AIDS export says what I've been saying for ages

[yesthattom]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/conditions/12/25/aids.vaccine.ap/index.html I hate the way the world works.

Comments

[tim1965.livejournal.com]

Why does this surprise anyone?

For years, political scientists and sociologists have known that it's government spending that drives technological innovation -- NOT the marketplace. Government investment drove the development of radar, the microwave, the laser, most medicines, physical infrastructure (who built your highway, Bechtel or the Federal Highway Development Trust?).

The first AIDS drugs all came from NIH. AZT (a shitty, useless medicine if there ever was one) was developed by NIH and the patent licensed to a private company. Once the profits from AZT were known within the pharmaceutical industry, only then did other drug companies (in the U.S. and overseas) begin searching for more AIDS drugs.

Of course, with the incentive being drugs to combat the symptoms rather than the cause of the disease, what incentive exists in the marketplace for drug companies to develop a vaccine that will make their investments useless? None.

This is one reason why government exists, to combat flaws in the marketplace.

The incentive structure confronting people with HIV and AIDS has been well-known for nearly two decades.

What we should be more outraged at is that the mainstream, corporate-owned media is only just now getting the message to the public. Of course, they won't push this story much at all. Why? Because the same incentive structure confronts the corporatized mass media, and corrupts the news in the same way that it corrupts medicine. And the choke-chain around the media's neck will get yanked on pretty hard once the corporate masters understand that stories like this will cause people to question the value and wisdom of corporate media ownership as well.

[gulfie.livejournal.com]

To be fair. Government is a lot older than 'the marketplace'. Not to mention the lots of other things government does (or should) do, that have no relation to 'the market'.


The creeping idea that everything must service 'the (hallowed) market' is rather off putting I think. It is of course what 'the market' would want. The market, what there is if it, is here to serve us, not the other way around.

[tim1965.livejournal.com]

Advocates of the free market would argue that trade came long before any government (it's their claim to ethical superiority, which is based on a state-of-nature claim).

But I agree that government has lots of reasons for existing. That's why overcoming market failure is just one of them.