Shaywitz opposes the growing movement to demonize, and eventually end, the consulting relationships through which doctors help pharmaceutical companies develop and market new drugs. After noting how hard it is to find commercially feasible ideas, Shaywitz writes:

To advance even a solid idea requires, ideally, close communication between industry and outside experts: university researchers, who often developed the science and understand it the best; practicing clinicians, who can describe where the medical needs are the greatest, and what properties an ideal therapeutic would have; and patients, of course, who understand better than anyone else what they need, and where existing approaches may fall short.

We should strive to cultivate, not demonize, these sorts of interactions.

This is just a taste of Shaywitz’s solid, fact-rich argument in favor of preserving such collaboration against a rising tide of attacks. Unfortunately, Shaywitz’s argument falters when he attempts a moral defense of drug companies’ profit-seeking.

Shaywitz, an adjunct scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, takes an approach similar to that favored by AEI’s president, Arthur Brooks. (My colleague Don Watkins has analyzed Brooks’ weaknesses here, here, here and here.) In essence, Shaywitz asserts that drug company profits should be tolerated because they allow companies to serve other people’s needs. In support he quotes Whole Foods CEO John Mackey: “Making high profits is the means to the end of fulfilling Whole Foods’ core business mission. We want to improve the health and well-being of everyone on the planet though higher quality food and better nutrition, and we can’t fulfill this mission unless we are highly profitable.”

This kind of argument amounts to: “Please excuse our profits—we’re really out to benefit others, not ourselves.” No matter how often conservatives resort to this strategy, it will always ring false because it concedes the impropriety of profit-seeking while simultaneously attempting to excuse it. Such arguments are worse than useless in the current controversy, because the anti-collaboration movement succeeds by decrying the profit motive as a source of corruption and conflicts of interest.

In reason, however, the progenitors of progress in medicine—especially the scientists, physicians, engineers, and executives who work in and for pharmaceutical companies—have no need to apologize or justify themselves altruistically. What’s urgently needed here is a defense based on rights—the moral right of doctors and drug companies to work together to advance their own productive interests, and their legal right to do so without interference from government regulators.

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Orange County, California, is surely no free market when it comes to the mobile food industry. But contrast the industry’s presence in O.C. to the dearth of food trucks in New York City, as described in this recent New York Times column:

As I was walking through Prospect Park recently, I wanted to find a healthful snack for my son and something for me. The only options, though, were the same sort of carts that my dad took me to in the ’70s: Good Humor ice cream, overpriced cans of soda and overboiled hot dogs sitting in cloudy water. This seemed ridiculous. In the past few decades, food in New York City has gone through a complete transformation, but the street-vendor market, which should be more nimble, barely budges. Shouldn’t there be four Wafels & Dinges trucks for every hot-dog cart?

Why are food trucks not easy to find in New York City? He blames regulations:

There are numerous (and sometimes conflicting) regulations required by the departments of Health, Sanitation, Transportation and Consumer Affairs. These rules are enforced, with varying consistency, by the New York Police Department. As a result, according to City Councilman Dan Garodnick, it’s nearly impossible (even if you fill out the right paperwork) to operate a truck without breaking some law. Trucks can’t sell food if they’re parked in a metered space . . . or if they’re within 200 feet of a school . . . or within 500 feet of a public market . . . and so on.

Things can get so bad that one food-truck employee spent eight hours in jail for vending falafels without the proper license!

The author concludes by comparing New York City regulations with the Third World:

In Ecuador, for example, it takes about 56 days and 13 separate procedures to get all the legal paperwork done to start a new business. In the United States, it’s an average of six days and six procedures. But if you want to open a mobile-food business in New York, it’s essentially like starting a business in Ecuador — and that’s if you can somehow arrange a permit.

I do not agree with everything the author says, but this whole article is worth reading because it illustrates how regulations can mire and discourage business activity.

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“The Web’s New Monopolists” floats a number of trial balloons, including:

• The desirability of regulating companies like Twitter and Facebook as “utilities”
• Whether Internet giants such as these, not to mention Apple, Amazon, and Google, should be seen as “scary monopolies that somebody needs to do something about”
• Whether a company like Facebook should be nationalized
• Whether “it’s possible to spin a credible tale of antitrust lawyers enabling disruption and innovation” through enforcement measures such as those against Microsoft in the 1990s.

What’s on display here is the idea that the more success a company earns, the more it must put up with coercive control over its business practices. Fox’s conclusion says it all:

So all praise to today’s would-be utilities and monopolies, as they try to build enterprises that own their markets and that we can’t do without. But when they actually succeed, don’t think we shouldn’t be sniffing around in their business. At a certain point, it becomes our business, too.

Unfortunately, the businessmen subjected to antitrust enforcement typically accept it as a cost of doing business. “There’s a joke in Silicon Valley,” says UC Berkeley economist Carl Shaprio. “‘You know you’ve really made it when you’ve got antitrust problems.’ That’s the sign of success.”

Notably, Fox’s article contains not a single quote or mention of anyone—businessman, academic, or policy analyst—who opposes antitrust regulation of Internet companies on principle.

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In case you didn’t think the UN could get even more bizarre (and dangerous), try this one. Iran will soon become the President of the Conference on Disarmament. The Iranians rotate into the job for four weeks near the end of May. Their qualification for the position? Iran is the member state that comes next in the English alphabet after Indonesia.

Iran will have the task of managing the 2013 Conference agenda, which includes “the cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament.” On the one hand, since the mullahs running the country are engaged in a mad race to acquire nuclear arms, chairing a meeting on disarmament may be a bit of a struggle. On the other hand, the Conference just talks, and talking for its own sake is an Iranian art form.

Bayefsky hits the nail on the head: “Now the proverbial foxes guard the chicken coop. It would be funny, except that the Iranian fox really intends to devour the chickens.” Read the whole thing.

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Disappointed that lawmakers in the United States haven’t been doing more to stop projects that would bring oil to America, Gore reflected that the lack of gumption to stop the pipeline was most likely because people were failing to take the issue personally. He said that when people view these issues as a matter of personal values, they are more likely to take action:

“When these kind of issues settle into a choice between right and wrong, then the moral clarity that eventually develops makes it possible to move quickly.”

I absolutely agree.

We are surrounded by technology that oil has made possible, and sometimes it can be easy to forget exactly how valuable those things are to us. I’m taking a moment today to reflect on some of those values.

Oil makes fuel which has allowed us to make trips that would never have been possible just one hundred years ago. Kerosene-based rocket fuel put men on the moon and satellites into space that allow us to find our location anywhere on Earth, listen to music or watch television, track storms and communicate worldwide.

The gasoline which powers our automobiles makes journeying to stay in touch with family easy. In the mid-1800s my great-great-grandfather moved away from the family farm in Wisconsin to make his own way in the neighboring state of Minnesota. He never saw his brothers and sisters again, and his children never met their grandparents. There was never any bad blood between them; it was simply that the distance between the two farms was too great to make visiting possible. He packed up, made the journey and never looked back. There were just 400 miles between the two farms.

Oil-based technologies now make that journey easy—simply jump into your car and go. Mechanized combines and diesel tractors unburden a farmer from a great deal of physical labor and make a weekend trip possible—even in the dead of a Minnesota winter.

Oil makes jet fuel. Living in California, I am able to see my family in Minnesota by simply boarding a commercial airplane. These vehicles can weigh over 800,000 pounds and sail through the sky, making a journey that would have taken my great-great-grandfather well over a hundred days had he chosen to travel the Oregon Trail out to California. A direct flight makes the trip in about five hours.

But a single barrel of oil makes more than just fuels–about 16% of each barrel goes toward making products such as: sunglasses, telephones, asphalt, dishwashers, microwaves, surf boards, refrigerators, umbrellas, roofing, shampoo, nylon rope, clothes, insect repellent, skis, footballs, water pipes, yarn, hair dye, movie film, soft contact lenses, artificial limbs, motorcycle helmets, syringes, CDs and DVDs, aspirin, deodorant, shoes, stuffed animals, pacifiers, extension cords and shower curtains.

The list goes on for pages. But even on this short list above, how many things are there that have made your life better, easier, safer, longer and happier?

Keep these precious things in mind the next time Al Gore or anyone else tells you that you should choose to give up these “unethical” values and force everybody else in the country to do the same.

Standing in front of this group in Canada, Gore’s message was clear. He rejected the idea that there was any circumstance, any use, any origin of oil that makes it justified, redeemable or proper to use.

“There’s no such thing as ethical oil,” he said. “There’s only dirty oil and dirtier oil.” This remark apparently triggered a round of audience applause.

Without any viable alternatives to oil, it is unclear how strangling the pipeline at the border will be a cause for celebration. Consider the view of morality implied in Gore’s outlook. On his view, human innovation, human health, human happiness and human flourishing—all these are dispensable, and should be sacrificed. In my view, moral clarity implies just the opposite and a well-due round of applause for oil.

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Curiously, this news has evoked not much more than a shrug from some people. For example, New York Times columnist David Brooks dryly summarizes the disasters expected to occur (“chaos” that will unfold in “cascades”) and then chalks it up to: “When you build [a] complex [regulatory regime], it takes a while to work through the consequences.” (Brooks is more interested in the political ramifications of Obamacare’s failure than its effects on people.)

But the damage that Obamacare will inflict on American health care—and as a result, on all of us—is not something to dismiss so nonchalantly. Brooks suggests that the pain may be temporary and eventually things will “settle down to a new normal.” Even if this were true (it isn’t—the “new normal” will be a health care system permanently crippled by greater government control—read one example here), Obamacare’s consequences should not be minimized.

The law will severely alter people’s lives—and not for the better. Here are just a few recent news headlines:

• “Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen With Health Law”
• “Indiana [medical device] company scraps plans for expansion over ObamaCare device tax”
• “Health-care law uncertainty grips Old Town Alexandria cafe — and other small businesses”
• “Health Law Pinches College Teachers”
• “Healthcare law could raise premiums 30% for some Californians”

These consequences, far from being shrugged off, should call into question the goal and rationale of the law itself.

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Note: For the 2013-2014 fellowship year, the deadline for applications is May 15.

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This defense doesn’t hold water.

First, only those earning below 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible for subsidies, which means if you are a young single worker who makes more than $45,960 a year, you must pay the higher premiums imposed by Obamacare entirely out of your own pocket. In my view, even one young person fleeced to pay for the older generation’s health care expenses is too many.

Second, the government obtains money for the promised subsidies by confiscating funds from its citizens—in the form of taxes, borrowing, or printing money (this last effectively depletes savings). So when Frakt says the federal government will effectively be subsidizing the coverage of those older, what he means is that everyone (including young people) whose earnings are drained by the government will pay for the coverage of those older. But it’s wrong for the government to force any group of people—be they young, of higher-income, or classified by any other category—to pay the medical bills of others.

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Stein argues at length that lower drug prices would benefit Medicare recipients, the federal government and taxpayers. Considered out of context, who could oppose the possibility of cheaper life-saving drugs for the elderly?

But consider the means Stein supports to bring about this result—a congressional initiative to impose price controls on drug companies (a process dressed up by calling it a “rebate”).

By what right does the government dictate to drug companies—those who have spent billions of dollars and worked countless years to figure out how to alleviate the complex ills that can plague the human body—what they can charge for their efforts? Stein doesn’t bother to consider this issue in her article—the assumption is that since some people need cheaper drugs, it’s okay to pay the producers, not what they’re charging, but what the consumers decide is enough.

Imagine doing this in any other context—for example, walking into an Apple store, picking up an iPad that costs $499, deciding it’s not worth that much, slapping a hundred dollar bill on the counter and walking out. It would be inconceivable (not to mention a crime).

Yet this attitude is ever-present in health policy circles, where there is much discussion about how to distribute the efforts of others without any consideration of the rights of the producers. In this case, there is no consideration for the fact that these drugs belong to the companies that have invested the time and resources to produce them—and that nobody else has the right to decide the price at which they are sold.

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Tren, who hails from South Africa, experienced first-hand a devastating malaria epidemic in the 1990s and saw how the re-introduction of DDT quickly brought the disease under control. At the same time, he saw anti-DDT advocates at the U.N. Stockholm Convention pushing hard for a world-wide DDT ban. This led him to become a founder of the organization Africa Fighting Malaria, where he is a director to this day.

One point he made that I found particularly interesting was that although people are coming at the disease from many angles (some search for an ever-elusive vaccine, others work on drugs to assuage symptoms, and still others concentrate their efforts on controlling the mosquitoes that carry the disease), in the end, it is the amount of wealth that a nation has that is its best protection against diseases like malaria. Free economies, in his view, are key for nations to rise out of poverty. In his view, there is a certain danger with foreign aid in that it stops countries from using their own resources to create sustainable programs. Although Tren calls Americans “generous” in their willingness to help, he also makes the point that if the people and governments in affected countries choose not to combat the problem themselves, eradication may be hopeless. I would add that the only proper outlet for this generosity is private charity, and not taxpayer funded foreign aid.

Some of the other topics Mr. Tren discusses in the podcast include:

• The problem of disappearing honey bees
• The use of pesticides in agriculture
• How DDT works
• Rachel Carson and the book Silent Spring
• The role of DDT in the eradication of malaria in the United States
• What led to the ban on DDT in the United States, and the consequences for the rest of the world
• The safety of DDT
• The problem of insecticide resistance
• The unfounded view of DDT as a dangerous chemical

Richard Tren is co-author of the book The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History and contributor to the book Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson.

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