Machan's Musings - Business & Government: A Perverse Union
by Tibor R. Machan
Whenever some industry is getting raked over the coals and someone stands up to defend it, the retort is, "Well, these businesses are routinely seeking government help, so they aren’t defenders of freedom, are they?" One recent target of this line of attack is the pharmaceutical industry.
Americans pay pretty hefty sums for medicine. One reason for this is that they need to invest great sums to guide a drug from initial conception in the minds of scientists to becoming available in the market place. Many drugs, even perfectly effective ones, never make it, of course, despite its having cost millions to bring them to the Food and Drug Administration to be tested, only to be rejected on some really insane grounds - such as, "It is not certain that no harm will come to anyone from using this drug." The requirement that one prove that something will never, ever happen, that no one will ever be harmed by something, is impossible to meet; so when such a hurdle is placed before a company, it is nearly guaranteed that its products will not make it.
Of course, these measures that have established the FDA and its various policies came about through the political process and that process makes it completely legitimate for politicians to introduce bills and pass them and have the president sign them simply because some group of voters is in panic about possible - not probable but only possible — side-effects of medications. When you live in a country where individual rights have been trumped by majority rule — actually, the rule of the majority of those who bother to vote, not of the citizenry itself — you can be dragged before various regulatory agencies and made to meet all sorts of requirements that make no sense at all.
Fact is, however, that people are a diverse lot and that applies to their physical constitution. Some are allergic to peanuts, others shouldn’t drink soda pop, and yet others would be hurt from a physical fitness program that benefits the rest. Aside from some very general principles of medicine, we must all pay attention to our particular, individual constitution, including various types we fit, such as being male or female, young or old, and many far more complicated physical categories. For some of these certain medication may be of benefit while others of harm. For others it will be the reverse. Very little of this can be generalized and people need to learn from their medical professionals what suits them best.
Instead, we have federal regulations making one-size-fits-all rules for the drug companies which tend to keep immensely helpful drugs to some off the market because a few others aren’t helped and may even be hurt from them. So, now we find the spectacle of Americans, with the most advanced medical and chemical sciences in their society, fleeing to Canada and Switzerland in order to obtain medicine that will help them out, at a reasonable price, and sometimes even save their lives. Why? Because in those countries the requirements for introducing drugs into the market place are far less Draconian, more reasonable, than in the USA. Here is a case where the USA is less free than many other countries.
Now, in this situation of extreme regulatory mania, with people wanting government to prevent any possible mishap instead of doing this job themselves as they ought to (with the aid of professionals), is it any wonder that various industries have resigned themselves to playing the political game? They lobby for various advantages, given the disadvantages imposed on them at the urgings of some voters and their representatives. They seek subsidies for doing research, hoping this will make up for the losses they suffer from the insane requirements no one can meet. They hire legal experts to guide them through the regulatory maze, which costs them huge sums, and then, now and then, they actually make some money from their work.
To this the critics answer: "But these companies are so big, so powerful, they will capture the regulators, they will have influence that will benefit them, influence the little guy cannot reasonably hope to have."
Well, isn’t that shocking? Not a bit. When the government is assigned the job by means of the political process to regulate industry, industry will naturally defend itself by the same means. All those lobbyists are merely voicing grievances, as per our Constitution, to politicians. They try to elect their political friends to office and often succeed, given that they are big and wealthy. And this is exactly what should have been expected — when one takes one’s troubles to government, others will do the same, and the bigger, richer guys will win out. It is all in the spirit of the Hobbesian war of all special interests against all other special interests.
Government, like a good referee, ought to stay out of all this, and the US Constitution should be interpreted in such a way as to respect its basic spirit of limiting it to securing our rights. Instead government has become a Leviathan which is, of course, most responsive to those big guys who feed it good and hard.
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