It appears as if American capitalism is brutal and this brutality began during slavery

[ralfy]

What are you getting at?

For your first point, what you have are not "capitalist rules" but the absence of such, as the patent holder has no say on the matter, and what you call the "anticapitalist" government allows anyone capable of manufacturing the drug to do so. Given such a circumstance, there is less incentive for pharmas to develop drugs.

For your second point, when an "anticapitalist" government prohibits "any capitalist in America from selling [drugs] unless she 'acquires the right,' it does so because those are the terms given by the patent holder, which also happens to be a capitalist. Those are part of "capitalist rules and a capitalist society."

The patent on Daraprim expired over forty years ago.

I am referring to drugs in general.

 

[Jarhyn]

The patent on Daraprim expired over forty years ago.

I am referring to drugs in general.

Then if capitalism doesn't support the development of new drugs, maybe the development of new drugs should not be a matter of private, but rather public, investment. And, oh, look, it already is as a function of research departments of public universities.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The patent on Daraprim expired over forty years ago.

I am referring to drugs in general.

Then if capitalism doesn't support the development of new drugs, maybe the development of new drugs should not be a matter of private, but rather public, investment. And, oh, look, it already is as a function of research departments of public universities.

They do some, but we are seriously lacking in developments of new classes of drugs. Specifically, look at antibiotics. The drug companies aren't too interested because they aren't going to make that much off them, but society really needs them. If the public funding model worked we would see a lot of funding here and we don't.

 

[Jarhyn]

Then if capitalism doesn't support the development of new drugs, maybe the development of new drugs should not be a matter of private, but rather public, investment. And, oh, look, it already is as a function of research departments of public universities.

They do some, but we are seriously lacking in developments of new classes of drugs. Specifically, look at antibiotics. The drug companies aren't too interested because they aren't going to make that much off them, but society really needs them. If the public funding model worked we would see a lot of funding here and we don't.

That last sentence is some real "starve the beast" kind of bullshit. It doesn't work because of self-sabotage.

 

[Bomb#20]

Note, however, that your approach to testing is far from adequate. Just because you produced a batch that's suitable doesn't mean your process is adequate to ensure every batch is either suitable or will be rejected.

Fair enough; but that isn't a reason for certification to be a government monopoly. A liability insurer will know better than I do what's adequate.

(...Pyrimethamine isn't exactly a shining star in the safety department which is why we are in this mess--the number of patients using it these days is very low, the market won't really support two providers.)

Huh? The market does support two providers, and more. The U.S. government is just keeping most of them from selling here.

Does the name "thalidomide" mean anything to you?

Of course. Thalidomide is what created the FDA's culture of "No". Thalidomide is why FDA employees can expect career advancement for saving people by saying "No" but no reward for saving people by saying "Yes". Thalidomide is why the FDA treats an identifiable person as vastly more worthy of protecting than a statistical person. The 3000-odd Americans it saved from thalidomide may have ended up costing us a hundred Americans apiece in consequent early deaths. The irony is that the FDA's Frances Kelsey fixation evidently wasn't even necessary to save those 3000 Americans: she stopped thalidomide here by applying the old pre-1962 regulations, before the FDA got turned up to eleven in a misguided attempt to get her outcome every time.

I do agree that we would be better served by being more willing to import drugs. However, I suspect it would end up being a very bad thing--consider the World Trade Organization. Saying we will only import from sources that meet standards equivalent to ours doesn't fly very well. Ever notice how dolphin-safe tuna disappeared? WTO at work--they declared permitting such labeling as anti-competitive.

The WTO isn't sovereign. We are. If the WTO got its way on dolphin-safe tuna, that just means dolphin-safe tuna isn't important to Congress. People being able to afford life-saving medication apparently isn't important to Congress either, but it should be.

 

[Bomb#20]

The patent on Daraprim expired over forty years ago.

I am referring to drugs in general.

Then we're talking at cross purposes. Southernhybrid and I were referring specifically to Daraprim. Sorry if that wasn't clear. A patent is certainly part of "capitalist rules", but getting the government to enforce a monopoly after the patent expires isn't. As the Constitution says, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

Then if capitalism doesn't support the development of new drugs, maybe the development of new drugs should not be a matter of private, but rather public, investment. And, oh, look, it already is as a function of research departments of public universities.

But capitalism does support the development of new drugs -- a lot more new drugs come out of industry than out of universities. Why wouldn't we want to keep both development pathways in operation? New drugs are a good thing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Then if capitalism doesn't support the development of new drugs, maybe the development of new drugs should not be a matter of private, but rather public, investment. And, oh, look, it already is as a function of research departments of public universities.

They do some, but we are seriously lacking in developments of new classes of drugs. Specifically, look at antibiotics. The drug companies aren't too interested because they aren't going to make that much off them, but society really needs them. If the public funding model worked we would see a lot of funding here and we don't.

That last sentence is some real "starve the beast" kind of bullshit. It doesn't work because of self-sabotage.

What are you talking about?

The left likes to pretend it's government money that drives drug research but if it really were we would see more work on things like antibiotics.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Fair enough; but that isn't a reason for certification to be a government monopoly. A liability insurer will know better than I do what's adequate.

Insurance does a pretty poor job of handling low-probability high-consequence events.

Huh? The market does support two providers, and more. The U.S. government is just keeping most of them from selling here.

I meant for a US-sized market.

The WTO isn't sovereign. We are. If the WTO got its way on dolphin-safe tuna, that just means dolphin-safe tuna isn't important to Congress. People being able to afford life-saving medication apparently isn't important to Congress either, but it should be.

The only way out of the mess would be to withdraw from the WTO. The Pyrimethamine mess is small potatoes compared to the harm that would cause.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

And now for another point of view.

Why They Keep Trying to Blame Capitalists for Slavery

In recent months, several national media outlets and public figures have begun pushing the idea that modern capitalism is built on the foundation of slavery. Last week, while linking to a New Your Times article on the topic, Bernie Sanders claimed "America’s rise relied on treating Black people as literal property."Meanwhile, arecent Vox headline proclaims "How slavery became the building block of the American economy."

Conveniently, this narrative is perfect for doing two things at once. It sets up capitalism as the moral heir of slavery. And at the same time, it pushes the idea that those who lead a relatively comfortable life under the capitalist system are benefiting from the toil of slaves from long ago. By this thinking, if every modern day business owner, entrepreneur, and middle-class property owner has benefited from capitalism, then that person — whether or not his ancestors were in any way connected to the slave economy — has also benefited from slavery. If the strategy succeeds, then modern day capitalists can be shown to be, in a sense, on the same moral plane as the slave masters of old. And, of course, capitalism is also shown to be morally repugnant.

Fortunately, the evidence doesn't support the theory.The slave economy was never the engine of American economic growth, and capitalist systems never needed slavery to succeed.[1]

Reviving the Arguments of Slave Owners

Modern-day anti-capitalists aren't the first to use this tactic. This version of history claiming everyone gets rich off slavery has a lot in common with the propaganda spun by slave owners in the antebellum South. The goal was to attack the idea that non-slaveholding northerners were morally superior to slave-owning southerners. The message was "we are all equally responsible for slavery."[2]

One part of the strategy consisted of claiming that some northern abolitionists were hypocrites for participating in the slave trade as owners of shipping firms that served the slave economy.

As recounted by Matthew Karp in This Vast Southern Empire, pro-slavery politician — and US diplomat in Brazil — Henry A. Wise chronicled the hypocrisy of northern merchants who claimed to oppose slavery while making money off the slave trade in Brazil:

The Americans involved in the trade, Wise reported, "are all from North of Balt[imore ]," and northern abolitionists were deeply complicit in the cruel traffic. One notorious ship, which landed about six hundred slaves in Brazil, "was owned by a Quaker of Delaware who would not even eat slave sugar." Another American vessel, Wise declared, "which has made several trips to the coast under the charter party of notorious slave traders here, is also the owner of an abolition newspaper in Bangor, Maine.

While this no doubt made some northern merchants look bad, these claims nonetheless failed to make the case that northerner farmers, mine owners, and other capitalists in general were getting rich from slavery.

Far more useful in spreading the blame about slavery was the "King Cotton" argument which pushed the notion that most of the industrialized world depended on the cotton economy. Karp continues:

Slaveholders in the 1850s seldom passed up an opportunity to sketch the inexorable syllogism of King Cotton: the American South produced nearly all the world's usable raw cotton; this cotton fueled the industrial development of the North Atlantic; therefore, the advanced economies of France, the northern United States, and Great Britain were ruled, in effect, by southern planters.

The conclusions southerners drew from this King Cotton model were no less grandiose than their premises. De Bow's encyclopedia declared that cotton was "the most beneficent product that commerce has ever transported for the comfort of the human family."

Without southern cotton, it was claimed, northern industry — assumed to be dependent on cotton for textiles — would suffer a crippling blow. Thus, the northern and European capitalists were thought to be at the mercy of the cotton producers, and to owe their success to the slave economy.

So widespread was this belief that southern political theorists believed the South ought to forget about diversifying its economy. George Fitzhugh, for example, insisted the South should focus on putting all its eggs in the cotton basket:

It matters little who makes our shoes. Indeed, the South will commit a fatal blunder if, in its haste to become nominally independent, it loses its present engines of power, and thereby ceases to be really independent. Cotton is king; and rice, sugar, Indian corn, what, and tobacco, are his chief ministers. ... We should not jeopard this great lever of power in the haste to become, like Englishmen, shop-keepers, cobblers, and common carriers for the universe.[3]

Ultimately, so confident were many southerners that they could use the cotton economy to control the world, Sen. James Hammond of South Carolina concluded: "[Y]ou dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it."

Needless to say, Hammond and the purveyors of the King Cotton theory were wrong about the extent of global political power generated by cotton.

It turned out that the world could survive without southern cotton, and — more importantly — the world did not need cotton produced specifically by slaves. Nor was it true that the world needed the "cheap labor" of slavery to produce goods and services economically. Northern immigrants disproved this even before the war.

The pretensions about the "necessity" of slave cotton became more abundantly clear after the war. Even in the wake of the Union army's scorched earth campaign against the South, cotton production began to recover within only a few years of the war's end. Cotton production, now using non-slave labor, had returned to peak levels by the 1870s. By the end of the nineteenth century, cotton production was more than double what it had been during the antebellum years.

Moreover, even during the slave-labor era, the northern economy was hardly doomed to failure without southern cotton. Textiles were not the only thing people needed to meet their basic needs. And slaves were not the only thing merchants could make money shipping. Northern states produced immense amounts of food stuffs. Northern merchants shipped growing amounts of crops, building materials, and other resources unconnected to the cotton economy.

Rather than be an engine of the world's economy, it is more likely the slave economy held the southern economy back. According to Karl Smith at Bloomberg this week:

Just before independence, the per capita gross domestic product of the South, adjusted for inflation, was $3,100 per year — compared with just $1,832 in New England. Over the next 60 years Southern per capita GDP actually declined, to $2,521. British demand for cotton helped it to recover to $4,000 per person in 1860, but by then the comparable figure for New England was $5,337.

Slave labor was no match for canals, railroads, steel mills and shipyards. Slavery — and the parochial rent-seeking culture it promoted — inhibited the growth of capitalism in the South.

The fact that many industries in the US North and in Western Europe benefited from slave-produced southern cotton does not prove that these economies needed slave cotton to thrive or survive. The world's industrial economies have gotten along just fine without it.

Nonetheless, certain leftists are now trying to revive the old antebellum theory that the capitalist economy is built on the backs of slaves. The slave drivers of old would no doubt agree. But the theory is just as wrong now as it was then.


[1] See Karl Smith's "How Slavery Hurt the US Economy" in Bloomberg":

The reality is that cotton played a relatively small role in the long-term growth of the US economy. The economics of slavery were probably detrimental to the rise of US manufacturing and almost certainly toxic to the economy of the South. In short: The US succeeded in spite of slavery, not because of it. ... In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, cotton production represented just 5 percent of the US economy. ... Still, it might be argued that the growth of a textile industry — in either the US or Great Britain — would not have been possible without mass quantities of US cotton. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be true

[2] Democratic editor Duff Green contended the slave economy was a unifying factor for all (non-enslaved) Americans, declaring slavery "unites the interests of the several states, furnishes the basis of foreign commerce … [and] constitutes an element of their common prosperity."

[3] Quoted in John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: Volume 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

 

[Trausti]

Imagine if the US never had slavery. It’d be as impoverished as those other Anglo shitholes: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And if only North America had imported many more slaves, the US could have been much more prosperous. Like Brazil.

 

[Jarhyn]

Imagine if the US never had slavery. It’d be as impoverished as those other Anglo shitholes: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And if only North America had imported many more slaves, the US could have been much more prosperous. Like Brazil.

It's almost like if you forcibly prevent some segment of your population from accessing education for a long time, problems foment in those population segments.

 

[Trausti]

Imagine if the US never had slavery. It’d be as impoverished as those other Anglo shitholes: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And if only North America had imported many more slaves, the US could have been much more prosperous. Like Brazil.

It's almost like if you forcibly prevent some segment of your population from accessing education for a long time, problems foment I. Those population segments.

Well, ok. But the premise that the US owes it’s economic success to slavery is obviously bullshit.

 

[Jarhyn]

Imagine if the US never had slavery. It’d be as impoverished as those other Anglo shitholes: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And if only North America had imported many more slaves, the US could have been much more prosperous. Like Brazil.

It's almost like if you forcibly prevent some segment of your population from accessing education for a long time, problems foment I. Those population segments.

Well, ok. But the premise that the US owes it’s economic success to slavery is obviously bullshit.

No, it still follows: the north of North America was physically separated from the bulk of the slave trade. We economically benefited from slavery, but indirectly: the textile factories of the north had cheap raw materials FROM slavery, but none of the actual uneducated slaves to worry about. And while the north still had slaves in their own right, they were wage-slaves and they still got access to public education.

As a result, we have a southern reach that is shitty and uneducated, and a northern reach with economic prosperity.

It's almost as if slavery causes economic benefit when you don't also have to deal directly with the consequences of uneducated slaves.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The article I cited says that the "cheap raw materials from slavery" is way over-hyped, and it was the rail roads, canals, factories of many sorts not just textiles, and diversified food farming that were a larger contributor to Northern economic success. By the time of the Civil War, the northern GPD was higher than the southern GDP, both overall and per capita.

 

[Politesse]

Wait so... you're saying that if America didn't benefit from slavery economically in the long run, then capitalism can't have been the motivator for slavery? How would mass chattel slavery have made any sense whatsoever without a capitalistic incentive? Whether or not it worked has nothing to do with motive or opportunity.

I assume this argument makes sense only if you assume in the first place that capitalist motives are always good for America. They aren't. Jason makes this point above himself (I assume inadvertently) by admitting that none of America's prosperity would have been possible under a purely capitalist system (canals, railroads, and government subsidized food crops having been critical to our success as a nation).

 

[Trausti]

Right. Slavery was non-existant before American capitalism.

 

[Politesse]

Right. Slavery was non-existant before American capitalism.

Another weird argument. If I prove that wheels existed before capitalism, does that prove that a man hammering wheels all day on a GM production line can't have capitalist motives for doing so? What's with all the non sequiturs today?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Wait so... you're saying that if America didn't benefit from slavery economically in the long run, then capitalism can't have been the motivator for slavery? How would mass chattel slavery have made any sense whatsoever without a capitalistic incentive? Whether or not it worked has nothing to do with motive or opportunity.

The article pointed out that slavery held back the south and did not benefit the north.

 

[Politesse]

Wait so... you're saying that if America didn't benefit from slavery economically in the long run, then capitalism can't have been the motivator for slavery? How would mass chattel slavery have made any sense whatsoever without a capitalistic incentive? Whether or not it worked has nothing to do with motive or opportunity.

The article pointed out that slavery held back the south and did not benefit the north.

Yes, it did. No disagreement. It was never designed to benefit "the South", or any other nation. Collective good is not the primary goal of any capitalist system.

 

[Trausti]

Right. Slavery was non-existant before American capitalism.

Another weird argument. If I prove that wheels existed before capitalism, does that prove that a man hammering wheels all day on a GM production line can't have capitalist motives for doing so? What's with all the non sequiturs today?

You're wrote that capitalism was the motivator for slavery. Who knew Mohamed (let shit reign on his head) was a capitalist?