The Most Glibertarian Thing Ever Said
Posted on September 17th, 2008 by D. Aristophanes
The FDA is notoriously risk averse when it comes to new drugs, a legacy of events like the Thalidomide horrors, when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Megan is hostile towards the agency charged with tracking down inedible sludge advertised as food.
Accidental or not, then, it seems that the foot-dragging was hardly pointless, does it?
The FDA under Bush has certainly NOT been “notoriously risk aversive” in approving new drugs – Big Pharma practically owns the FDA, as evidenced by the high number of drug recalls over the last eight years.
So her actual point isn’t even based in reality. Gods, she’s an idiot.
Don’t MOCK AIRWOLF, beaches!1!
I quote common tater stewartwadehines:
stewartwadehines (2 weeks ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam
Pretty sure airwolf wins this one because his song is cooler and his pilot wasn’t in Jaws.
~
Sorry, I was just testing, cause dumbass teh poor manners has no preview.
But I have to say this: Megan McArdle is an idiot.
Christ on a stick, that is the most ignorant thing I have heard in weeks, including the nonsense that falls out of McCain’s mouth. Frances Kelsey, the pharmacologist who resisted the pressure to rush approval of thalidomide, is national hero. For fuck’s sake, it was anything but ‘accidental’, except insofar as evidence is always sort of accidental. I suppose it’s accidental that we ever figured out the heliocentric theory of the solar system, given that Copernicus was just a liberal douchebag who hated capitalism.
Kelsey took clear evidence that human bodies could absorb ridiculous amounts of thalidomide and said “hey, where is that stuff going? Maybe it’s getting dumped into fetuses like some other drugs do!” Jesus, she sure was a bumbling moron, that accidental savior of thousands of people!
I tried to come up with a joke about McMegan and flipper babies, but I’m too angry.
Oh, here it is: she can complain about foot-dragging precisely because she doesn’t have a goddamn FLIPPER for a limb, thanks to Frances Kelsey.
This notorious discrimination against what could have been an emerging community of Thalidomide-Americans should not go unrecollectified.
Galt’s Gulch, a timeline:
Day 1: Celebratory rapes
Day 280: Flipper babies
ABOVE: Megan’s Spring Pasta, as cooked by
Clif. Needs bigger pieces of asparagus
Don’t forget the Brussels sprouts and Chopped Liver, dammit!
Obama should stop mocking McCain’s computer illiteracy because McCain actually has flippers for hands.
The FDA is notoriously risk averse when it comes to new drugs
But come the 20th Century, they’ll pick up the pace, but quick!
when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies
Except when it didn’t, y’know, actually do that.
As an aside, I’ve actually seen a package of Thalidomide – in 2003. Any guesses on the graphics the manufacturer prints on the packaging? A ‘flipper baby’, as they were called. It’s… unsettling, to say the least.
Much to Megan’s surprise, I’m sure, it’s still on the market and used as… a cancer treatment! The health risks are not taken lightly and dear old Dad, at 78 years old, had to sign a piece of paper that said he wasn’t planning to have children. What with all the actual birth defects that occurred when people were using Thalidomide, even though the FDA dragged its feet and very nearly, just about, almost, practically prevented those very same birth defects.
To be honest, I’m not sure what Megan’s point was, now. Regardless, the woman knows nothing about anything.
Oh, that’s right. Her point was the Free Market ALWAYS WORKS (motherfuckers!) except for that time it didn’t work when the gov’t “accidentally” got something right but then the Free Market FUCKING WORKED ANYWAY or something.
Frances Kelsey, the pharmacologist who resisted the pressure to rush approval of thalidomide, is national hero.
Also the Frau Doktorin’s second cousin. Yay Frances. By all accounts she is living at home, is in good health, and has so few of her original joints left that she reckons there’s nothing left to go wrong.
I have a prototype design for a backyard nuclear reactor I’d like to build, but the g** d*** drag-a**es at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission keep whining about ‘leak’ here and ‘not even vaguely resembling science’ there.
If it weren’t for these sorts of bureaucratic red tape dumba**es, we’d already have tons of different untested designs for nuclear reactors scattered across the nation.
What with all the actual birth defects that occurred when people were using Thalidomide, even though the FDA dragged its feet and very nearly, just about, almost, practically prevented those very same birth defects.
It caused an awful lot of birth defects where it was approved, especially Germany and Canada. It caused 100+ in the US, where doctors were allowed to offer “samples” to their patients pre-approval. So, yes, “foot-dragging,” also called evidence-based science, prevented a lot of birth-defects in the US.
It’s not “still on the market,” it was finally approved for use in people not having babies once it went through the far more rigorous testing standards that were fucking inspired by the flipper baby episodes years ago. It’s also pretty good for treating leprosy, BTW.
More than two dozen crates of Dr. Aristophanes’ Radium Elixir for Gentleladies of the Female Persuasion are sitting in my basement. When applied in private by a trained professional to a women’s lower regions, this healthful tonic is second-to-none, but alas, the FDA will not approve it. Foot-draggers all.
Who the fuck can look at the current FDA and say ‘How can they be so shamefully careful? You idiots! Stop regulating food and drugs!‘
I mean, we are talking about a body that, since being hijacked by supply-side jackoffs like the people Megan thinks are super awesome, has allowed various vital staples to be contaminated with fucking e. coli; has put through more drugs that turned out to be worthless or hazardous in the last half decade than it had in perhaps the thirty years before that; and we’re supposed to get on them for too much regulating?
What, did she think Reagan was a communist or something? How can a woman be thirty-five years old and this goddamned ignorant?
Big Pharma practically owns the FDA,
By coincidence, I was reading in Teh Skeptical Inquirer today about vagus nerve stimulation — a surgically-invasive treatment for depression that performs no better than a placebo in clinical trials, has risks and side-effects, and was unanimously turned down by the scientific panel in charge of approval. The Director of that section of the FDA (a certain Daniel Schultz MD) approved it anyway.
Googling reveals that Daniel Schultz MD is in strongly in favour of a constructive, mutually-beneficial working relationship between medical suppliers and the FDA.
*dutifully awards you the Internet*
The worst thing about dealing with the present FDA is that they’re the right wing of a perverse debate. Fast-pacing medications that don’t fucking work in exchange for money only really works if you’ve internalized the idea that, as a pharmaceuticals regulator, your only job is to collate the bribes. This is a stupid hippie stereotype, and yet they live it.
It’s rather like people like McCain, who devote enormous amounts of time and energy to being a kintergarten-Marxist plutocrat; the Republicans accept that society is in a vicious war between the oppressed masses and the parasitic overclass, they reject (as few modern leftists do) the idea that rich and poor could ever coexist in a reasonable society, and they fight for the rich.
The debate, as it exists now, is between pharmaceutical-manufacturing hucksters and placebo-manufacturing hucksters. The idea that the state should be pretty directly involved in producing enough research and medicine for everyone on the cheap is foreign to the debate. We must either spend half of our paycheck on SSRI reuptake inhibitors or half of our paycheck on aromatherapy; there is no alternative.
This shit makes me so goddamn mad. I get hives, I swear.
Good townsfolk of the blogosphere! A recent heat wave coupled with the Dipteran larval season has hastened the urgency with which we at Aristophanes Whaling Industries, LLC must reduce our stores of freshly fermented manatee meat, just 17 short months from humane slaughter by propeller and neither frozen nor smoked a single day in that span! Prices per pound have never been lower! Supper tables across the land are sagging under the weight of platters piled high with steak upon steak of this delightfully aromatic meat! Children everywhere are saying, ‘Mother, make mine manatee tonight!’ As always, our slogan: Caveat Emptor!
re: vagus nerve stimulation: God, I really hope the intellectual fashion for treating mood-altering medication the way fundies treat stem-cell research dies down before I have kids. Given how much wrong my vagus nerve has done me in my lifetime (if you’ve ever been in intense pain, you’ll notice a sudden wave of cold and nausea: that’s the vagus nerve having a sort of stack overflow), I really don’t like the idea of any of my loved ones being forced to choose between that and Jack Shit, PhD.
This shit makes me so goddamn mad. I get hives, I swear.
For a mere $12,000 per annum I believe we have a drug regimen that can fix that for you.
For a mere $12,000 per annum I believe we have a drug regimen that can fix that for you.
Might just be a deficiency of vitamin manatee, who knows.
I broke out in full-body hives once after eating a hotel pan of strawberries at the restaurant I was working at. The doctor actually asked if he could take pictures of the rash on my torso, such was its potential interest to science, apparently.
That was probably a good comment to bow out on. Night-night!
We’re on the road to Wellville,
come on inside.
From the addled one:
Why bother running any tests then? If anything really bad happens, people will hear about it and they won’t buy the drug! It’s the magic of the free market!
I just… I don’t know how to… you know, snark this shit. I mean… I mean… HOW IS THIS FUCKWIT BEING PAID TO WRITE THESE THINGS???????? HOW GOD DAMMIT, HOW???
Incidentally, I’d like to point out the beautiful glibertarian efficiency of Megan ‘Lawful Evil But Why On Earth Would My Character Be Black’ McArdle’s sympathies: just as we saw with her simmering at individuals fighting state-backed mortgages in small, symbolic ways and groups of people with almost no power using their First Amendment rights against a war mostly popular with statist wankoffs, so here does McArdle reveal that her concern is not so much smaller government but smaller government for poor people.
Case in point: here we have three parties – the consumers, the manufacturers, and the government.
The government taxes the consumers; the government forces the consumers to buy into an insurance system that could only be more abusive if it were literally protection money – an insurance system insulated from the Free Market™ through titanic amounts of state intervention at that; the government refuses to honor laws and regulations which the consumers have been consistent in demanding for decades.
The manufacturers profit from this – often by the state directly subsidizing them out of the consumers’ pocket – at every turn. They are given a level of legal and economic leeway and freedom from liability that would make even the most extreme corporatist blush – a level of leeway that would be close to impossible to achieve in an actual free-market system.
There comes along a case where the manufacturers wish to sell a product which the research – done by the state at the consumer’s expense – cannot yet recommend safely. The FDA being what it is right now, this would generally be a case involving corruption, nepotism, or both; and there would probably be clear dangers to at least someone from the medication.
McArdle, as a staunch believer in free markets, recoils in horror at the thought of a regulatory body stopping or even cautioning the public about the manufacturers producing a dangerous chemical discovered and documented at taxpayer expense – or, for that matter, impinging in any way on the manufacturer’s exclusive right to produce that medication, like any other, at any price.
It is certainly a high set of principles, and they stick boldly to them. After all: the freer the rich are to pretend at state expense that there exists the exact kind of free market described by Hayek, the freer the people.
Wait, are the poor human? I keep on forgetting.
the FDA should put much less energy into preventing drugs from reaching the market, and vastly more energy into assessing them after they have
If we’ve learned one thing from the Vioxx saga and similar cases, it’s that it’s easier to withdraw a noxious drug from the market — once the doctors are receiving their honoraria for prescribing it, and the production has been scaled up, and the astroturf groups of patients have been funded to publicise their own good experiences with the drug and to decry any thought of replacing it with something else — than it would have been to properly test its side-effects in the first place.
FUCK. That woman is stupid.
1. The average cost to develop a new drug is on the order of a billion dollars – with a huge chunk going to clinical trials. Hey I think I’ve got a new treatment for the indigestion you get when you eat meals prepared according to McArdle recipes. Billion dollars please. And IIRC, generics/different dosages/different delivery mechanisms/etc. all require Phase 2 testing for bioavailability and bioequivalence. This is on the order of millions. Hey marketing’s got a great idea to package the drug with caffeine to reduce drowsiness. Ten million dollars please!
2. Moreover, this may sound un-commie-pinko-Marxist-lib but the idea that she would suggest this after typing the following line…
FUCK she’s stoopid.
Comment-spoor deposited at the Altar Of The MeganBorg, regurgitated here For Great Justice:
If I’d wanted to, I could’ve included Prepulsid (which also had several other brand-names). They gave it to lots of anorexic & bulimic girls to counter esophagitis, knowing in advance that a) it was strongly contra-indicated for anyone suffering from depression, & b) those girls were chronic depressives. Like Ford with the Pinto, they made the cold-blooded calculation that the quick money was worth the risk. A whole lot of nice people killed themselves while on it … & the company that put it out – & the doctors that pushed it – all got off scott-free. Eventually, when the heat got too intense, it was pulled off the market – which didn’t really render any of its victims any less dead.
Ah, the wonders of the Free Market at work.
McArdle suffers from the “George W Bush syndrome” – she’s so cretinous she actually thinks she’s smarter than everyone else.
Bush: “if you’re so smart how come I’m the President and you’re not?” – (verbatim at a press conference)
McArdle: “If all those bloggers ROTFLing at my posts all the time are so smart, how come I’m on a fat salary at the Atlantic and they’re not? They even fired Yglesias, which proves I’m smarter than him!”
I had hives earlier, they’re mostly gone now. May I suggest Unisom or any other OTC sleeping pill with diphenhydramine? I mean, okay, going round the clock on sleeping pills is probably not all that smart if you operate heavy machinery for a living, but it’s a fuck of a lot cheaper than finding a fucking doctor.
The difference between me and Megan is that I won’t charge you for that advice, and the difference between me and John Stossel is that I won’t pretend it’s better than actual working health insurance. Also, I have no money so if you end up crashing the forklift, suing me won’t do you any good anyway.
So, the FY 2009 FDA budget is about $1.7 billion dollars. IIRC, a dozen years ago, it was nearly double that, but the Republican Congress had this idea that they could save the US taxpayer a ton o’ bucks by requiring applicants for approvals pay a fee for that service (in some circles, this is called a “bribe”). This also means that anyone* who can’t afford the fee is shit outta luck getting a product approved.
[* Entrepreneur who might challenge the hegemony of Big Pharma.]
For the sake of perspective, if you make enough moola to pay $5000 in Federal Income Tax, proportionately that $1.7 billion spent by the FDA costs you $3.35 a year. Meanwhile, Bush will blow that much on the GWOT between now and sometime Saturday afternoon. $3.35 is also roughly equivalent to your daily contribution to the interest payments on the National Debt.
The FDA used to be: “Dragging our feet to make sure that you’re born with them.”
From McArdle’s article:
“parallels between financial products and other sorts of new technologies”
The breathtaking stupidity inherent in this statement – Ponzi schemes = advances in technology – is incredible. Where did The Atlantic find her?
protected American mothers from limbless babies.
In New Zealand, if mothers find themselves attacked by a ravening horde of limbless babies, they can defend themselves. They take responsibility for themselves and learn karate! Pioneer self-sufficiency!
it delays possibly life-saving advances
There’s a school of thought out there that all the key drugs have already been discovered (usually by accident), so not to expect any breakthroughs, FDA or no FDA. Here’s Ben Goldacre:
If it weren’t for government bureaucrats, industry researchers could be carrying out massive, potentially life-saving research on viral-born DNA alteration.
Instead, though, we’ve got gray, ugly people in ugly offices sneering at the American public saying, “No, it’s probably not a good idea to let corporations release viruses in the air or on public transportation to re-write your DNA and see what happens.”
Hmph. Liberals. Cowards. Disgusting.
Here we could be having people at random developing additional useful limbs, or developing an immunity to aspirin, and why can we not have this?
Oh, because some widdle bureaucrat is afraid that ‘oh goodness we might have mass deaths throughout the population’ and ‘holy crap you’re talking about rewriting the human genome at random for your stupid experiments’ and ‘my god what you’re talking about isn’t just madness it’s psychosis’.
Pfft.
Instead, though, we’ve got gray, ugly people in ugly offices sneering at the American public saying, “No, it’s probably not a good idea to let corporations release viruses in the air or on public transportation to re-write your DNA and see what happens.”
Hmph. Liberals. Cowards. Disgusting.
I have been wanting some face tentacles and laser eyes for awhile…I like the way you think, sir. You’ve got my vote!
Fun fact: the FDA has no legal authority to order recalls of food, except for baby formula. Now that’s what I call heavy handed regulation.
Clearly we have to stop the FDA from slowing innovation and experimentation in baby formula. Yes, it may save infants from dying, but how does it otherwise benefit society to slow baby formula companies from rolling out new products to be sampled by our nation’s infants?
” . . . the industry is rapidly running out of new drugs” – to treat limp dicks and restless legs. In the meantime, Big Pharma spends more in a month marketing ED treatments than it has researching new antibiotics in the past decade.
It’s always much more profitable to produce and promote new treatments for chronic discomforts. The old alcohol-based, cocaine-laced Dr. Pepper formula was probably just as effective in most cases, but there wasn’t any money in it. Trying to come up with things that actually prevent fatal illness is such a waste of capital.
Y’know, for five and a half years, McCain didn’t even have flippers, never mind hands.
Meagan, if you keep gratuitously killing off the peasants they will after awhile rise up and crush your skull…
Boy, the stupid in her article is never-ending. I usually don’t go to the original article that S,N links to just because so many whacko/wingnut sites, notably redstate.org, use lots of Java, scripts, and cookies … I hate all that messy rightwing sludge on my machine. But this is the Atlantic, still kinda respectful even though it has been infected with the Brainless Virus.
Anywho, the line that made my eyebrows involuntarily rise up:
“But now we have had Hayek, and the failure of the Soviet Union, and a hundred other ways to learn that in any sizeable economy, the information problem is simply too big.”
Wow. Give up regulation because a political system failed, which wasn’t socialism but rather a form of quasi-communitarian totalitariansim. Throw in the mix some run-of-the-mill “intellectual” who has been elevated to pseudo-holiness by selfish persons to justify their selfishness. Then, to top it all off, add the illogic of “we must just give up because the problem is too big”.
Wow. I just CANNOT believe they pay her for her rantings. Her piece sounds like a smart 8th grade essay (or stupid 11th grade essay) by a student who has been assigned the thesis: “Defend self-centeredness”
Wow.
Thanks to the miracle of the market economy, we no longer need to know anything about anything. All of our knowledge needs are provided for us at no charge by highly motivated knowledge-suppliers like McArdle, who manufacture an ample supply of attractively packaged and easily digested non-nutritive knowledge-nuggets for our consumption.
Oh sure, like if you’re so smart, how come you’re not pulling down a couple hundred ks to write for the Atlantic?
After the insanity of Wall St. this week, it’s nice to have some comfort food to go home to. Feel the insanity of Joseph Grant Swank in:
NASTY FEMINISTS VS. PALIN = ANTI-GODISTS
Make that raw chopped liver…
Megan is angry because she has absorbed her identical twin while in the womb, but it /she still has rights to half of the trust fund.
By the way, bitches, welcome to the revolution! The govt holds your mortgage, and underwrites your flood insurance and collects your premiums for your homeowners insurance and its monopolist franchisee issues your credit cards and takes your bet on Consolidated Diversified Inc.
I am sick and tired of the medical bureaucracy keeping out anyone they don’t think is ‘qualified’ to be a “Doctor”, just because they don’t pass their fancy tests or get all their learning out of a book.
I think the free market is fully capable of figuring out who is a good doctor or surgeon through trial, error, supply, and demand, and I don’t need no damn arugula-eating, pointy-head ivory tower type telling me that someone can’t do my operation just because they’ve never done anything like that before.
Grey ’62: Unity Or Death!
You can now become a millionaire while working for the government. what a country! in america, government underwrites you!
Specialization is for insects and learning is for chumps. TAANSTAFL! TAANSTAFL! One of us! One of us!
. . . knowledge-suppliers like McArdle, who manufacture an ample supply of attractively packaged and easily digested non-nutritive knowledge-nuggets for our consumption.
Chicken McArdles?
Megan McNuggets?
Wow. Thats… Wow.
*gasp* Class warfare? How uncivil. No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. When we, the Atlases of America, shrug off the unfair burdens placed on us by the despicable rabble, it’s enlightened self-interest. When they – no doubt spurred on to exercise contemptible antagonism against their betters by crass, inexplicably class-disloyal health-pimps – irrationally decide to take things away from us without ensuring our best interests are met, it’s statism.
See, that’s the problem with you Marxists. You think that humanity is just a massive orgy of Hobbesian rapine, with everyone acting without restraint in their own interests is a nightmare, and the best the government can do is to prevent most people’s lives from being ruined. In the reality made beautifully clear by Hayek and Friedman and those guys who proved darkies are genetically inferior to us, the free market works beautifully. The rich act without restraint in the best interest of the rich (I might not like getting e. coli in my organic cream casserole, but that’s the price you have to pay for freedom of choice); the poor act without restraint in the best interest of the rich. Everyone wins! Of course, sometimes you need a little bit of incentive to get the irrational masses to agree to such a perfectly fair system, but at least we’re not a Communism like Sweden or Nazi Germany.
We can add Lasik to the pile of “stuff that shouldn’t have been approved.”
Because of this, April, 1987:
We wind up with companies producing machines that this same bunch can used to correct their patient’s vision with lasers. And what is the result?
April, 2008:
Now this isn’t the people who have what are regarded as complications, which is truly awful and leave them visually handicapped. In fact, there have been “Lasik suicides.”
This is what happens to as many as 80% of people who claim they are satisfied. They are listed as “happy” with the surgery. But they don’t market it that way.
And, in a sick twist, it’s sold as a way to not wear glasses during activities. But the corneal flap is only 2.6% as strong as it was before surgery, and it does not fully heal.
So people find they now have to wear eye protection during said activities.
Caveat emptor!
Why stop with the FDA? Dump the USDA- meat safety testing is sooo pre-Reagan administration. And the SEC obviously isn’t protecting the economy, let’s bin it and let the market protect itself.
Here’s how the FDA got started in the first place:
The free marketers would tell you there’s no reason to regulate this kind of thing. People would just hear about the blinding and disfigurement, decide not to do that, and the company would withdraw the product.
Let’s do it old school! 1906!
The ‘information problem’ she’s talking about is a much-vaunted Austrian theorem (which is axiomatically true because Austrians believe it, rather like everything else about Austrian economics) where the inability to completely gauge the wants and desires of every citizen completely paralyzes any state bureaucracy.
The theorem assumes that a single person actively micromanages the entire system – a theme that comes up over and over without any clear justification in history in glibbie discussion of ‘totalitarianism’.
It does an elegant and thorough job of proving that a single actor cannot, in fact, manage an entire economy.
These are the financial products she was talking about when she was talking about the bold strides an unfettered mind could make. No bureaucrat on the public dime has ever produced so much clear-headed and pure theory as Hayek. For instance, did you know that people will generally buy what they prefer to until they run out of money, and will then stop? Amazing.
Of course, Hayek’s information theorem also clearly proves that several hundred regulatory bodies do a far worse job of managing most of an economy than several hundred corporate bodies. Why? Because Stalin was a bad, bad man.
Of course, it used to be you had to sling around a bunch of gobbledygook about public management and discrete allocation of resources to get a high position in our statolatrist bureaucracy. Nowadays, as (I think) von Mises predicted, we must expand the government that, by the new bureaucrats’ utter purity of classical thought, it shall wither away unneeded by a truly free market. Of course, first we must expand the tools of justified force to stamp out the statist kulaky. Then the withering. We promise.
Wow, does that twit like hearing herself yammer.
I came up with this little nugget from a commenter:
Yeah, people are dying every day! From CANCER!!11! What are we to do?
Solid tumor blocking your colon? Try some of these ground up apricot pits.
Coughing up blood? Tie 5 knots in this string, burn it, then rub the ashes in your armpits.
Leukemia? Monkey blood. That’s the ticket.
Who needs FDA-approved cancer drugs that have gone through 3-stage clinical trials at academic medical centers and NCI cancer treatment facilities when we have the internets?
What does it cost to develop a cancer drug, and how long does it take? Answer: Around $800 million, and around 15 years. I nearly fell off my chair. How many people with cancer are dying because of this level of life-saving control?
Does he think research can be made to cost nothing and take no time?
I’m sure there are all sorts of “cures” for cancer being “researched” in various 3rd world areas around the world, which don’t cost much and which are immediately available.
Why stop with the FDA? Dump the USDA- meat safety testing is sooo pre-Reagan administration. And the SEC obviously isn’t protecting the economy, let’s bin it and let the market protect itself.
I forget the name of the farm, just now, but the gov’t recently ruled that a beef farmer is not allowed to test his own cattle for Mad Cow disease, because he could then label his beef as tested. This creates an unfair market for other farmers because they can’t say the same thing.
There’s a similar injunction against dairies labeling their milk “hormone-free”, for the same reason. Who knew quality and marketing were so unfair and so bad for business?
USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) FY 2009 budget = $1.1 billion.
Proportionately, that’s about $2.17 out of your pocket if you pay $5000 in Federal Income Tax. Same as roughly 18 hours worth of interest on the National Debt.
I have heard free-marketers on several occasions suggest that regulation is keeping people from becoming doctors. I like how part of the glibbie dogma is that EVERYTHING IS A FREE MARKET FOREVER, ergo it’s statism to force doctors, lawyers, architects, and hazmat techs to go through years of training before people’s lives are in their hands.
Of course, the market would demand better doctors because it’s impossible to pretend to be a qualified physician, and having no bodies with a funding-controlling mandate to provide public access to qualifications like this would increase the quality for people available to pay the fees.
Nobody could possibly have foreseen that putting bureaucracies in charge of people who swear up and down that bureaucrats are intrinsically corrupt and self-obsessed would wind up being self-obsessed and corrupt bureaucrats. It’s a freak occurance, we swear. Or: maybe it’s the state doing it to us. Maybe if the bureaucracy were private, the magic of the market would make it all better.
You know: like the credit industry, the insurance industry, the housing industry, all of those. Pictures of transparent efficiency. Never send a state to do an impossibly rich man’s job!
In seriousness, looking at how quickly we were making fatal conditions treatable or even fully avoidable before the 80s is enough to make you cry. The government is still in the business of handing out horribly unfair contracts and making massive research giveaways, it’s just that they no longer actually presume any real control over production or quality.
Reagan inherited the government that eradicated smallpox and came close to eradicating polio, and in two impossibly brief terms of bargain-basement giveaways, he rendered it feeble enough that all it took to submerge a major American city was four more Goddamn supply-sider years. It’s a pity that the Paulies never really made any intra-partisan noise; I wish someone were still there to point out that the supply-siders have been the most vicious, deadly, and pitiless enemy of America since Stonewall Jackson.
Small beef and dairy farmers practicing free-market capitalism?
Ha! We’ll get government on the phone and put a stop to that right quick!
Is it me, or has something as simple as flu vaccination been screwed up. I know the strains mutate, and it’s a bit of a crapshoot, but it seemed like before it was at least an informed crapshoot.
I’m not hearing the old “Gee, got my shot and didn’t get sick” smugness I used to. Now I hear “I got my shot and was down for longer than people who didn’t get it!”
Actually this presents a tremendous opportunity — just think of the rapidness of advances and trials we could experience if we banned all new drugs testing whatsoever ! You know, just simply outlawed it. Then we wouldn’t have no damn delays for what might be lifesaving drugs.
McArdle and Stossel would be the best drug test subjects, ever. With all that R&D being spent, surely one of Big Pharma’s magic potions could render them less stupid.
Yeah, I’m thinking the USDA does the food inspections.
There is no cure for stupid.
. . . it’s statism to force doctors, lawyers, architects, and hazmat techs to go through years of training before people’s lives are in their hands.
Trying to imagine the long term effects on the quality of the human genome of untrained/uncertified Bomb Squad technicians.
Why do y’all keep assuming McArdle is just stupid? Has it occurred to you that perhaps she could simply be, like the vast majority of libertarians, merely neck-twistingly malevolent?
Yes! With the power of the free market!!
How? Because shut up, that’s why.
Again, as somebody said, the movie Idiocracy wasn’t meant as a training film.
Hey kids! Let’s play Spot Swank’s Stumble:
Yes, as a god-hating feminist, I admit that I hate Palin because I think homemakers are stupid cows, and she’s a… wait. What?
I would assume she operates from a split-mindset, where a part of her rationalizes that she does believe this, because it has to be true, since she genuinely believes in Conservative Principles.
When confronted with the abundant real world evidence that, in practice, Conservative Principles suck rat’s asses, she further rationalizes that they simply haven’t been applied properly, so it’s the current crop of unsuccessful figureheads who are at fault.
Moments of doubt have already been rendered inoperative by early religious conditioning, featuring HELL, which is the whole point of early religious conditioning.
This is a sturdy, essentially bullet-proof, construction that can be used in any instance!
Anyone who supports any war is a statist. The rest is just haggling over the details.
cookie-making-dungeon
This, right here, is why I loves me some Pastor Swank.
So – sportscaster-cum-politico married to a manual laborer = housewife.
Mother of two who decided to stay at home when her husband’s career took off = castrating extremist feminazi harridan.
I guess it makes sense if you think cookies are made in a dungeon. Otherwise, I think the only uniting principle as to whether Swank thinks someone is a good person is if they look white when you squint at them.
Sorry, my bad.
cookie dungeon
Why, oh why, does the Swankmaster have comments disabled? Do you realize the mind-blowing Swankisms we might get out of him should we get him even mildly worked up?
Don’t MOCK AIRWOLF, beaches!1!
Fuck Blue Thunder, fuck Michael Knight! Airwolf is the adjective we should use to describe anything of majesty, beauty and intensity.
Love the Swankster!!!
Thus is the hypocrisy of such nasty feminists. They are not the real thing—feminists. They are nothing more than foul-mouthed, forlorn, lonely, misdirected, ignorant creatures who have no idea how to live out their gender.
And made entirely of straw.
It’s possible, the rules of good-faith assumptions aside, to be both: McArdle is a good example of one of the more purely stupid adult glibbies. (The woman is thirty-five; by the laws of statistics one would have expected her to have drowned looking at a rainstorm by now.) On the other hand, she has to be simultaneously malicious to claim and believe some of the shit she does.
Starting from the premise that freedom from state interference is the best thing evar and then supporting a massive imperial war because people you like do and Saddam is also a new Hitler would require so much ignorance that it’s impossible to forgive. McArdle may be pig-ignorant about the laws of economics and society and the behavior of normal (e.g. non Homo economicus) people, but there’s no amount of ignorant that can hide the fact that she’s been shilling, and is still shilling, for the biggest single war machine – and by extension the biggest single state – in human history.
The prior comment I made I make as a statist. I am one of the few people who will own that label, because I like to think well of people and governments are purely human enterprises. By definition, if you’re supporting a military adventure you’re supporting either a state or something that functions as one. When you do that without supporting the constructive aspects of statehood – you know, education, infrastructure, patronage of the arts and sciences – you’re a fucking monster, like Mussolini without even trying to run the trains on time. Calling yourself ‘liberal’ by any sense is just asinine, and you have to know it.
For the most part, people who cite Hayek as evidence rather than using him as a bludgeon are idiots; Hayek and von Mises and all the other proto-glibs did what they did by combining a fairly strong education in finance / firm management / other microecon stuff with a fine-honed neoclassicist cant. They made themselves useful to people in power, then suggested to those people that they stop paying for any other services.
But they, at least, served a useful function. McArdle is a parasite in the most meaningful way a person could ever be; she lacks even the barest fig-leaf to cover her naked abjection to Mammon, and like most glibbies she finds it insulting that anyone would worship anything else. It takes being a special combination of rich and stupid to buy into the Mammon cult (instead of, like your Cheneys and Forbeses, showing up on Smithmas and the odd Monday) But buying into the cult of Mars requires at least some malice.
Sneering at the DFHs can come from stupidity. Wanting to brain them for opposing the American state’s incipient war on Iraq cannot, at least not wholly.
Methinks this Pastor Swank projects too much.
Man, Swank. Even the Pope accepts that marriage is supposed to be a happy and liberating thing; you can’t just go telling us to force a thin tie into a curled oven mitt for the rest of our damn lives, or nobody but closet cases is gonna have any interest in Jesus at all.
Makes me wonder what Megan’s mom was ingesting when Megan was in utero.
I’m thinking something whose constitution was a secret of a high-born trade not subject to our mundane law.
You know, Elfish waybread.
Wuzza-wuzza-wuzzup, loony libs? Looks like you’ve gone and stirred the hornets’ nest again…don’t think the McArdle Mission won’t drop a SPREAD of TRUTH BOMBS on your butts! The way the Cool Coach sees it, the fabulous free market is the only thing keeping us from poverty- which is exactly what you goofy greens want! Too bad the SPREAD of TRUTH dished out by us McCainiacs has the public clamoring for free enterprise! Badoodle-boo yeah!
And now you’re tugging on Superman Swank’s cape? You better believe that the Power Pastor is about to get his fists of fundamentalist fury geared up and ready to reign down on you loony libs!
Ding dong dilly! You just got served a SPREAD of TRUTH, libs! Urban out!
Fuck Blue Thunder, fuck Michael Knight! Airwolf is the adjective we should use to describe anything of majesty, beauty and intensity.
Even with the Barry Van Dyke/Geraint Wyn Davies second series? You sure you wanna go there?
This is, without any question, the most hilarious thing I’ve read in a week.
Fail.
You’re not even funny by accident. You’re just asinine and sad in the same way so many people who actually have souls are.
I like how you’re sticking to your guns about how we’re voting for a black man even though they, as a race, had to move from West Philadelphia to Bel-Air to escape trouble in their neighborhood.
Wammy zoom-zoom zazzle! ROFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing).
Oh fuck, the Coach. Whenever I read one of his agonizing, grandad-trying-to-be-down-wit-da-kidz screeds, my sphincter contracts to a location somewhere near my neck. FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST MAKE HIM STOP
Forgive the vast oversimplification, but this to me is the general concept of the McArdle/OlePerf brand of glibertarianism:
– Hatred of the “elitist” bogeyman
– Ubiquitous state expansion on the military/global influence front
– Love of technical doodads to the point of obsession
– “Freedom” through state/business collusion and monopolies
– Ridiculous nationalism
That’s pretty much it, right? Fits these dorks well enough, yes?
Because it fits the ruling ideology in China, too. Something to be proud of, guys.
Makes me wonder what Megan’s mom was ingesting when Megan was in utero.
Ah, yes. The timeless question. Cranial-rectal inversion: Nature or Nurture?
Hey, has this Swank guy ever been in a cookie-making dungeon? Nah, I didn’t think so. Illegal immigrants live in paradise compared with those poor little elves.
Oh, but we can’t be like China, or Russia, or that unnamed little blip on the German political landscape…
because…
well, any fool can see we’re Amurricans, dammit. Where not Russkies or Chinese.
God, you libs are dumb!
Maybe we’re doing the same things, the same way, for the same purpose, but we’re not Russians. Okay? Get that through yer thick heads. Too much arugula stuffed up in there?
Sayin’ we’re Russians. Stoopid.
don’t think the McArdle Mission won’t drop a SPREAD of TRUTH BOMBS on your butts!
Oh, I can’t wait. I’m quivering with anticipation! How will I recognize it when it happens, though?
Oh g, so very cheeky.
You mean it’ll be a paddling?
HOW IS THIS FUCKWIT BEING PAID TO WRITE
THESEANYTHINGS???????? HOW GOD DAMMIT, HOW???Fixed!!
It’s a two-fer, subsidizing fuckwits who can’t write.
They have “things” they can point to to show that “authorities” believe six impossible things before breakfast, so you should, too!
As a bonus:
It degrades the very concept of using words to explain things.
Let’s face it, we’re all just lab rats in MegMac’s universe. O hai, sorry about those side effects, but hey, as long as we’re rolling regulation of drugs back to the nineteenth century, let’s bring back circus sideshows, too! And here’s a shitty pasta recipe to make you feel all better, kthxbai.
Yes! We should totally be the Guinea-Pig Nation! What Megan McStupid calls “preventing drugs from reaching the market” might also be seen, like say by an intelligent person, as “rigorous testing to make sure it’s actually of value.”
When I had breast cancer nearly 10 years ago, I participated in a clinical trial to help determine if a new treatment was better than the then-standard chemo drug cocktail. Five years or so ago this particular drug received its FDA approval and is now the new gold standard. See, this is how it’s done. You do the testing and make sure there’s efficacy and stuff BEFORE it received widespread availability. Not all cancer patients are in their death throes and ready to do anything, anything! to treat their disease. Many many more will have additional survival benefits (i.e., years of life) because of careful vetting of new improved treatments that have undergone the most rigorous testings possible. That’s what saves lives, not just unleashing whatever pharmaceutical companies come up with and want to rush into the marketplace and which may after the fact be found to be ineffective, or even worse, to cause more harm than good.
Actually, government does NOT have “neutral incentives.” Government–theoretically, anyway–is charged with the decidedly non-neutral “incentive” of protecting the public health, of acting in the public interest. She’s making the typical neocon mistake of analogizing government and industry.
She is just the stupidest twat I’ve ever had the misfortune to read.
the difference between me and John Stossel is that – D. Sidhe
You don’t give mustache rides to those who benefit from your “unconventional wisdom”?
On a tangentially related note, I’ve noticed that confusing inventions for technology is a major feature of the glibbie mindset – so you’ve got one of their rare purely non-economic prophets Kurzweil claiming that ascendant AI is just around the corner because the iPhone came so soon after the iPod Nano. (My own variation of this is to project the same thing Kurzweil and the singularitarians do, only (a) with trains instead of computers and (b) putting the Singularity in 1900. I have yet to encounter a coherent objection to this.)
Technology necessarily involves a change of perspective. This is one of the beautiful things about forcing everything to be about consumption: walking in space used to be at least vaguely connected to progress, advancement, and man’s meagerness in the face of the universe; now you can buy a ticket and keep a photo of you hanging out in the Space Station if you’re rich enough.
So: not only do they love ‘technical doodads’, they basically force everything to be about them. There is no technology, advancement, or discovery that glibbies will accept if divorced from widgets. It’s not limited to them, sadly – look at the Science and Discovery channels, and you’ll find the former uses ‘science’ like, well, like glibbies use ‘free’ – mostly meaning something completely different. People conduct experiments on the Discovery Channel; on the Science Channel (besides Bill Nye, I’ve not seen his new stuff) they marvel at fancy toys that can be yours for twelve easy installments of Zimbabwe.
They’re pretty proud of it. They like to pretend that China is inevitably going to liberalize on account of its increasingly Free Markets™, but the increasingly fascist and surveillance-obsessed political realities of Chinese society are open for all to see.
Of course, the people they like in China are generally monsters – right-wingers who think China is almost perfect, and all they have to do now is cut the peasants out of the deal entirely. For the most part, the Chinese economy if not Chinese society was, from Mao until the present, broadly Keynesian – with about the most powerful welfare state you could find in the Second World. The glibbies’ main objective is getting the Chinese to become anti-Keynesian without actually liberalizing – for politically liberalizing would necessarily involve a greater amount of corporate transparency and public participation.
In a century we will have our equivalent of Ford gloating over his medals from Hitler. I don’t know if the direct object will be China, but if it is these fuckers will be front and center.
Mmm, yummy crow pie, my fave!
I said Cipro didn’t I? Well, I should’ve said Vioxx.
Twice.
On two websites.
Oh well, it’s just on the Interwebs. Forever.
Fuckazoids.
I can’t even claim I was on Ambien, either.
OR shitfaced.
(*gnashes teeth*)
jim: It’s obvious you were suffering from the side effects of your SSRI. Happens to me all the time.
Yes. This is the point I’ve been trying to make with everyone when it comes to healthcare – Americans have had the profit motive beaten into them as an ur-motive for every goddamn thing. That people can graduate high school without understanding the idea of quasi-public enterprise is absurd.
Long story short: yes, Megan, in a free market system the drug companies would be a more economically efficient source of medication. A, the shit you’re asking for is nothing even close to ‘free market’ – you’re scratching wildly at the mote in the consumer’s eye while a beam digs into the producer’s brain. (Typical, but what can you do.) And B, although this means nothing to you because it’s not part of Magical Austrian Supply Side Fun Hour, for-profit companies are highly allocatively inefficient. Hayek can say whatever he likes; five hundred years of history tell us that if someone’s job is to make money they’re going to be a force directly against providing services for free, even when providing those services for free is socially necessary.
And you might think that, because you’re a rich bitch, you will come out on top in a society where whether or not you die of the flu depends on what you make in a year. The problem is, when you live in a depraved civilization which treats the maladies of the poor like the suffering of draft animals, there is a bitter harvest to be had – namely, epidemics. Even setting aside the poorer quality of traditionally private health systems, by trying to turn vital medicine into a standard trade good you’re not just making people miserable, you’re endangering yourself. Less state intervention means when you come down with something it won’t be anywhere near as safe to seek out medical advice; less state intervention means you’re more likely to catch a virulent bug, and that bug will have much more leeway to spread and evolve.
The perverted ideology of America-as-gated-community aside, you cannot by any means sequester yourself from the world, no matter how wealthy you are. Your hygenic, market-regulated spinach will give you dysentery; you will brush up against people who have never had reliable access to antibiotics in their lives on the subway; your domestic contractors will have no way of dealing with the aches and pains that are part of everyday life. You may put yourself by whatever means at the top of it, McArdle, but the society you and your malignant breed are trying to foist on the world is a Hell, and the rest of humanity isn’t obligated to wade through it, waiting for you to learn your obvious lesson. The Black Plague killed kings and popes, and no one but God put restraints on the chemist’s art in those heady days of intellectual freedom.
Makes me wonder what Megan’s mom was ingesting when Megan was in utero.
She was one of those ectopic pregnancies that feed off of the colon.
Megan McArdle, objectively pro-birth defects. Stay classy, Meggie.
You know, I’m disabled (although not missing any bits that should be there), and I simply cannot get my head around the idea that the Magickal Free Market™ is so sacred and holy that preserving it justifies the creation of more disabled people.
Being Canadian, I actually have known several people who were deformed by Thalidomide. I think having mild cerebral palsy sucks rancid Republican ass, and I’m hardly affected; I can barely even imagine what it would be like to have no hands. Speaking from albeit temporary experience, being in a wheelchair sucks disease-infested, lousy, scrofulous, rancid Republican ass, and I didn’t even have to try getting around in public by myself at the time…
Guinea-Pig Nation!
If McP.O.W. somehow manages to be given this election, I’m moving out and starting my own country.
You’re all invited. MzNicky has generously provided the name.
There, there, jim. I looked up Cipro, and it also has some bad side effects. Like excruciating pain from swollen joints x 5 months.
Beautiful.
Aside from even that, these whackos are supposed to understand economics, yet they never even consider Economy of Scale.
In a privatized world, even the rich are going to pay through the nose for helicopters (because there are no roads,) electronic equipment (because if serfs can’t afford them, they’ll be built by hand,) construction materials (who is going to support all the nail making machines?) and on and on.
Like all cement-headed righties, they assume changing all these variables they are so hot on will have no other consequences.
The rich will be living like kings, all right… kings of the fifteenth century.
“The FDA is notoriously risk averse when it comes to new drugs, a legacy of events like the Thalidomide horrors, when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies.”
That’s not even really a sentence, it’s three fragments that are not even tangentially related. Let’s take this point-by-point:
“The FDA is notoriously risk averse when it comes to new drugs,” WAS notoriously risk-averse, McMegan my daaaaaaaahling. Unnecessary “reforms” were instituted across the approvals policy in 1985 in order to speed HIV/AIDS medications to market. The industry raised hell when the FDA only wanted to fast/parallel track these urgently needed medications so changes initially designed to bring emergency drugs to market wound up crippling the FDA and has allowed for such disasters as Rezulin, Prozac and the SSRIs and the Celebrex/Vioxx/COX-2 inhibitor class of NSAID.
“a legacy of events like the Thalidomide horrors,” First of all, thalidomide is not a trade name and should not be capitalized. Second…uh, what horrors? Because of the FDA the “thalidomide horrors” never happened here. Only seventeen US cases of thalidomide teratogenesis are known to exist because a 1960 decision to wait on thalidomide because it needed further study on the safety of its sedative-hypnotic effects. Thalidomide is today FDA approved for treatment of both Hansen’s disease and multiple myelomas.
“when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies.” I’d say determining whether people were significantly more likely to seek out driving opportunities under the influence of thalidomide than under the influence of diazepam or phenobarbital is pretty important, but whatever. What was no accident was that the FDA had serious doubts about thalidomide as a psychoactive so they did not let it through. It was only after the thalidomide problems in Europe and Africa that the FDA even began testing for pregnancy/child safety.
So, once again, McMegan’s wrong on everything and her grammar still sucks.
In other news, sun rises.
And it just goes ON like that. For the love of gawd and sonny jeebus MAKE IT STOP.
At what point did calling these clowns “Snake Oil Salesmen” stop being ironic?
As Pauli said, “That’s not right. It’s not even wrong”
Welcome to The Jungle, baby. Can I get anybody some Durham’s Pure Beef Lard? It’s just delicious.
Whoa, wait a second. Don’t lump me in with those assholes.
Yeah, all I ever did was sell human remains as cooking shortening.
You gonna diiiiiieee!!!
Well, not so absurd depending on the school board. Come on, people are fighting whether or not to teach that Jesus rode a fucking dinosaur. The concept of the Commons is waaaay over their heads.
You’re missing by a notch. They want to treat not just the maladies like the suffering, but the actual poor like actual draft animals. That’s where these fucktards are coming from. They want to be able to buy, sell and own whole populations.
That link is making me too angry to read at the moment. Perhaps later.
alec,
‘Cause you’re all a bunch of fuckups, and you’re all gonna die.
I should find that and watch it again.
when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies.
I find it really hard to believe that she wrote this without her tongue in her cheek.
And then I remembered, it’s McArdle.
I’ve given up arguing this with die-hard Libertarians. My new response is something along the lines of:
“Yes, yes they do. You can also get a close shave with a chainsaw. Just because it works doesn’t mean it works well.”
Folks, geez. All this speculation about Megan’s motivations and what her major malfunction is, and no one gets the simple truth?
Megan is paid by the pharmaceutical lobby. Indirectly through free trips and overly large payments for public speaking engagements she’s unqualified for, and probably directly for rewriting their press releases into her work.
Further, she’s not quite as stupid as some of you think, tho she is monstrously stupid.
She knows the FDA doesn’t work now, and that’s her whole point. Megan’s primary useful idiocy is in pointing to government functions conservatives have corrupted and obstructed into oblivion and claiming that proves the government shouldn’t try to do anything.
Shit, lately she’s been trying to argue that the current financial crisis just shows the pointlessness of trying to regulate the markets, and instead the taxpayer should just privatize all corporate risk.
Megan doesn’t know what an honest argument is.
*instead the taxpayer should *socialize* all corporate risk, durh.
Tho she pretends to be shocked, shocked I tells yah, that this is what’s ended up happening.
Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Fuckwit. Statist.
Re: Cipro, I had the misfortune of being prescribed some of that once. The result, once it had some time to build up in my system, was severe debilitating flu-like symptoms. Naturally, I went back to the doctor when this occurred. His diagnosis was fucking West-Nile virus. “But Doc,” I said, “what if it’s a side effect of the Cipro?” He told me to discontinue its use, but if I started to feel better in a few days it’d be alright to take it again. Meanwhile I was missing loads of work thanks to my supposed virus. Well, a few days later I felt a bit better, so I took another Cipro. Within hours the symptoms were back, stronger than ever.
I got a new doctor.
Now, I’m sure Cipro is a net good when you add up all the people who’ve used it, but it sure would have been nice to be warned about the possible side effect of severely disabling flu-like ass-beating. You have to wonder how the fuck a doctor could have not known that was a possibility…
May I suggest Unisom or any other OTC sleeping pill with diphenhydramine?
I am grateful for D. Sidhe’s prescription, and would like to hear more of her medical advice.
Here we could be having people at random developing additional useful limbs, or developing an immunity to aspirin, and why can we not have this?
My all-time favourite 2000 AD line:
“We don’t serve mutie-chow in Texas City Jail!” [from one of the Cursed Earth story-lines]
One time many years ago… many many years ago… many many many years ago… I had a big stack of Analog / Astounding magazines from the 60s and 70s. John Campbell Jnr.’s libertarian editorials had the same contrarian style as McArdle’s; he would smugly defend the usefulness of (say) Mafia loan-sharks, because after all they were clearly filling a market need, and the occasional broken leg for failing to meet the 10% / week interest rates was part of the deal that the customer knowingly signed up for.
I’m beginning to suspect that the stack is now in McArdle’s possession, and she’s systematically mining it for her columns. We’ll know for sure when she goes off on a tangent about Deane antigravity drives.
The modern FDA keeps doctors, on the whole, only marginally less ignorant about what new drugs do than patients. They let the pharmaceutical manufacturers construct their own intra- and extra-industry pitches; while they’re obligated to tell the truth in certain cases, usually they bury common side-effects in a long list of freak coincidences that occur in every damn clinical trial.
Even when they’re specifically researching something, physicians often have to scan the roster for organ failure, death, and other horrific side-effects. You know, because the government can’t possibly restrict drug companies’ freedom of expression.
Clearly we have to stop the FDA from slowing innovation and experimentation in baby formula. Yes, it may save infants from dying, but how does it otherwise benefit society to slow baby formula companies from rolling out new products to be sampled by our nation’s infants?
And on the evening news: Thousands of Chinese babies suffering, even dying, because certain milk producers decided to add melamine to their stocks, artificially inflating its protein content and therefore the producers’ profits. Yep, same scam that killed all those American dogs & cats last year… the news reports even seemed to be suggesting that the ChiCom milk-factory owners may have seen reports of the “pet food crisis” and thought, hey, we could *totally* take advantage of that!…
Of course, while our new Chinese overlords don’t have much more FDA-style oversight than we have under the C-Plus Augustus, they do have a rather more determined post-release deterrent program — which involves, if reports are not exaggerated, data-gathering via torture, and a level of swift & efficient punishment such as our decadent western society reserves for bystanders at a SWAT bust. But of course the McArdles among us assume they’d be the Red Princelings and not the poisoned babies in such a free-market paradise…
The FDA is notoriously risk averse when it comes to new drugs, a legacy of events like the Thalidomide horrors, when pointless foot-dragging on the approval accidentally protected American mothers from limbless babies.
This sentence needs more verbs.