Posted on 01/01/2010 3:11:31 AM PST by The Raven
On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I’m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.”
I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done, particularly of late: reducing “capitalism” to its alleged sins.
And that’s the point. There are few areas of life where a thing responsible for so much good gets so little credit for it.
Imagine if I were to collect the most infamous deeds of African Americans over the last decade — say, Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal and O. J. Simpson’s most recent criminal exploit — and then put a bow on it with the phrase “the decade in black America.” What if I did the same thing with Jews? Bernie Madoff, the face of Jewish America! Do the scandals of Rod Blagojevich, Charlie Rangel, and John Edwards define the Democratic party from 2000 to 2010? Do Abu Ghraib and the balloon boy sum up America?
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
Executives at pharma companies are mostly conservative, usually donate to Republicans twice as much as they do to Democrats, and would like to see government get off their backs. They enjoy state protected monopolies which enable large profit margins, but they are forced to kick back more than half of that to the state, so it's not so great. Prices would fall dramatically if they could just shake the mafia controlling them.
Not commenting on Pharma Execs per se, what I am saying is that as long the .Gov has such a hand in their business model Goldberg is committing the same error as NPR is.
Mainly seeing their view as the one, dominant, all correct one when in fact it is merely Opinion and not an Objective View when it comes to State interventionism into the private sector.
Pharma both benefits, and suffers losses from, State interest in their businesses.
That said, prices are not falling anytime soon, not in the US, we are a “profit center” in the words of a UK Pharma Executive.
I mostly agree with your post, but I think there is some error in believing that these weaknesses/failures (the dark side of any “ism”) can be avoided by any type of regulation or legislation.
These weaknesses are all rooted in human weakness. Here it is greed. It doesn’t matter how we try to limit or regulate them. Greed will find a way to satisfy itself.
When on-air their voices drip with snootiness, I guess a strange byproduct of having things stuck up their butts. Deep seated envy is always lurking just beneath the pompous front. It must go back to some childhood trauma, being overly tortured with peer envy.
“Capitalism Fingered as Fiend”
And the answer to that is unbridled socialism, enforced by self-appointed intellectual psychotics who think they have all the answers.
IMHO
Bingo. “Too big [and its new brother, “interconnected”] to fail”, claimed and enabled at every turn by the Federal Reserve for the past thirty years at least.
Big government is addicted to the money they make off pharma so prices will go up, even faster with "health reform". And what's amazing is they don't take any of the heat for the increasing prices. The anger is all directed at the pharma companies that are so under control they can't complain about it. Our government does not want lower drug prices in America because they would mostly be hurting themselves. America is the world's biggest profit center for the drug industry, but if the feds destroy that, they destroy their golden goose.
the last decade was 1991-2001
. . . and given that leftists control the nation's propaganda organs, that is excruciatingly difficult. I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:Any business person who is willing to collude with the government to crush competition and thereby establish a monopoly, is not following “free-market” or “capitalist” economic principles. They are following, first and foremost, socialist principles. It does not matter whether that is a lone businessman or a mega-corporation.
- objective :
- reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists who are members in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)
- liberal :
- see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
- progressive :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- moderate:
- see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
- centrist :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- conservative :
- rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")
- right-wing :
- see, "conservative."
At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation just as surely as marketers love to boldly proclaim that the product which they are flogging is NEW!
The fact that "new" is such a good label to use to sell things, or ideas, reflects the fact that although Americans traditionally are not "progressive" in the Newspeak sense, they are in fact progressive in the literal sense that they believe in the promise of progress implicit in "the blessings of liberty" mentioned in preamble to the Constitution and explicit in Article 1 Section 8:
The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
That said, when such an enterprise decides to collude with the government rather than serve the market, they become CORPORATE SOCIALISTS.
it is the fault of colluding with government, which is fascist/socialist.
. . . and the fact that there is a distinction but, from the POV of a lover of liberty, negligible difference between fascism and Communism is the burden of F.A. Hayek's classic, The Road to Serfdom.
Your range has 11 years in it.
decade - noun
1. a period of ten years
2. a period of ten years beginning with a year whose last digit is zero: the decade of the 1980s.
3. a group, set, or series of ten.
1991-2000
decades begin with the year one. the was no year zero
since the common calendar starts from the year 1, its first full decade contained the years from 1 to 10, the second decade from 11 to 20, and so on. The interval from the year 2001 to 2010 could thus be called the 201st decade, using ordinal numbers.
The fake capitalism of Wall Street with their bundled securitized mortgages, derivatives. high frequency trading and credit default swaps.....that is the fiend of the last decade
And those fake capitalists are always looking for an in with the Feds...Goldman Sachs being the best example
Democrat scum like Fanny/Freddy and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd didn’t do nearly as much damage as Wall Street
Please, a Companies’s purpose in Globalism is to maximize profits, if every .Gov regulation and tax disappeared overnight they would merely charge the same prices, if not more, and pocket the additional profits.
When only one medicine can treat whatever condition that creates scarcity which will drive prices ever higher, they have -0- reason to charge less than whatever the market will bare for their products, .Gov interference or not.
Your point that "fascism" has become a meaningless buzz-word is also true.
Patents and Trademarks are as old as the Republic itself.
Socialism (paradoxically?) objectifies people by depersonalizing their "upkeep". Socialists trust in their altruism, but ultimately bureaucrats act in their own interest, creating no wealth.
Well said. BTTT.
Capitalism isn't perfect but there is nothing better.
Socialists place their trust in what my professors used to call the "state police apparatus." Except for the dupes and the true believers, their altruism is a fig-leaf.
Socialism creates enough wealth so that the bureaucrats in control have something they can accumulate and benefit from, while leaving a sufficient amount for the masses so that they won't revolt.
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