The UK Libertarian

NB, I’m not Davy

For those that don’t know, there is a fairly unfunny satire of libertarianism doing the rounds. I discovered it via a facebook conversation with an opponent of liberty, but have also heard it discussed on Free Talk Live, but I thought I’d have a bash at it.

So, the satire is called “Top 10 Jobs in Libertarian Paradise,” and is published by The Daily Kos. One can get a general feel for the type of stuff the article is going to procede in just from the opening paragraph:

Tired of Big Gubmint getting in the way of your entrepreneurial ambition?  Ready to Go Galt and shrug all the welfare queens off your shoulders so you can have the riches you deserve?  Well, I have some great news – there are many unique job opportunities to be had in a small government society that are simply not available in today’s Communist America.  In fact, there are so many that I can only discuss a handful of them here, but they’re more than enough to refute the odious librul myth that people can’t get by without public services.  There is an entire world of opportunity for hard-working people in Libertarian Paradise.

Just to comment right off: Yes, the “Big Gubmint” gets in the way of entrepreneurial ambition. The number of people shut down for not having the requisit licenses, not being able to use their home kitchens to prepare food, etc. etc. is not something can be shrugged at, not to mention the effects in the third world of such things as having to spend five years and thousands of dollars to register a business legally. Each of these entrepreaurial endeavours does two things: It provides and income for said entrepreneur, and it provides jobs for anybody they would hire. Since the principle cause of poverty is not low pay, which is often a gateway to higher pay, but no-pay – unemployment, getting in the way of entrepreneurialism is not something to be mocked.

The second thing I will say is that there may well be welfare queens. There could easily be those that choose to live on welfare rather than work. I would say that it is unlikely that the worst cases of these are those that try to stay completely jobless on Jobseekers’ Allowance, since that is pretty small. I would say a bigger problem is the effects of tax credits, under which people are encouraged to make sure they do not work more than sixteen hours a week, coupled with a child support system that, instead of having one lump sum, pays people more per sprog they drop, and housing benefit that is based on how much rent a landlord charges, and so pays them to charge as much as they want.

However, I would be more inclined to say that welfare queens are not the principle problem of the welfare state. The bigger problem is that it rests on theft; and, beyond this, it rests on the theft of incomes that would have been used to either stimulate demand for goods and services, and so for jobs to provide them, or invested in the production of those goods and services. Beyond this, there is the impact on society: The welfare state traps people into poverty. It costs couples that choose to live together £1,336, thereby making single parenthood more profitable, despite the evidence that children are better raised by two or more. Beyond this, though, because of the costs of loss of benefits, plus the income tax, those on welfare who work and progress in work are financially penalised, the minimum wage of £5.80 an hour can be worth as little as 26p. It just doesn’t pay to try to avoid welfare, or get off it, and advance. So you stay, earning £5.80 an hour, working sixteen hours a week in a single parent households, in a community where most of your friends and associates do the same. The result is that this is the world you raise your children in, with the same expectations and values.

And, lastly, it doesn’t work. The opponent to liberty I mentioned having a conversation with earlier, has defended his move to the Labour Party by declaring “Its about social justice, Dude.” But in the last ten years, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has grown from 5% to 6%, under the Labour Party. Likewise, in the US, the country where the Daily Kos is published, more than $7trillion dollars has been spent on government anti-poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty” and launched his “great society” in 1964. However, between 1959 and 1964, the poverty rate fell from 22.4 to 19.0 percent, without special oversight from the executive branch. This poverty rate accelerated in the next few years, but  the income maintenance and social action programs authorised under Johnson had relatively small budgets during his term. So, the poverty rate was steadily declining until the Great Society Programs kicked in, since when the poverty rate has levelled off or even risen in times of recession. Or, in other words, the welfare state ended the decline in poverty in the US!

So, lets see what The Daily Kos thinks would be the top ten jobs in the libertarian paradise.

10. Plague corpse disposalWith the CDC no longer wasting taxpayer money rewarding people too lazy to defend themselves against disease, new opportunities would exist in the field of plague corpse disposal.  As a strong, motivated, red-blooded true American, you need not worry about becoming infected yourself – no dirty foreign pathogen is going to corrupt your precious bodily fluids.  But you can earn a living ridding society of the festering reminders of the poor and sickly whom God, in his infinite capitalist wisdom, has seen fit to remove from the society of worthier people.

Now, I find this claim particulary hard to understand, coming, as I do, from Great Britain, and not the US. You see, in my country, there is no Centre for Disease Control, or an equivalent. I guess that there must be plague rife throughout the UK!

Now, the issue of containing contagion and how or whether it can be achieved in a manner compatible with libertarian principles is interesting. After all, in the UK it could be said that the modern libertarian movement had its birth in groups such as the Personal Rights Association which campaigned against particularly nasty attempts by the government to tackle the spread of syphilis by calling for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, which in itself became part of the first laws regulating prostitation. Interesting issues revolve around prevention of contagion as a public good, and so whether avoiding free riding justifies compulsion. The daily Kos ignores all this, though, prefering to suggest that societies like ours that lack a CDC would be rife with plagues. Of course, we do have stories of how well government hands major contagions, such over Mad Cow disease (EU bans on shipment of beef from the UK remained in place long after threats had died down, because they worked as protection against British competition for French farmers), or over foot and mouth disease (failure to contain the illness), and Bird Flu (mass hysteria, enabling the growth in government powers, and huge over purchasingof vaccines).

09. Witch detector

 

Despite the infinite blessings of pure capitalism, there would still be plenty of problems in society.  And the cause of those problems, of course, is witchcraft.  Libruls would claim that lack of rational governance is the cause, but that is only because they too are engaged in witchcraft and wish to deflect blame from themselves.  Still, even though the New Libertarian Order would not immediately address the witch problem, it would open up opportunities to enterprising individuals such as yourselves to deal with it and make a tidy profit in the process.  Whenever crops fail from incompetent agricultural practices; whenever someone falls victim to a mysterious illness; whenever the weather is unseasonably inconvenient, there will be business for a witch detector.

What?! There will bewhich detectors in a libertarian society? People who’s crops fail will pay for somebody to detect witches? They will then pay for that detector to punish said witch or exact restitution from them? Really? Of course, said witch detector would have to either prove their charges to either a court provided by the minimal state, or a court agreed on by them or their protection agency, and the protection agency of their victim, or else any attempt to punish the “witch” would itself be treated as an offense against that witch, either by the minimal state, or by the witch’s own protection agency, and punished as such. Those who want to pay for witch detectors, of course, will also have to be willing to pay the detector enough to be able to afford him enough to pay the protection agencies of suspected witches to use courts that recognise laws against witchcraft. These protection agencies will only accept this if they are either unprincipled enough to accept such clap trap, or if the payments from the witch detector would excede the value of the market for protecting witches against punishment. Or, in other words, punishing witches would have to be more valuable to the witch fearing than being protected against punishment is to witches. None of which (ha! Witch) is likely…especially in this day and age in a society that largely does not believe in witchcraft.

Beyond this, the implication is that having “big gubmint” is in some way is the reason there are no witch detectors or witch trials. Personally, I find that doubtful. In 1944, two women, Helen Duncan, and Jane Rebecca York were convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1735. The charges brought against Helen Duncan were not brought by supserstitious farmers in her native Western Scotland, but by MI5 and Naval Intelligence, an investigating team that actually included Bond author Ian Fleming. The last threatened use ofthis law was as late as 1951, and it wasn’t until 1953 that the law was repealed.

On to Job 8:

08. Reader

 

Now that the socialist school system has been abolished, and people only learn what they need to jockey pictographic cash registers, you can earn a living as a professional reader for occasions where someone needs all those weird-looking symbols on paper interpreted for them.  Granted, literacy is not a very manly or patriotic thing, but as long as you keep it within business hours and don’t go around reading any high-falutin’ books in public, it’s a perfectly decent way to make money.

Ahhh, yes, without “big gubmint” schools, literacy would plummet. Thank goodness “big gubmint” saved us from that…

Times Educational Supplement reports that 22% of 16-19 year olds are functionally innumerate, and that 17% are functionally illiterate, and this has been the case for the last 20 years. Same story from the Telegraph. The BBC tells us that the Public Accounts Committee reported in 2007 that 51,000 school leavers left school without a GCSE of at least grade D-G in Maths, and 39,000 without this in English. Interestingly, aslong ago as 2000, the BBC was also warning that one in five adults were functionally illiterate. The wikipedia page on the definition of functional illiteracy is useful, not just for illuminating what the phrase means, but also for telling us the prevalence of functional illiteracy, with this neat passge:

In the United States, according to Business magazine, an estimated 15 million functionally illiterate adults held jobs at the beginning of the 21st century. The American Council of Life Insurers reported that 75% of the Fortune 500 companies provide some level of remedial training for their workers. All over the U.S.A. 30 million (14% of adults) are unable to perform simple and everyday literacy activities.^[5]

The National Center for Education Statistics provides more detail. Literacy is broken down into three parameters: prose, document, and quantitative literacy. Each parameter has four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. For prose literacy, for example, a below basic level of literacy means that a person can look at a short piece of text to get a small piece of uncomplicated information; while a person who is below basic in quantitative literacy would be able to do simple addition. In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the “below basic” level for prose literacy; 12% are at the “below basic” level for document literacy; and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.

The UK government’s Department for Education reported in 2006 that 47 percent of school children left school at age 16 without having achieved a basic level in functional mathematics, and 42 percent fail to achieve a basic level of functional English. Every year 100,000 pupils leave school functionally illiterate in the UK.^[6]

Yay for “big gubmint” ending illiteracy! Must’ve been hell before the state got involved in education (scroll down)… you know, the time when, according to EG West,

that the percentage of the net national income spent on day-schooling of children of all ages in England in 1833 was approximately 1 percent. By 1920, when schooling had become “free” and compulsory by special statute, the proportion had fallen to 0.7 percent.

You know, that time when, in the UK

annual growth of enrollments between 1818 and 1858 exceeded the annual growth of population. After the compilation of the first educational census in 1851, it was reported that the average school attendance period of working-class children was nearly five years. By 1858 the Newcastle Commission concluded that it had risen to nearly six years. And the same authority reported that “almost every one receives some amount of school education at some period or other.”

The results of this consumption of schooling, leading to, by the late 1830s, according to RK Webb

In so far as one dare generalize about a national average in an extraordinarily varied situation, the figure would seem to run between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working classes as literate, a group which included most of the respectable poor who were the great political potential in English life.

And West continues:

It is not surprising that with such evidence of literacy growth of young people, the levels had become even more substantial by 1870. On my calculations for 1880, when national compulsion was enacted, over 95 percent of fifteen-year-olds were literate.

Of course, literacy and functional literacy are not the same things, so we could not say that reading ability is worse now than it was in the nineteenth century, but still… maybewe could do with some professional readers in today’s “big gubmint” society!

Onto the next job, which may divide libertarians between anarchists and minarchists, until both recall that the job exists right now in the US, and that it could exist under a minimal state as well as under anarchy:

 07. Bounty hunter

 

With all those oppressive government police forces out of the way, malefactors can be apprehended in a freer, more appropriate way: By mercenary bounty-hunters armed to the teeth and unaccountable to any civil authority.  Sure, you might end up causing more damage to society than the people you apprehend, but what the hell, this ain’t France.

Yep, bounty hunters. I’ll not say no. Instead of being forced to pay for and consume the services of a local police force, you can hire one of your own, from a multitude of freely competing ones. Or, more likely, you would just insure yourself against the damages of some act of aggression, your insurance company would cover such damages, and then hire bounty hunters to recover the loss from the wrongdoer.

Sounds awful, right? Well, the picture above evokes images of the Wild West. But the Wild West was a more peaceful, less murderous place than the US is now.

In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, W. Eugene Hollon stated that he believed “that the Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful, and safer place than American society is today.” The legend of the “wild, wild West” lives on despite Robert Dykstra’s finding that in five of the major cattle towns (Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell) for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported — an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season.In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, “nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.” Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had 5 killings in any one year. Frank Prassel states in his book subtitled A Legacy of Law and Order, that “if any conclusion can be drawn from recent crime statistics, it must be that this last frontier left no significant heritage of offenses against the person, relative to other sections of the country.”

When he appeared on ABC’s TV program Counterpoint, PJ Hill was asked whether ther was evidence of just how violent the West was. Hill responded

Peter Hill: Well, we certainly have some. One of the interesting things that I do is that when I’m giving a lecture I ask people how many bank robberies do they think that came about in the West, in all of the western states, let’s just take 15 western states from 1859 to 1900. And of course you think about the usual movie depiction, six or seven cowboys ride in in their slickers, it may be a hot day but they’re still clothed in their big oilcloth slickers, and they hold up the bank and a terrified populace cowers. Finally an inept possie takes after them and of course they have escaped with most of the money from the bank. So that’s what you would probably see. An historian has actually looked and the best that he can tell between 1859 and 1900 in 15 western states were probably between eight and ten bank robberies.

Michael Duffy: In the whole area?

Peter Hill: In the whole area in the entire time. So that’s quite a difference. Now, you think about why that might be and one of the reasons of course was that the populace was armed, almost everybody either had a sidearm, every household had either a shotgun or a rifle over the front door, and they used those mostly to shoot predators, maybe to kill a horse that had been lamed, but they used them somewhat for self-protection. But you can imagine any small town in the West, the bank robbers ride in, they rob the bank, there’s probably 20 or 30 people that are fully armed, the bank robbers try to leave, and my guess is before they get a few metres out of town they’ve been filled with bullets. So this image of that kind of thing happening just really doesn’t fit with history.

The explaination makes sense. Look back at the period: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and their Hole in the Wall Gang, they robbed trains. The James-Younger gang robbed trains. Train robberies can occur in isolated out of the way places, unlike bank robberies. (In fact, I recall that the bit in Pekinpah’s classic film of the James-Younger gang, The Long Riders where the gang got all shot up Pekinpah style was precisely when they did try to rob a bank!)

Of course, owners of railroads had an incentive to ensure that passengers or owners of freight were safe for travel. That is why they also paid for private police -or bounty hunters – to protect them. Murray Rothbard writes

The most successful and best organized private police forces in American history have been the railway police, maintained by many railroads to prevent injury or theft to passengers or freight. The modern railway police were founded at the end of World War I by the Protection Section of the American Railway Association. So well did they function that by 1929 freight claim payments for robberies had declined by 93%. Arrests by the railway police, who at the time of the major study of their activities in the early 1930s totalled 10,000 men, resulted in a far higher percentage of convictions than earned by police departments, ranging from 83% to 97%. Railway police were armed, could make normal arrests, and were portrayed by an unsympathetic criminologist as having a widespread reputation for good character and ability.²

Rothbard also writes of another example of the private sector filling in for demand for adequate policing:

A dramatic contrast of the merits of public vs. private protection is provided by one block in Harlem. On West 135th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues is the station house of the 82nd Precinct of the New York City Police Department. Yet the august presence of the station house did not prevent a rash of night robberies of various stores on the block. Finally, in the winter of 1966, fifteen merchants on the block banded together to hire a guard to walk the block all night; the guard was hired from the Leroy V. George protection company to provide the police protection not forthcoming from their property taxes.

And I have blogged elsewhere about similar examples where people organising in their communities have hired private cops to keep themselves safe.

As for this concern about bounty hunters being “unaccountable to any civil authority,” I first have to ask “why?” The Daily Kos article started off being about the “many unique job opportunities to be had in a small government society.” It there is a small government, couldn’t there be a “civil authority” to whom these bounty hunters are held accountable, namely said small government? Duh!

OK, so some libertarians are anarchists, but then again, whatchanges. As libertarians they believe in libertarianism: that people should be at liberty to do as they choose with their person and property as they see fit; and, consequently, the only justifiable use of force is to secure this liberty by enforcing known and clear laws against force, fraud and theft.Under an anarchist society, these laws would be enforced privately. The Daily Kos, as well as many critics of anarchism, are basically saying, “well, what if the law enforcers break the law.” The answer is that law enforcers arrest and/or punish them for doing so. The fact that anarchists propose that law enforcement and adjudication be private does not entail that they think that there should be no law enforcement against enforcers of the law. On the contrary, they suspect that it is because the provision of this is now monopolised by the same organisation that hires police and forces the populace to pay for them that police are unaccountable and brutal and oppressive.

Put differently, anarchists don’t propose that bounty hunters be “unaccountable to any civil authority.” They propose that anybody should be able to use their person and property to start up a voluntarily funded and manned “civil authority,” even within the same geographic area as another, to hold these bounty hunters to account, and force them to operate within the bounds of “known and clear laws against force, fraud and theft” that secure people’s “liberty to do as they choose with their person and property as they see fit.”

Strawman, then. Job number six is…

06. Maker of child-sized coffins

In the absence of prenatal care, pediatric medicine, or childcare other than what luck or family inheritance can provide, there will be oodles of little cadavers for the enterprising coffin-maker to serve.  Cholera, whooping cough, measles, pneumonia, influenza…all spells big bucks!  Grieving parents are a very price-tolerant consumer base, and aren’t likely to investigate the particulars of your product – i.e., whether you charge them for mahogany while making it out of plywood.  Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money!

You see the kind of thought going into this article! I would just like to point out one oddity: The article suggests that there will be a significant market for mahogany caskets, presumably from parents willing and able to fork out on them… but said parents would not be willing to fork out for pre-natal care, pediatric medicine or childcare! Now, I’ve done a bit of research, and a mahogany coffin would cost between £510 and £1865. Compare this, now, with SimpleHealth’s health insurance coverage for me, a made up wife, and two made up kids, one aged 12, the other 8, which costs £118.51 a month. Insurance seems cheaper to me, especially as the same policy without the kids would cost £87.31, so it only costs about £31 to cover my kids in the same policy as me and the missus, and especially when, you know, I probably love those kids at least a little. Probably enough to choose to spend £31 a year keeping them alive rather than £1020 burying them!

Then there is the snide remark that the coffin maker would charge for mahogany but supply plywood. But, in a libertarian society, such a person would be charged with fraud and punished duly.

The main topic of this section , of course, the idea that we could have no healthcare without “big gubmint.” But what happened before the state moved into this area? I can summarise by quoting my own posts from discussion forums:

The Times reported, in 1885, that the combined incomes of London charities (London, not the whole country), was greater than the revenues of several European governments. Ten years later, a survey reported that the average middle-class family spent ten percent of its income on charity, more than it spent on clothing or housing, or anything other than food. But it was not just the middle-classes. A survey of working-class and artisan families found that half of them made weekly subscriptions to charities. A quarter also donated to a church or chapel. Victorians gave up to 10 percent of their incomes on charity. Today the average British person gives less than one percent. And this was formal charity, not the informal. It was the norm, for instance, that if the head of the household over the street hadn’t been able to get work at the docks this week, well you would send you lad over with a pot of stew to tide them over, since they would do the same for you.

And then you had all the mutual aid and self-help organisations. The most obvious of these were the friendly societies, which provided unemployment support, also functioned as labour exchanges finding work for members, funeral costs, paid for some medical expenses – GPs were often on retainer to friendly societies, with collectively bargained contracts -, and were moving into pension provision, as well as funding entertainment for members. People joined a society, usually with links to their trade or profession (hence the link between the friendly societies and trades unions), though some, like the Manchester Oddfellows were open to all trades – Oddfellow means “jack of all trades.” They then paid regular subscriptions that funded all the services that the society provided. membership also entitled them to a vote in how the society was run, either in electing members of the board, or in having a say at local meetings.

In 1803 the membership of registered friendly societies was 704,350. The poor law was tightened in 1834, largely abolishing or severely contracting the existing welfare state. Charity and mutual aid filled the void. By 1877 the membership of registered societies was 2,750,000. Ten years later it was 3,600,000. Ten years from that it was 4,800,000. Ten years on from that, in 1910, it was 6,600,000. David Green has said that “It is common to think of private charity as the primary alternative to the welfare state, whereas mutual aid associations provided social security and even medical services for far more people than did charities. When national insurance was first enacted in Britain in 1911, over three-quarters of those covered by the scheme (some nine million out of 12 million) were already members of mutual aid associations. The nine million includes unregistered societies.”

Out of 550 hospitals for treating infectious diseases in the provinces in 1906, more than four hundred were founded since 1850. In London today, thirty-six our of its sixty-four hospitals were founded in the nineteenth century, including all the major teaching hospitals. They were founded by public subscription by groups of people and individuals. As the charitable hospitals boomed, they began to catch up with local authority hospitals (usually associated with the poor law institutions). By 1936, charitable hospitals took 60 percent of all patients requiring acute care, and by 1948 that number was probably higher. An increasing number of people were paying for treatment, too. Some people paid cash directly, others insured themselves against hospital expenses. However, one of the major inovations were contribution schemes. They paid through regular contributions to a hospital (one would imagin that now this could be to a hospital chain, or to an independent organisation) which entitled them to treatment if the need arose. It was like health insurance directly arranged with the hospital. by 1943 there were 191 such schemes, with ten million subscribers. Families were coverred, too, so some twenty million people recieved protection that way.

The proportion of charitable hospital income coming from paying patients, then, rose dramatically throughout the ninteenth century, from 9 percent in 1891 to 52 percent in 1948. The charitable side did not go away, it was just joined and supported by payments. In 1935, the voluntary hospitals had an annual surplus of over £1 million in spite of the economic depression.

Consultants were expected to see patients in hospital for free, and then see private patients at other times of the day, from which they would draw their income. General Practitioners would also often treat patients free of charge, or they would adjust their fees according to the means of the patient. It has been estimated that some 20 percent of the population recieved free services from a GP in the early twentieth century. Charitable hospitals, poor law hospitals, and charitable dispenaries also provided free out patient treatment.

A small number of patients, usually the richer ones, paid for GP visits with cash, but the majority made regular payments in various ways. many, over half the population, would pay for their GP through membership of a friendly society. Your local society lodge would appoint a doctor, and membership entitled you to see him for free, or for a reduced fare. Alternatively, the society would issue a list of approved doctors, and you could see one of them. An alternative scheme was to create a “medical institute,” a place where doctors could work full time as an employee of the society. Another arrangement was for workers to arrange with their employers for deductions to be taken from their pay to go to a fund. That is how miners and steel workers in the Welsh valleys created ‘medical aid societies.” Doctors also organised contributory schemes, like those of hospitals.

Over all, the vast majority of people paid one way or another to see a GP, but the poor could normally get a discount or see one for free. In 1911, out of twelve million coverred by the national insurance, nine million were already covered by one contributory scheme or another, although once they were obliged to have national insurance, people let their use of voluntary schemes lapse. By 1939, though when nineteen million people – two fifths of the population – had compulsory national insurance, the other 27.5 million still obtained GP services through direct payment, friendly societies, dispensaries, etc. The proportion of the population having to rely on free services had fallen below 15 percent.

Its interesting, actually, how similar the “medical institutes” were to the Health Societies in inter-war period Yugoslavia. After the First World War Yugoslavia was a mess, a country already much poorer than here was war torn and ravaged. When the war ended the Red Cross left, and doctors moved to the cities where they could get a higher income. This left most of the largely rural country without access to healthcare. Fortunately people didn’t wait for a benevolent government to intervene and solve this problem. They organised in their villages and communities, forming “health Societies.” They would build a house and small surgery or clinic for a doctor and assistant to live or work in and, although many were started with a one off interest free loan from the government, members of health societies paid regular amounts to the society so that it could hire a doctor and an assistant. Members recieved free consultations from the society doctor, and shared the costs of surgery or other treatments.

We should not forget that these arrangements were not occurring in a free market, though. The state intervened in significant ways, regulating healthcare and related industries, and it usually did so at the behest of those it regulated, for their benefit, and at the expense of the poor, causing prices to rise, by granting monopolistic privileges to healthcare providers. Without this intervention, prices would fall. Likewise, Dr.Mary Ruwart has written

We can estimate the impact of regulations on drug prices through their increased impact on drug development times, which climbed from 2 years and 7 months before the 1962 amendments to morethan 14 yearsin the 1990s. As we learned earlier, neither safety nor effectiveness was improved by this added aggression which increaded the development time by a factor of five!

The five-fold increase in drug development time over the last several decades has increased prices at least five-fold as well. The price increase is probably much larger, since the requirement for more clinical studies, the most expensive part of the development, have been responsible for most of the timeline extension. If we did nothing but stop the aggression put in place by  the 1962 amendments, we would slash development costs and the drug prices by at least 80% without compromising safety of effectiveness.

Healthcare would be cheaper and more available if “big gubmint” go out of the way, and voluntary co-operation and mutual aid, which has arisen in the past, and we could expect to arise in the future, would make this even more the case.

That’s enough for Part 1. I’ll go through other jobs at a later date.

Rich