We are being conditioned to believe that for every problem, there is a government answer, and nothing lies outside its purview and expertise. Even mild cases of food poisoning merit a nation-wide investigation and crackdown on bad guys, who, we are encouraged to believe, are always in the private sector and never in the public sector.
The Caribbean island of Cuba has recently been experiencing a strange outbreak of dengue.
The problem for the survival of a market economy arises when the voters permit or encourage the expansion of government power to such an extent that private businesses can gain short-term profits through the intervention into the competitive market by state officials.
When government on all its levels enters health care, the industry has to adjust to every dollar spent and every order given.
Allowing terminally ill people to bypass the drug testing and approval process will not create a "right to experimental drugs." It will not destroy the incentives for patients to participate in the clinical trial system. It will not make it impossible to gather scientific data on how drugs work. What it will do is allow individuals who are fully capable of rational choice to make the most important choices of all according to their own values.
The politics of the environmentalists are increasingly predictable and obvious. They oppose all forms of capitalistic innovation. Indeed, they represent a special kind of danger to the human race that socialism never did.
Apparently the discovery of penicillin is often trotted out as a classic case showing the importance of having the innovation-incentives of a paten
Many in Britain, writes Lew Rockwell, no longer have any choice: they have to pull out their own teeth.
