generic, three drug cocktail in the U.S. costs around $15,000-$20,000/yr.

Something’s not right.

Much of the research that led to the development of these HIV/AIDS therapies was down in the U.S. and funded by U.S. taxpayers. So why are we paying such outrageous amounts for the drugs we already paid to develop?

Think of the billions that taxpayers, insurance companies and ultimately the concumers of health care are overpaying, simply because the Bush Administration and the FDA are snuggled up in bed with the Drug Companies. Think of all the other things you could spend that money on.

We saw even more evidence of their cozy relationship with the passage of the Bush-backed Medicare Reform Act which specifically prohibits the government from negotiating with the drug companies for lower prices.

How many people will remain sick, how many will die, how many will not be able to afford needed treatments, and how many will stripped of their life’s savings because George Bush is anit-competition and anti-free market?

Would Jesus steal people’s money through taxation then use that money to regulate markets in a way that allows drug companies to charge prices for drugs they could never get in a free marekt?

I don’t know what Jesus would do, but I do know what George W. Bush is doing.

Maybe those French aren’t so bad after all.

Thanks to Marginal Revolution, which has apparently diversified into real estate listings, I came upon this short but interesting biography.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) merits a hallowed place in the annals of political economy. A member of the French Liberal, or laissez-faire, school of economists that included the great J. B. Say, Bastiat marshaled logic, clarity, and exuberant wit in the cause of understanding society, prosperity, and liberty. In a series of brief essays and pamphlets, and a treatise on political economy, Bastiat taught, contra Rousseau, that there is a natural harmonious order to the social world, an order that emanates from the free exchange between human beings driven to satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources.

This passage made me think of the upcoming presidential election:

In the revolutionary year of 1848, the French people, disgusted with monarchical corruption on behalf of special-interests, forced their king from power. In the turmoil that followed, socialist and other utopian schemes gained adherents.

Some things never change.

Though I’ve heard his name before, I am not familiar with his writings. But I am immediately simpatico with somebody who writes like this:

Selected Essays on Political Economy, a posthumous collection of essays and pamphlets, contains some of Bastiat’s best writings. Here he debunks, for example, the doctrine of the balance of trade, pointing out that if it is better to export than to import, then best of all would be for ships carrying exports to sink so that no imports may return as a result. Also in this volume is his essay “The State,” which contains the oft-quoted truth, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

In “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” Bastiat’s perspicacity and perspicuity are on display. He begins with a story of a boy who has broken a window. An onlooker points out the silver lining of the boy’s mischief: the glazier will earn six francs plying his trade, his industry thus encouraged. To which Bastiat protests, “That will never do! Your theory stops at what is seen. It does not take account of what is not seen.” What is not seen is that had the window not been broken, the six francs would have been available for things that the window-owner must now do without. He is therefore poorer! There is no silver lining.[bolding mine]

Just yesterday, I was having a discussion with a friend who advocates going to a single-payer, government run health care system like in Canada and Europe. He argued that such a system treats more patients at a lower cost.

Because our government prevents competition in our own health care market, we pay much more for drugs than in any other country in the world. The discounts that other countries get are being subsidized by American taxpayers and health-care consumers. The artificially inflated prices that consumers in the U.S. pay for HIV/AIDS drugs is an excellent example.

Single payer is a blank check for health care providers as long they offer services that are approved by the government. The real cost is the lack of choice. A person with a particular disease, who is highly motivated to find a cure for it, is being forced to buy someone else’s idea of health care, pay for treatments that he does not need, leaving him less money to search for the cure for his own disease, which in the end would benefit many others with the same disease.

Marginal Revolution links to Cato, WalterInDenver and a couple of other sites to provide an excellent background history on the Pledge Of Allegiance. I’m not going to provide all the links or quote the text; it’s a really informative post you should read for yourself.

WalterInDenver provides the link to some really disturbing pictures. There are some things we did just like the Nazis.

Get them while they’re young.

Today we learn more about Ronald Harold Young, the foster father who has been accused of molesting young boys placed in his care by Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS).

While she [Wendy Young] worked 12-hour days as a baker, what neighbors and family members saw was an energetic Mr. Mom who cooked and cared for the six young boys and studied to become a minister while they were at elementary school. [emphasis mine]

[…]

In charging documents, prosecutors said that Young admitted to posting the pornographic pictures on the Internet of himself and groups of two and three boys in various sexual acts, including oral and anal sex. Some of photographs were taken as recently as March 15, according to digital date stamps on them.

Social workers at DSHS said yesterday that despite their frequent contact with the Youngs and their foster boys, they saw no signs that the children were being molested.

[…]

Young’s mother, who lives in Alabama, said her son was studying through an Internet Bible school to become a pastor and felt that God had wanted him to be a foster parent.

She said her devout son once worked at a day care and often sent her pictures of his foster boys and talked about trips with them to Seattle and Mount Rainier [emphasis mine].

[…]

Neighbors said that about a year ago, the Youngs were baptized as born-again Christians. They often brought their foster sons to Sunday services and Bible study at the Port Orchard Church of Christ. The Rev. Melvin Byrd said Young appeared to be a stern but loving father [emphasis mine].

The thing that amazes me about this story is that nobody seems to understand that religion IS child abuse. Teaching children to value things that don’t exist more than things that do exist destroys their ability to think clearly and rationally.

To all the people who are involved in this case who maintain that there were no signs that the children were being abused, I can only say that you don’t understand abuse, probably because you were subjected to the same kind of abuse by your own parents. You see the abuse as the “normal” way to raise children.

The human mind is man’s tool for survival. In order to think rationally, the human mind must think about things that exist. It is not possible to think rationally about things that don’t exist because there is nothing to be known about things that don’t exist. There are no relationships to understand about things that don’t exist. THEY ARE NOT THERE!

People get upset about children who are physically beaten and sexually abused, as they should. They would get upset a parent chopped off a child’s arms or legs, but they don’t get upset about parents who destroy a child’s mind and his ability to think rationally. The destruction of a child’s primary tool for survival is the worst form of child abuse.

There were signs of child abuse in this home. Case workers may not have seen the sexual abuse but the poisoning of these young minds was staring them in the face. That was the clue, that was the forest that could not be seen because social workers were looking for a single tree.

People don’t see religion, the substitution of faith for reason and nonexistence for existence, as abuse. They see it as desirable and good. It is much easier to manipulate children whose ability to think rationally has been crippled. Unable to process the evidence around them into knowledge they will accept what they are being told by authority figures in their highly controlled environment as the truth.

In addition, in our culture, you will get all kinds of social support, tax breaks and other benefits, for practicing this particlar form of child abuse. It is a learned form of child abuse and because so many people have been victims of it, they see is as normal, and they have built a social structure that supports and rewards it.

On example of this came before the Supreme Court this past week. Inserting the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, forces anyone who recites the pledge to imply that God exists, in spite of the fact that there is no evidence to support such a belief.

I can’t make this point enough: people don’t see the poisoning of a child’s mind as abuse because it is a ubiquitous and socially acceptable form of child abuse.

The truth is based on existence. There is no truth outside of what exists. Once authority figures can break the connection between existence and truth, once a child can be taught that truth depends on things that don’t exist and faith, the child can be taught to believe anything; evidence and proof no longer have any meaning or value. The child learns that the make-believe world of his parents is preferable to the real world, the one his body was designed to live in.

Hell in a Foster Home, Part I.