That's a keeper right there. You just conjured up the memory of a conversation I had with a neighbor a few years ago that convinced me that Rand's villains are real. In my Seattle days I used to work for a biopharmaceutical firm - Publius may even recall which one - that made the Big Strike and came up with a very effective and successful drug. That one cost between $350-500 million in R&D - the amount is indeterminate because your R&D doesn't stop once the drug hits the market, you have to keep researching to unearth unexpected effects. (This particular drug turned out to be harmful to active tuberculosis patients, for example - best of luck figuring that one out in a test population).
So this neighbor of mine confronted me one day about how much the drug cost and I explained that it was really expensive to produce due to the process being sort of exotic and she says, "Well, you should find a way to make it cheaper." Yeah, I said, that's what process science is all about, but in the meantime there are patients who need the stuff, and anyway the R&D for that new process would cost us money...she wasn't listening. She was absolutely convinced that the whole thing was a plot to squeeze money out of sick people.
My mistake was mentioning our next drug, one that looked promising and (worst case) didn't fail until very late in the process, costing us maybe another half a billion, and she was outraged that patients using one drug should have to pay money to develop other ones. I told her we had to do that or the company would fold and there wouldn't be any new drugs for anyone, and her reply was, "Well, that's what you get for soaking your patients."
She participated in a drive somewhat later to turn the successful one into a generic so the prices would go down. Remember what Orren Boyle did to Rearden Metal? That's exactly what she wanted to do. What was scary was that this woman actually wanted to hurt people - I'm not kidding, "the government" seizing the company, the bank accounts (that's where the filthy profits were), making the researchers and manufacturers work for free (yes, slave labor) in order to make up for the exploitation we'd committed - I got to thinking that if this woman were ever in the position to do that stuff, she would, and would feel perfectly justified about it.
Atlas Shrugged didn't come to mind at the time but it probably should have because she's in there. The psychological mechanism was very simple - she thought she'd found "injustice" and therefore anyone having anything to do with it needed to be punished. You read AS and you think hey, it's a novel, people like these are caricatures, but they're not, they're all around us. You can never be disarmed in the presence of these people, they will kill you, or order someone else to kill you. And feel great about it.
There's cognitive dissonance for ya. You tell her the consequences of NOT doing the way it is today, and she equates that with the consequences FOR doing it that way. Moron.
I find it astonishing people like your neighbor don't stop to think that drugs available today, drugs that save lives, weren't available 20 years ago.
Your neighbor doesn't want to stop and think that such life saving drugs weren't available at any price 20 years ago.
Great comments on this thread, Mr. Thedrill.
And best of luck on the book.