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Disorders Made to Order
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Jan 6, 5:34am
8 reviews
•http://www.motherjones.com/news/featu...
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You might think it odd that I've tagged this under economics and "free trade" rather than medicine. The reason is that it illustrates a fundamental flaw with the free trade capitalist paradigm and it's part of my research for an essay on same.
Milton Friedman and his disciples believe that unfettered capitalism is the answer to all our prayers and that, left to the "self interest" of capitalists and consumers, all conceivable demands would result in the most efficient supply by willing entrepeneurs.
What their blinkered model deliberately - or stupidly - ignores is that "self interest" drives entrepeneurs not merely to satisfy demand but to create it. The perfect capitalist situation is where the consumer is addicted to his product and cannot ever satiate his demand. Tobacco is the obvious example of that, but, to be fair to the capitalists on this occasion, this was an accident from which they (the capitalists) have merely been happy to benefit. They didn't create the addiction (although they've certainly done their best to promote it and to deny that it is an addiction)
Not so the Pharmaceutical industry generally. And this story provides one of many examples. They're essentially looking not to satisfy natural demand or to solve existing problems. That might be profitable but short lived. They want permanent profitability, so they need permanent demand. The last thing they need is a permanent solution to ANY problem.
So, where a problem does not exist, they go out and create it. Hence, here we have "Generalised Anxiety Disorder", which, conveniently, will never go away, but can be treated by "Paxil" a product they've invented, patented, licensed nearly 10 years earlier but haven't been able to sell. So what better than to invent a new disease (or "market" as they would prefer to think of it) which it is ideally suited to treat.
It's not even a particularly prominent example. I'll be dealing with those later. But apply the same logic to the economy generally and we can see the roots of the ongoing drive to militarize and terrorize the whole world into becoming a cost centre and source of profit for Blackwater and its ilk.
The last thing a privatized military is going to do is solve the problems that allegedly make it necessary. Rather, it is in their interests - as all the conspiracy theorists shout from the rooftops - to create and prolong those problems to ensure their ongoing profits.
Thus, I hope, you can begin to see how and why the idea of expecting unregulated free trade capitalism to treat the problems it creates is one of the most obscene - or plain stupid - conspiracies against the interests of the human race ever perpetrated.
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