Freemarketcare II

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story in the newspapers about US-based Turing Pharmaceuticals increasing the price of a drug used by some AIDS and cancer patients by about four thousand percent virtually overnight from about $14 per pill to $750 per pill?  It’s been in all the papers.  Seems the drug in question, Daraprim, has been around for decades but Turing only acquired the rights recently, hence the rather abrupt price adjustment.  The CEO of Turing, thirty-two year old multimillionaire and former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, defended the company’s pricing policy saying he was just trying to make a profit, claiming the previous owners of the drug had been “giving it away,” and calling a reporter who questioned his judgment on the matter a moron.  Which of course from the perspective of people like Mr. Shkreli is exactly what someone would be if he or she didn’t raise the price of whatever he or she was hawking to whatever the market would bear.  That’s just basic economics.  Supply and demand.  Now in Mr. Shkreli’s defense I see he was in the news even more recently saying that having heard the public outcry he now intends to reduce the price to something a bit more affordable although in the story I read he declined to say what that might be.  One assumes it would not be the previous give away price.  I should also point out the company claims it provides the drug to about half the people who use it at no cost whatsoever and has plans to expand its charitable drug program.  So apparently if you’re in whatever class Turing Pharmaceuticals believes deserves charity then you have nothing to worry about.  I’m not sure who that might be.  Unemployed bankers?  Just joking.  I’m confident they run a perfectly reasonable means based system.

One might have expected this situation to foster an interesting debate between economic conservatives who believe whatever happens on the free market is ethical gold from liberals who conventionally take a more nuanced stance on such matters and are equally conventionally branded economic morons by conservatives.  .. Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Kim Davis, Religious Exemptions, and Fatassism

Welcome friends! 

I was just chuckling over the latest news item on Kim Davis.  If you haven’t been reading the papers recently she’s that mildly frightening backwoods county clerk from Kentucky or Tennessee or some such place who has been in the news recently for refusing to carry out her official duties in terms of issuing marriage licenses to gay people.  Why was she doing that you ask?  Didn’t the Supreme Court just rule on that recently?  Why yes but like every conservative Ms. Davis is mostly concerned with what she herself wants to do.  In the vernacular, she don’t need no stinking laws.  Thus, like every other obnoxious power grabbing petty local bureaucrat who has ever lived she apparently felt entirely justified in doing whatever the hell she wanted to do.  In this case she looked into her blinkered heart and determined that at least in her little neck of the woods only straight people would be getting marriage licenses no matter what those power grabbing Supreme Court big shots in Washington might say about it.  To make a long story short they carted her off to the local slammer and her deputies ended up doing her job for her.  But I just read the other day she’s out again.  Maybe now she’ll do her job and then again maybe she won’t.  Don’t worry though.  Conservative Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, offered to take her place in jail the next time she flouts the law.  I think they should take him up on the offer.  The best case scenario would be for Ms. Davis to get canned and Mr. Huckabee to serve a long jail term thus ensuring he cannot harm any innocent bystanders via electoral mishap... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!