We have NOT been democratic as a nation since Reagan gave money the vote; it has deteriorated ever since Carter left office (as the result of Reagan's treasonous deal with the Iranian hostage holders).
Well, I'm certainly NOT in favor of bringing a vote to a dollar fight, with apologies to Indiana Jones.
To have a democracy, you first have to fix misinformation. (And NO, one doesn't fix misinfo with just more of it.)
To fix misinformation you have to defund, deny, depose the billionaire class.
Money altering, when not determining, political outcomes is, was and always will be (a good old fashioned word) "corruption". So are some of the jaw-dropping conflicts of interest we have folded into our current concept of normalcy. Money has always weighed corruptingly on the "scales" of justice, and social justice has continued in some respects, to the current day, but since decades of progress against political corruption has been on a roll ever since sleazy Reagan successfully smeared government of, by and for the people. I think many opportunities missed to launch a public movement against the power of money over politics, but whatever, we surely must focus on it now. How many problems are caused or worsened, and remain seemingly irremediable because concentrated money is in the way.
Here is just one wrinkle of that that came to my attention yesterday. From time to time I see an article warning of the growing death toll of multiply antibiotic resistant bacteria. Every such article explains our lack of progress (for decades) the same way:
“We’ve had no new classes of antibiotics come into routine use since the late 80s and the market model that would promote the creation of new ones is broken. If you develop a new antibiotic, it might be used by someone for a weekly course once a year. Where’s the profit in that?”
“By contrast, blood pressure drugs that have to be taken every day, or cancer drugs that have to be administered for months, offer pharmaceuticals far greater profits. So there is no incentive for them to try to develop new antibiotics. It is a real headache.”
So we all wait for "The Invisible Hand" to reach out and save us from a potentially deadly epidemic? I'm not seeing it. It not that we could not be doing better, but big moneyed interests are getting in way, either by omission, or warping or stopping legislation when we seek our own remedy.
I was recently prescribed a drug that cost almost $800 for three months. It made me nauseous and I asked for a different drug. Another one for the same thing cost $5.00. I am still gobsmacked. I feel the vultures are overseeing our health care.
Similar experience here. Script was $900+. Good rx coupon was $46. Crazy. Today I pick up a $8500 script. We’ll see how the $2000 cap works. If no go, back to hospital infusions which Medicare covers. The same drug (Enbrel) that the pharmaceutical company provided almost free for 12 years. What a racket.
Monopolies are a form of extortion. Control the market for things that people need or want and name your price. My local paper ran a story on how a local surgeon who was "performing" several operations at once became the hero of hospital bean counters. The downside was poorer patient outcomes. That's the choice point we are facing, and since Reagan, the bean counters usually win.
One of the extortion rackets is what has become of patents. Patents, or something like them can serve the needs of both innovators and society because ostensibly, we make the rules. Yet the rules have steadily become more one-sided and abusive as an engine of monopolies. There is plenty of room to rethink and reevaluate policies that should serve everyone. Government of the people, by the people, for the people don'cha know?
I don't have many prescriptions, but before I hit Medicare, a friend told me about Good Rx. I have no idea how they manage to get the prices so low, and I do realize they don't apply it to your insurance, but still! I had a topical ointment that would have cost $100 through insurance and was $27 using the Good RX.
We are far from the days when Alexander Fleming, who discovered insulin to treat diabetes, sold the patent for a token $1 since he wanted the drug to be available to all. We should have a nonprofit research center working to develop new antibiotics, antiparasitics, and antivirals. The current system is not working and we are broke.
Fleming's perspicacity gave us penicillin, but yes, there a cases when breakthrough discoveries were donated to the common good. In recent decades, Congress reversed the policy that considered public university research public domain, and that opened a whole can of worms for both universities and the common weal.
I took a great macro econ class from the author of Prices and Choices in 1986 or -7 at HSPH, and he said, and I will always remember this formulation, that the benefits of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of a free market have just 3 simple pre-requisites. The simple requirements EVERY American defender of a free market should know, inside out, are:
1) product choices (a variety of competing products in a niche)
2) informed consumers (who know key distinguishing attributes of the products), and
3) consumers acting rationally in their own best interest.
These conditions don't need to be perfect, just substantially the case.
However, these 3 things are the absolute LAST THING that any typical, self-serving laissez-faire capitalist wants.
US CAPITALISM FIGHTS the existence of a true free market, tooth and nail:
1) it seeks monopoly (and proprietary horizontal & vertical integration) at every opportunity and in every niche, and failing that, colludes on price, and failing both, commits fraud (disinformation, disinfotainment), to PREVENT actual product choice competition. A fair market is an unstable condition that strongly tends toward monopoly. One cannot obtain, nor keep a free market without a responsive and strong regulatory regime in governance. US Corporations are required both by law and stockholders to maximize their profits, and do so to the best of their ability. They will attempt to buy congress and law, capture regulators, increase in size, influence judges, and misinform the press & public, and therefore...
2) it invests in enormous advertising budgets, sufficient to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, or in Steve Bannon's phrase 'fill the channel with shit' or in Plato's phrase, 'to make the worse appear the better cause' (this last was part of the City of Athens' 'trumped' up indictment of Socrates - perhaps we should make hemlock available to the billionaires, CEO's, and presidents who ACTUALLY do this?). US Capitalism abhors an informed consumer! Even major corporations with a popular product (winning in a free market is never assurance one will continue to win) will pull out all stops (&undercut all regulations) to misinform! (Correct information IS fungible power, and leaving power with the consumer is an anathema to 'proper' self-interested corporations.)
3) it uses said misinformation in a cynical manner to trigger EMOTIVE human choices in domains where consumer choice does still exist. It overtly uses sex ('sex sells'), fear, appetite, addiction, love, even humor, and increasingly AI-targeted & individually informed misinformation, to steer the non-rational behaviors of those they have observed to have responded in desired ways in the past (via the Attention & Surveillance Capitalism Economy - to which we all have clicked "I Agree").
One only needs to see the growing misanthropy, objectification, obesity, addictions, amoral transactionalism, social isolation, dishonesty, and distrust in American society, to understand US Capitalism is playing what Simon Sinek calls a 'Finite strategy in an Infinite Game'. We are 'misinformation-marks'; we are rarely rational consumers. This extraction via misinformation does not scale as a civilization. There will be no winners here. This does not get prettier with greater consolidation of power.
o To summarize, US Capitalism exists in direct conflict with free markets.
o The capacity to control a market is related to the size of a corporation.
o Democracy and good governance can't co-exist with a billionaire class.
IF one has the money to buy / own information streams that half the nation consumes, or if one can buy 3/4 of congress with petty cash, one can always 'win', without risking free market competition on merit.
This is the kind of world that the kind of person who needs to be a billionaire, needs to have, and in my view increasingly does have.
Again, democracy, free markets, and billionaires are incompatible.
Exactly, and I was aware that I risked defaming Adam Smith by using what was originally his metaphor; although I think it was an unfortunate one as it seems to ascribe a benign purpose to what is instead a strategy of balance. Russian communists thought the could change human nature. The USSR even tried to push a phony theory of genetics (Lyesekoism) to reinforce that belief. The "right" believes that selfishness alone can deliver us to the promised land. Smith grasped that competition CAN serve as a regulator, but in a free market (in a free society) worthy of the name. "Freedom" to bully, freedom to monopolize is the opposite of that.
Remember a brief treatment of Lysenkoism when I studied genetics in the early-mid 70's.
Appreciate your distinction of types of freedom, very much along the lines of Jefferson Cowie's recent Pulitzer winning history, 'Freedom's Dominion', where he traces two disparate and conflicting uses of the concept of freedom to (as I recall) before the founding of the Union. One notion was the freedom of thought and religious belief and to 'the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness', the other being the freedom to dominate others (women, native Americans, slaves, the poor) without interference from government authority.
Both those notions of freedom continue to characterize American life and internal conflict. Seems this disparity needs to be addressed in the education of the youth for a couple generations to fully extirpate it, since the belief is culturally transmitted. Both parties agree on this point, just don't agree which freedom should define America's future.
Alas it appears to me that we are increasingly allowing others, and commercial media in particular, to define what our nation's culture is. It's sidewalk level and collaborative or it isn't really ours.
Exactly so. Fair markets are great, but unstable, and cease to exist without regulation sufficient to assure a level playing field of competition. This sufficient government regulation ceases to exist when business 'regulatees' become large enough to capture the 'regulators'. Most large US Corporations are substantially unregulated with regards to preserving 'level playing field' markets, and today, at best, regulation barely serves to preserve public safety and national security. And in the case of Musk, is failing at both.
Would love to catch up with him. That was Plainsboro, NJ, a bit outside Princeton. At the time I was friends with John, it was a one stop town (a few miles from Orson Wells' Millstone Pond setting for the radio version of H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds). John's home was in Cranberry, a couple miles east - no relative that you know?
To be fair, Kissinger also made a disastrous deal to delay the end of the Vietnam War to help Nixon’s reelection. Republicans have a history of putting their power above the good of the country.
Well I wouldn’t call that Republicans, but I certainly would agree with that having to do with Nixon by the way who was recently rated by Gallup the worst president in history. But you won’t be happy, but who is rated the second worst and believe it or not it wasn’t Jimmy Carter. It was your own Joe Biden. By Gallup.
We’re not that democratic, are we? A little pie-in-the-sky, perhaps?
We have NOT been democratic as a nation since Reagan gave money the vote; it has deteriorated ever since Carter left office (as the result of Reagan's treasonous deal with the Iranian hostage holders).
Well, I'm certainly NOT in favor of bringing a vote to a dollar fight, with apologies to Indiana Jones.
To have a democracy, you first have to fix misinformation. (And NO, one doesn't fix misinfo with just more of it.)
To fix misinformation you have to defund, deny, depose the billionaire class.
Money altering, when not determining, political outcomes is, was and always will be (a good old fashioned word) "corruption". So are some of the jaw-dropping conflicts of interest we have folded into our current concept of normalcy. Money has always weighed corruptingly on the "scales" of justice, and social justice has continued in some respects, to the current day, but since decades of progress against political corruption has been on a roll ever since sleazy Reagan successfully smeared government of, by and for the people. I think many opportunities missed to launch a public movement against the power of money over politics, but whatever, we surely must focus on it now. How many problems are caused or worsened, and remain seemingly irremediable because concentrated money is in the way.
Here is just one wrinkle of that that came to my attention yesterday. From time to time I see an article warning of the growing death toll of multiply antibiotic resistant bacteria. Every such article explains our lack of progress (for decades) the same way:
“We’ve had no new classes of antibiotics come into routine use since the late 80s and the market model that would promote the creation of new ones is broken. If you develop a new antibiotic, it might be used by someone for a weekly course once a year. Where’s the profit in that?”
“By contrast, blood pressure drugs that have to be taken every day, or cancer drugs that have to be administered for months, offer pharmaceuticals far greater profits. So there is no incentive for them to try to develop new antibiotics. It is a real headache.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/05/antibiotic-emergency-could-claim-40-million-lives-in-next-25-years
So we all wait for "The Invisible Hand" to reach out and save us from a potentially deadly epidemic? I'm not seeing it. It not that we could not be doing better, but big moneyed interests are getting in way, either by omission, or warping or stopping legislation when we seek our own remedy.
I was recently prescribed a drug that cost almost $800 for three months. It made me nauseous and I asked for a different drug. Another one for the same thing cost $5.00. I am still gobsmacked. I feel the vultures are overseeing our health care.
Similar experience here. Script was $900+. Good rx coupon was $46. Crazy. Today I pick up a $8500 script. We’ll see how the $2000 cap works. If no go, back to hospital infusions which Medicare covers. The same drug (Enbrel) that the pharmaceutical company provided almost free for 12 years. What a racket.
Racket describes it best. I had no idea til this last insanity.
Monopolies are a form of extortion. Control the market for things that people need or want and name your price. My local paper ran a story on how a local surgeon who was "performing" several operations at once became the hero of hospital bean counters. The downside was poorer patient outcomes. That's the choice point we are facing, and since Reagan, the bean counters usually win.
One of the extortion rackets is what has become of patents. Patents, or something like them can serve the needs of both innovators and society because ostensibly, we make the rules. Yet the rules have steadily become more one-sided and abusive as an engine of monopolies. There is plenty of room to rethink and reevaluate policies that should serve everyone. Government of the people, by the people, for the people don'cha know?
On point. Thanks
And so it should be. Extortion racket seems to nail what I have been through lately.
I don't have many prescriptions, but before I hit Medicare, a friend told me about Good Rx. I have no idea how they manage to get the prices so low, and I do realize they don't apply it to your insurance, but still! I had a topical ointment that would have cost $100 through insurance and was $27 using the Good RX.
I too found a source of a drug cheaper out of pocket than though my very expensive insurance through Good Rx.
I don’t get it. I suppose big pharma viewed Medicare as a cash cow.
You betcha. That's why Republicans prohibited Medicare from negotiating price. They capture power for plutocrats.
“Republicans” is synonymous with vulture. As HST said, they oppose anything that helps the average American. It’s been going on for a long time.
Thank you for this. I signed up for Mark Cuban’s drug plan but they don’t have any of mine at present. Maybe I’ll try Good RX
Here's another. Follow the money.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/08/health-experts-childrens-health-chemicals-paper
We are far from the days when Alexander Fleming, who discovered insulin to treat diabetes, sold the patent for a token $1 since he wanted the drug to be available to all. We should have a nonprofit research center working to develop new antibiotics, antiparasitics, and antivirals. The current system is not working and we are broke.
Fleming's perspicacity gave us penicillin, but yes, there a cases when breakthrough discoveries were donated to the common good. In recent decades, Congress reversed the policy that considered public university research public domain, and that opened a whole can of worms for both universities and the common weal.
I took a great macro econ class from the author of Prices and Choices in 1986 or -7 at HSPH, and he said, and I will always remember this formulation, that the benefits of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of a free market have just 3 simple pre-requisites. The simple requirements EVERY American defender of a free market should know, inside out, are:
1) product choices (a variety of competing products in a niche)
2) informed consumers (who know key distinguishing attributes of the products), and
3) consumers acting rationally in their own best interest.
These conditions don't need to be perfect, just substantially the case.
However, these 3 things are the absolute LAST THING that any typical, self-serving laissez-faire capitalist wants.
US CAPITALISM FIGHTS the existence of a true free market, tooth and nail:
1) it seeks monopoly (and proprietary horizontal & vertical integration) at every opportunity and in every niche, and failing that, colludes on price, and failing both, commits fraud (disinformation, disinfotainment), to PREVENT actual product choice competition. A fair market is an unstable condition that strongly tends toward monopoly. One cannot obtain, nor keep a free market without a responsive and strong regulatory regime in governance. US Corporations are required both by law and stockholders to maximize their profits, and do so to the best of their ability. They will attempt to buy congress and law, capture regulators, increase in size, influence judges, and misinform the press & public, and therefore...
2) it invests in enormous advertising budgets, sufficient to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, or in Steve Bannon's phrase 'fill the channel with shit' or in Plato's phrase, 'to make the worse appear the better cause' (this last was part of the City of Athens' 'trumped' up indictment of Socrates - perhaps we should make hemlock available to the billionaires, CEO's, and presidents who ACTUALLY do this?). US Capitalism abhors an informed consumer! Even major corporations with a popular product (winning in a free market is never assurance one will continue to win) will pull out all stops (&undercut all regulations) to misinform! (Correct information IS fungible power, and leaving power with the consumer is an anathema to 'proper' self-interested corporations.)
3) it uses said misinformation in a cynical manner to trigger EMOTIVE human choices in domains where consumer choice does still exist. It overtly uses sex ('sex sells'), fear, appetite, addiction, love, even humor, and increasingly AI-targeted & individually informed misinformation, to steer the non-rational behaviors of those they have observed to have responded in desired ways in the past (via the Attention & Surveillance Capitalism Economy - to which we all have clicked "I Agree").
One only needs to see the growing misanthropy, objectification, obesity, addictions, amoral transactionalism, social isolation, dishonesty, and distrust in American society, to understand US Capitalism is playing what Simon Sinek calls a 'Finite strategy in an Infinite Game'. We are 'misinformation-marks'; we are rarely rational consumers. This extraction via misinformation does not scale as a civilization. There will be no winners here. This does not get prettier with greater consolidation of power.
o To summarize, US Capitalism exists in direct conflict with free markets.
o The capacity to control a market is related to the size of a corporation.
o Democracy and good governance can't co-exist with a billionaire class.
IF one has the money to buy / own information streams that half the nation consumes, or if one can buy 3/4 of congress with petty cash, one can always 'win', without risking free market competition on merit.
This is the kind of world that the kind of person who needs to be a billionaire, needs to have, and in my view increasingly does have.
Again, democracy, free markets, and billionaires are incompatible.
Exactly, and I was aware that I risked defaming Adam Smith by using what was originally his metaphor; although I think it was an unfortunate one as it seems to ascribe a benign purpose to what is instead a strategy of balance. Russian communists thought the could change human nature. The USSR even tried to push a phony theory of genetics (Lyesekoism) to reinforce that belief. The "right" believes that selfishness alone can deliver us to the promised land. Smith grasped that competition CAN serve as a regulator, but in a free market (in a free society) worthy of the name. "Freedom" to bully, freedom to monopolize is the opposite of that.
Remember a brief treatment of Lysenkoism when I studied genetics in the early-mid 70's.
Appreciate your distinction of types of freedom, very much along the lines of Jefferson Cowie's recent Pulitzer winning history, 'Freedom's Dominion', where he traces two disparate and conflicting uses of the concept of freedom to (as I recall) before the founding of the Union. One notion was the freedom of thought and religious belief and to 'the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness', the other being the freedom to dominate others (women, native Americans, slaves, the poor) without interference from government authority.
Both those notions of freedom continue to characterize American life and internal conflict. Seems this disparity needs to be addressed in the education of the youth for a couple generations to fully extirpate it, since the belief is culturally transmitted. Both parties agree on this point, just don't agree which freedom should define America's future.
Alas it appears to me that we are increasingly allowing others, and commercial media in particular, to define what our nation's culture is. It's sidewalk level and collaborative or it isn't really ours.
Exactly so. Fair markets are great, but unstable, and cease to exist without regulation sufficient to assure a level playing field of competition. This sufficient government regulation ceases to exist when business 'regulatees' become large enough to capture the 'regulators'. Most large US Corporations are substantially unregulated with regards to preserving 'level playing field' markets, and today, at best, regulation barely serves to preserve public safety and national security. And in the case of Musk, is failing at both.
You are not by any chance the John Graham who attended Plainsboro elementary in the 60's? A Rocket man? McGraw-Hill fan?
No, I'm older than that. I thought rockets were cool though.
Would love to catch up with him. That was Plainsboro, NJ, a bit outside Princeton. At the time I was friends with John, it was a one stop town (a few miles from Orson Wells' Millstone Pond setting for the radio version of H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds). John's home was in Cranberry, a couple miles east - no relative that you know?
Not that I know. War of the Worlds was cool too.
To be fair, Kissinger also made a disastrous deal to delay the end of the Vietnam War to help Nixon’s reelection. Republicans have a history of putting their power above the good of the country.
Just like the current border “crisis”. Republicans don’t care about immigration except to fear monger and get votes.
I never saw a price tag for Trump dispatching thousands of troops to the border as a political stunt. Republicans get to do things like that.
And decency. When Democrats shed their most openly racist wing, Repubs assumed the lease. A "deal with the devil" if there ever was one.
Well I wouldn’t call that Republicans, but I certainly would agree with that having to do with Nixon by the way who was recently rated by Gallup the worst president in history. But you won’t be happy, but who is rated the second worst and believe it or not it wasn’t Jimmy Carter. It was your own Joe Biden. By Gallup.
Spot on
Hey Mark, if Reagan gave money, the vote and Kamala Harris’s output, Trump three to one and spent $2 billion on our campaign. Why did she lose?