Posted on 01/06/2005 11:06:01 AM PST by Hank Kerchief
While the attention of the world is occupied with distress at the calamity of the recent tsunami devastating Southeast Asia, my attention is aimed at a critical issue overlooked by most in addressing this tragedy. While private relief agencies, such as the American Red Cross and groups affiliated with the Catholic Church, have been diligently and effectively working to provide assistance to victims, undertaking actions fully in accord with the stated purpose of these organizations, the forthcoming involvement of a new player in the relief effort is far less desirable.
President Bush has, in the past days, announced his intention to allocate $350 million of government funds to "assist" in the relief effort. While the devastation wreaked by the flood was by no means deserved on the part of its victims, I do not believe that two wrongs make a right. Government intervention in this case, as in all cases where government exceeds its proper boundaries, will only act to the detriment of the flood victims, the American taxpayer, and the principle of the minimal state.
How is it, one might ask, that government relief to flood victims would damage them, whereas private relief would assist them? Then again, how is it that government aid to the unemployed robs them of the stimulus to return to work and resume earning an income for themselves? How is it that government efforts to rehabilitate criminals, drug addicts, and alcoholics have corresponded with a statistical increase of all three groups over the past several decades? How is it that government efforts to "protect consumers," through regulatory agencies such as the FDA, have resulted in millions of consumer deaths from disease because of the time delays involved in forcing new drugs to undergo unnecessarily stringent tests before being released to the open market? How is it that government labor laws and minimum wage statutes damage the least skilled among workers by forbidding employees to hire them at rates that their skills warrant and are simultaneously profitable to companies?
We find that, whenever government intervenes on behalf of a group it deems a victim of society, personal deficiency, private action, or nature, its intervention only serves to further incapacitate the victims. Though contemporary politicians have all but forgotten this principle, one of America's much-underrated great Presidents, Grover Cleveland, knew it in amazing depth. In 1893, when a massive drought afflicted Texas farmers, Cleveland categorically refused to grant federal aid to the victims. He issued an eloquent written justification for his decision:
I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit...The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune...Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthen the bond of a common brotherhood. |
It is no coincidence that, during the time of Grover Cleveland, the late nineteenth century, the majority of the vast private charities of our time, including the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations, the American Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, were founded. During that era, there existed virtually no government intervention in the realm of charity, yet people, of wealthy and moderate incomes alike, were far more eager to be generous with their funds than they are today, in an era of massive welfare-statism. The reason? In the late nineteenth century, government did not take away thirty percent of those people's incomes and thus leave them with fewer discretionary funds to spend on purposes outside their immediate needs.
Today, however, the government not only appropriates these funds, but also deprives private individuals of the direct choice of how the funds are to be spent. In a private market, an individual can choose to finance innocent flood victims who wish to rebuild their lives, or struggling young geniuses assisting whom might pay off with later inventions and discoveries, and not choose to finance homeless drug addicts, seven-time rapists on rehabilitation, or chronic welfare bums. In a welfare state, the choice is made for the individual, and it is often a contrary choice to what he would make on his own. At the same time, while bureaucrats spend his money on unworthy purposes, the individual has less money to spend on ones he considers worthy.
But, as Cleveland aptly points out, even when government uses its funds to assist innocent and potentially productive victims, a possibly worthy purpose, the government inevitably fails. Private individuals have flexibility in the disposal of their funds, and can allocate them to some individuals and not others, depending fully on the donors' evaluation of the recipients' worthiness.
The economist Milton Friedman would term this phenomenon "Category II spending," an individual spending his money on somebody else. Because an individual has limited resources to spend, he will necessarily be concerned with furnishing the most effective solution at the smallest cost, thus being prudent with the allocation of relief, ensuring that the aid serves only those who truly cannot survive without it and those who, once they receive it, will resume their autonomous, productive lives. Government spending, on the other hand, is "Category IV spending," or an entity spending someone else's money on someone else, with the government having no direct stimulus to ensure the most cost-efficient and consequentially effective allocation of resources. After all, whether or not the government relief program accomplishes its stated purpose, the government will continue to receive an indefinite supply of funds through the taxpayers. Thus, in government aid, there is no incentive to keep aid cost-efficient.
Moreover, this inexhaustible supply of funds implies that, unlike private individuals, who will supply aid for a limited time with the expectation of the recipients' resumption of an autonomous condition not requiring aid, the government can, under pretexts of compassion, afford to give this aid to so-called "victims" indefinitely, thus creating a myriad of money drains like today's farm subsidies (a direct violation of Cleveland's policy of no federal aid to farmers), welfare programs, rehabilitation programs that do not rehabilitate, and Medicaid for drug addicts. Thus, the former expectation of the victims recovering from their conditions transforms into the expectation of the victims continuing to rely on the perpetual magic fount of assistance, fueled, of course, by money unjustly taken from good, productive citizens. Thereby does government, through furnishing this manner of assistance, become the "paternal" entity Cleveland warned us of and discourage otherwise generous and charitable people from helping the new class of perpetually dependent grown-up infants the government has created. After all, a prudent private citizen would not invest his funds into a building that will never be completed or a product that will never be marketed. Nor should he be expected to invest in a person who will never improve as a result of the investment.
Furthermore, government assistance to the tsunami victims will deprive those forced to assist under such circumstances of the ability to practice the moral virtues of benevolence and generosity that private aid entails. According to philosopher Ayn Rand, "The moral is the chosen." The very reason why the concept of morality has any value to an individual is that the individual has the free will to choose to act morally in the face of an alternative. An action that an individual is forced to perform by someone else, be it a government or a private agent (whose use of force would classify him as a criminal), adds nothing to an individual's moral integrity, because, even if he would have done this action independently, he cannot be credited as its initiator, for he had no choice in the matter. Somebody else made the decision for him and enforced it, be it through direct compulsion or the threat of force.
In Rand's words, "Morality ends where a gun begins." Indeed, the government's deprivation of another $350 million from already heavily burdened taxpayers is tantamount to putting a gun to the taxpayers' heads and telling them, "Your money, or your life." The taxpayer has but to try not cooperating with this aid allocation to verify the truth of such an assertion. Almost everyone reading this has at some time been a benefactor, host, or patron of some individual or organization, in at least as minor a way as inviting the beneficiary over for tea. Is this the way he would wish to be treated by his beneficiary, or by any intermediaries that might exist between them? And is there much difference between biting the hand that feeds one, and threatening to bite it if it does not?
Lastly, our Founding Fathers established the United States under the premise that "that government is best which governs least." Indeed, the sole function of government is to enforce individuals' natural rights to life, liberty, and property, formulated by John Locke as prerogatives to action and the ability to keep what one already has, rather than the reception of positive goods from somebody else. In other words, rights are negative obligations, not positive ones, and the proper role of government does not extend to natural disasters. It only extends to people and the barring of people from inflicting harm upon others.
Natural disasters are unfortunate and, indeed, devastating, but nobody's rights are violated in them, for individuals maintain the ability to act in full accordance with their free will in the aftermath of the disaster. The only manner in which rights can be violated is when a man is forced by another to perform a course of action he would not have himself chosen. Thus, the only legitimate function of government is to protect man from other men, and from the government itself, which, in its modern Leviathan scope, is the chief violator of individual rights.
Nobody can have a right to disaster relief, however undeserved the calamity afflicting him might have been, for a right to positive goods implies an obligation on the part of somebody else to provide them. This means that the provider's life, liberty, and interests must be made subordinate, for a time at least, to the needs of the victim, thus creating a hierarchy of value that rewards need at the expense of ability, a purely Marxist notion antithetical to the founding principles of America. If government rewards need and penalizes ability in this manner, need, or pretend need, will eventually become more profitable than ability, and more people shall be inclined to enter a state of need or fabricate their need so as to receive government handouts, hence the sorry spectacle of welfare fraud in modern America on a colossal scale, or the phenomenon of farm lobbies trying to maintain and increase subsidies for some of the most financially successful farmers in the world, cases that could easily repeat themselves in the realm of disaster relief.
As horrified as I may be by the damage inflicted in this unforeseen tragedy, I am more horrified when the sanctity of the most fundamental principles of justice, reason, morality, and natural law is utterly transgressed by the United States government, which currently seems oblivious to the examples set for the correct application of original American values by such men as the Founding Fathers and Grover Cleveland. Disasters, however terrible, are temporary and can be recovered from. The consequences of a loss of fidelity to principles, on the other hand, cannot be undone, for principles are permanent and universal, and, without their guidance in proper decision making, there can exist nothing but perpetual suffering for individuals, both the givers and the receivers. Acting with the alleged intention of alleviating suffering, the government, through its involvement in tsunami relief, will only serve to perpetuate this suffering on a scale that only a welfare state is capable of.
I wonder how often we do this? Is it just this time, because of the hge numbers?
I was going to give a good sum (for me) to the relief effort. After Bush gave $350 million I figured that I already gave through my taxes.
I pick this comment out because I have some personal experience in the health care industry. First, I'd love to see the author document how he came up with the number of "milllions of consumer deaths". Secondly, how he can assign them as the result of "unnecessarily stringent tests". Finally, is it then his contention that no lives have been saved though such tests having either disqualified druges from the market because they were either ineffectual or dangerous, or having caused the use of such drugs to be modified to minimize side effects that were discovered though the result of testing?
Then I guess the civil unrest from populous nations with distressed and overburdened economies from the tsunami destruction won't really ripple out to the US in the form of economic upheavels, immigration issues or mass recruitment by Islamofascists.
What a country if this "Two-Party Cartel" had these principles
Amen!
We would have a lot more money to donate if the government wasn't seizing half our wages for spending on the causes THEY want to support. What would you do with a 50% raise?
Does the author even mention that the US military was the single group most able to provide the most aid in the shortest amount of time? I suppose he thinks it was immoral to send our forces to Indonesia.
"Then I guess the civil unrest from populous nations with distressed and overburdened economies from the tsunami destruction won't really ripple out to the US in the form of economic upheavels, immigration issues or mass recruitment by Islamofascists."
Welcome to FR...
Anyway assuming you're not a troll, the area's economy is already distressed, no amount of government aid will solve that.
Immigration issues? The refuse of the third world already immigrate here at will any time they can to leech off the taxpayers, so this changes nothing.
Islamic recruitment? They are already recruiting as many killers as they can. Shoveling billions of US taxpayer dollars at them won't change this.
He would. But perhaps if the federal gov't were reimbursed by private charity, it wouldn't be so bad. I think in this case, given your point, an exception could be made to the principle of not supporting charity at the barrel of a gun.
I have to agree with the general premise of the evil of "coercive philanthropy". "A Christmas Carol" also makes the point quite well.
James Madison was quite clear on this. The Constitution does not authorize the expenditure of federal funds on benevolence, no matter how worthy the cause.
But, hey, it's a living document don't ya know.
I have just had the greatest idea ever.
1. Eliminate taxation deductions for charitable donations, except those
2. Voluntary contributions to The American Peoples Fund, which provides all funding for
3. US Government charitable assistance, which at any time is limited to
4. the actual amount of the APF reserve.
It would work.
Nobody gets what this fellow is saying anymore. We are so far down the road to socializm already that I often fear we'll never get back.
RonF: "First, I'd love to see the author document how he came up with the number of "milllions of consumer deaths". Secondly, how he can assign them as the result of "unnecessarily stringent tests". Finally, is it then his contention that no lives have been saved though such tests having either disqualified druges from the market because they were either ineffectual or dangerous, or having caused the use of such drugs to be modified to minimize side effects that were discovered though the result of testing?"
1. Let us say that the drug in question is a cancer drug. It takes perhaps 10-13 years on average for a drug to undergo the extensive tests the FDA requires of it before it can be marketed. In 10-13 years, how many people will die of even the particular brand of cancer that this drug, had it been marketed sooner, would have been able to treat successfully? While we can never attach an exact number on a hypothetical, it is reasonable to expect that, in this manner, millions of patients of common serious diseases will be affected.
2. Milton Friedman, in "Free to Choose," provided a wonderful explanation of the incentives that the FDA places on regulatory overseers to over-test rather than under-test, to be nitpicky about any remote possibility of the potential presence of side effects in a drug, because the overseer's name will be smeared with negative publicity if he allows the drug to pass the FDA's standards and, later, the drug happens to have had inadvertent side effects. If the drug does not happen to have such side effects, he will not be blamed, even if the delay caused by testing resulted in numerous deaths in the meantime. Thus, rather than just test where testing is reasonable and cost-efficient, the FDA mandates tests regarding every possible contingency, thus creating immense gaps between a the time a drug could feasibly be marketed and the time it actually is.
3. I am not denying the need for tests altogether. I am merely stating that these tests ought to be performed on the free market by individual companies, without any oversight agency setting standards on issues that it cannot have a better knowledge of than the company and the consumers themselves. Health care businesses ought to decide for themselves what degree of testing is necessary, and, if consumers agree with their choice, they will buy their products, thus rewarding competent choices.
I am
G. Stolyarov II
RonF: "First, I'd love to see the author document how he came up with the number of "milllions of consumer deaths". Secondly, how he can assign them as the result of "unnecessarily stringent tests". Finally, is it then his contention that no lives have been saved though such tests having either disqualified druges from the market because they were either ineffectual or dangerous, or having caused the use of such drugs to be modified to minimize side effects that were discovered though the result of testing?"
1. Let us say that the drug in question is a cancer drug. It takes perhaps 10-13 years on average for a drug to undergo the extensive tests the FDA requires of it before it can be marketed. In 10-13 years, how many people will die of even the particular brand of cancer that this drug, had it been marketed sooner, would have been able to treat successfully? While we can never attach an exact number on a hypothetical, it is reasonable to expect that, in this manner, millions of patients of common serious diseases will be affected.
2. Milton Friedman, in "Free to Choose," provided a wonderful explanation of the incentives that the FDA places on regulatory overseers to over-test rather than under-test, to be nitpicky about any remote possibility of the potential presence of side effects in a drug, because the overseer's name will be smeared with negative publicity if he allows the drug to pass the FDA's standards and, later, the drug happens to have had inadvertent side effects. If the drug does not happen to have such side effects, he will not be blamed, even if the delay caused by testing resulted in numerous deaths in the meantime. Thus, rather than just test where testing is reasonable and cost-efficient, the FDA mandates tests regarding every possible contingency, thus creating immense gaps between a the time a drug could feasibly be marketed and the time it actually is.
3. I am not denying the need for tests altogether. I am merely stating that these tests ought to be performed on the free market by individual companies, without any oversight agency setting standards on issues that it cannot have a better knowledge of than the company and the consumers themselves. Health care businesses ought to decide for themselves what degree of testing is necessary, and, if consumers agree with their choice, they will buy their products, thus rewarding competent choices.
I am
G. Stolyarov II
Surely you meant filosofer...
If there's a single drug in the pipeline that promises to have life-saving effect on millions of patients, it's not going to take 10 to 13 years to get through testing. These things get fast-tracked now. The vast majority of drugs are much more specific than this.
The other thing to consider is how many people have been saved because the testing protocols have eliminated drugs that were either ineffective (thus keeping patients from wasting time and money using drugs that don't work instead of ones that do) or harmful; cancer drugs are designed to kill cells, and testing often finds that while they kill cancer cells, they also kill healthy cells and their owners.
While I haven't read Milton Friedman's book, I'll stipulate that a regulator's career is more likely to suffer from under-testing than over-testing. And there have been efforts to fix that. However, I have an issue with this statement:
I am merely stating that these tests ought to be performed on the free market by individual companies, without any oversight agency setting standards on issues that it cannot have a better knowledge of than the company and the consumers themselves.
The free market also has it's incentives, and even with regulatory oversight they have historically often not operated in favor of the consumer. Corporate officers often tend to worry about short-term financial objectives and push a drug to market, fooling themselves that the long-term effects will be minimal or non-existent, or that they can destroy or bury the records of any problems. By the time that reality catches up, people have died. And I don't buy that consumers have more expertise in the health care issues surrounding new drugs undergoing testing than a regulatory agency filled with doctors, etc., that have specialized education and have run and reviewed numerous drug testing protocols and studies.
When I buy a car, I know something about cars. I know that companies that sell defective cars are likely to go out of business. I also know that if I buy a defective car I can get it fixed under warranty, and that my biggest problems will be loss of money and services.
When I buy a cancer drug I probably know little about cancer and almost nothing about how cancer drugs work in general or the specific drug in question. And it'll take me a while to get up to speed. And if the drug fails, I'll be dead and what happens to the company won't matter. The free market works macroscopically here, but you end up with dead people. Individually it poses a much different risk than buying a car.
RonF wrote: "If there's a single drug in the pipeline that promises to have life-saving effect on millions of patients, it's not going to take 10 to 13 years to get through testing. These things get fast-tracked now. The vast majority of drugs are much more specific than this."
MR. STOLYAROV: The best recent example of this NOT happening was ImClone's anti-cancer drug, Erbitrux, which, for months and years, the FDA threatened to not approve, but finally reneged on the threat. The threat itself, however, sparked a massive selling spree of ImClone stock and the entire unjustified Martha Stewart trial. As a result, ImClone's reputation has been so tarnished that it will not likely be able to market the drug effectively even though it now has FDA approval.
Moreover, is the life of every individual not significant? Just because a given drug treats a rare disease does not mean that the emergency situation faced by patients of said disease is any less imminent. A lot of them, especially patients of terminal diseases, would wish to be treated NOW, even if the drug has not been investigated as thoroughly as it could be, since to wait would mean to die. In a free market, they would be given that option, but, presently, the FDA decides that they ought to die in order to prod the drug for every conceivable side effect it could produce. To add to this, there are numerous rare diseases, and, even if their patients were the sole ones affected by the FDA (which is not true, by the way), the number would still add up to a considerable sum. I would, however, also argue that if the FDA's prohibitions on the marketing of drugs destroy at least one life, that organization is already immoral, just as a murderer who kills only one person is immoral.
RonF wrote: "The other thing to consider is how many people have been saved because the testing protocols have eliminated drugs that were either ineffective (thus keeping patients from wasting time and money using drugs that don't work instead of ones that do) or harmful; cancer drugs are designed to kill cells, and testing often finds that while they kill cancer cells, they also kill healthy cells and their owners."
MR. STOLYAROV: Still, I contend that the company who releases such drugs on the market without ruling out such harmful possibilities will quickly lose customership. On the free market, however, there is most often a deterrent effect that prevents companies from making such errors before the fact. The very fear of losing customership often in itself stimulates companies to tread carefully, but not *obsessively*, before releasing the new drug.
In some cases, like those of terminally ill patients, however, the customer would *want* access to an incomplete drug as a lesser evil than no drug at all. The government should not prohibit these people from trying to save their lives.
RonF: "Corporate officers often tend to worry about short-term financial objectives and push a drug to market, fooling themselves that the long-term effects will be minimal or non-existent, or that they can destroy or bury the records of any problems."
MR. STOLYAROV: Simply put, the corporate officers who do so tend to lose customers and profits. They fail more often than those who can plan for the long term and see the entire consequences of their decisions. The best entrepreneurs in history, such as Rockefeller, Ford, and Gates, were able to see decades and perhaps even centuries into the future in order to chart the courses they set for themselves. They repeatedly outperformed the less prudent businessmen. The free market cannot guarantee corporate competence, but it provides an *incentive* for such competence to exist; he who has it will outcompete him who has it not. Thus, having it is desired by many.
RonF: "When I buy a cancer drug I probably know little about cancer and almost nothing about how cancer drugs work in general or the specific drug in question. And it'll take me a while to get up to speed. And if the drug fails, I'll be dead and what happens to the company won't matter. The free market works macroscopically here, but you end up with dead people. Individually it poses a much different risk than buying a car."
MR. STOLYAROV: If you are not allowed to buy the drug by the FDA, you are far more likely to be dead as well, since cancers almost never cure themselves. Thus, the risk on the free market is far smaller, especially if the company is doing its best to *prevent* consumer deaths so as not to spoil its relations with customers and the public.
I am
G. Stolyarov II
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