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

[southernhybrid]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy.

Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation.

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”

I've always thought that racism was just as bad, sometimes worse in the northeast than the south, having lived in both places. I didn't know how much the north benefitted from slavery after the north ended slavery. What we are taught in US history as teenagers leaves out a lot of the truth. The difference between north and south is that racism in the south is more open, while it's not as obvious in the north. But, that's a subject for another time.

When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.”

Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity.

Today modern technology has facilitated unremitting workplace supervision, particularly in the service sector. Companies have developed software that records workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks, along with randomly capturing screenshots multiple times a day. Modern-day workers are subjected to a wide variety of surveillance strategies, from drug tests and closed-circuit video monitoring to tracking apps and even devices that sense heat and motion. A 2006 survey found that more than a third of companies with work forces of 1,000 or more had staff members who read through employees’ outbound emails. The technology that accompanies this workplace supervision can make it feel futuristic. But it’s only the technology that’s new. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations, which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force.

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the nation’s first corporate Big Brother was the overseer. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. Plantation owners used a combination of incentives and punishments to squeeze as much as possible out of enslaved workers.

Slavery did supplement white workers with what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage,” which allowed them to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement. But this, too, served the interests of money. Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people. Just as in today’s gig economy, day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners.

I apologize for quoting so much, but this piece is extremely long and I don't know if all of you can access it. I only quoted about 10 or so percent of it. Sometimes the NYT allows links to be read by non subscribers, but sometimes it doesn't. There are also several other pieces linked to the article that can be read. I hope if you can access the entire article, you will read all of it, when you have time. I learned a lot that I never knew before, and I've read many books on the history of slavery, etc. I just never realized how much influence the plantations had on our current system of capitalism. Don't get me wrong. As the article points out, many capitalistic countries have regulations that make the work place much more fair. And, if you're a small business owner, who pays your workers a fair wage and provides decent benefits to them, this isn't about you. And, I still believe that capitalism, while very flawed, is the best economic system, assuming it is regulated and workers aren't treated as chattel. Pure socialism and communism have always turned out even worse. Marx died before he saw his ideas put into place. He was a smart man, so I'd like to believe that if he saw how his policies were implemented, he would realize he was wrong, and perhaps come up with a better solution. But, I digress. This isn't a thread about socialism.

I've worked for some private companies that were very fair to their employees, but I also did contract work for one, who paid their employees what might be called "slave wages", who offered no sick time, no health insurance and almost no other paid time off. These small business owners yelled at people, fired them without warning, etc. Sadly, this is common in health care agencies and long term care facilities. It's not about care anymore. It's all about profits. And, most long term care facilities in the US are now owned by large corporations. The care is often terrible and the workers are treated poorly. Due to a shortage of health care workers, conditions have become even worse for the residents of these places.

As far as big corporations go, I think they've become more oppressive over the last few decades. My husband worked for Carters, the makers of children's clothing, and we saw things get worse over the ten years that he spent working there in IT. At first, the hours were reasonable, and the employees were treated fairly. But, then manufacturing was sent outside the country, f its to Mexico and Costa Rica, but eventually to China, where labor was the cheapest. At the same time, he was expected to work many hours of over time, unpaid because he was salaried. Health insurance premiums began to increase and upper management acted more like tyrants. I don't think all corporations are as bad as that, but I really don't know. Perhaps some would like to share their own experiences.

The purpose of my posting this is to give those who disagree, something different to consider, as well as offering some interesting facts about the history of capitalism in the US. If you disagree, please provide some believable evidence as to why you do. Basically, why can't we make our capitalistic system more equitable? Other countries have made progress. Why can't we?

 

[Harry Bosch]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation.

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”

I've always thought that racism was just as bad, sometimes worse in the northeast than the south, having lived in both places. I didn't know how much the north benefitted from slavery after the north ended slavery. What we are taught in US history as teenagers leaves out a lot of the truth. The difference between north and south is that racism in the south is more open, while it's not as obvious in the north. But, that's a subject for another time.

When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.”

Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity.

Today modern technology has facilitated unremitting workplace supervision, particularly in the service sector. Companies have developed software that records workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks, along with randomly capturing screenshots multiple times a day. Modern-day workers are subjected to a wide variety of surveillance strategies, from drug tests and closed-circuit video monitoring to tracking apps and even devices that sense heat and motion. A 2006 survey found that more than a third of companies with work forces of 1,000 or more had staff members who read through employees’ outbound emails. The technology that accompanies this workplace supervision can make it feel futuristic. But it’s only the technology that’s new. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations, which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force.

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the nation’s first corporate Big Brother was the overseer. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. Plantation owners used a combination of incentives and punishments to squeeze as much as possible out of enslaved workers.

Slavery did supplement white workers with what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage,” which allowed them to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement. But this, too, served the interests of money. Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people. Just as in today’s gig economy, day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners.

I apologize for quoting so much, but this piece is extremely long and I don't know if all of you can access it. I only quoted about 10 or so percent of it. Sometimes the NYT allows links to be read by non subscribers, but sometimes it doesn't. There are also several other pieces linked to the article that can be read. I hope if you can access the entire article, you will read all of it, when you have time. I learned a lot that I never knew before, and I've read many books on the history of slavery, etc. I just never realized how much influence the plantations had on our current system of capitalism. Don't get me wrong. As the article points out, many capitalistic countries have regulations that make the work place much more fair. And, if you're a small business owner, who pays your workers a fair wage and provides decent benefits to them, this isn't about you. And, I still believe that capitalism, while very flawed, is the best economic system, assuming it is regulated and workers aren't treated as chattel. Pure socialism and communism have always turned out even worse. Marx died before he saw his ideas put into place. He was a smart man, so I'd like to believe that if he saw how his policies were implemented, he would realize he was wrong, and perhaps come up with a better solution. But, I digress. This isn't a thread about socialism.

I've worked for some private companies that were very fair to their employees, but I also did contract work for one, who paid their employees what might be called "slave wages", who offered no sick time, no health insurance and almost no other paid time off. These small business owners yelled at people, fired them without warning, etc. Sadly, this is common in health care agencies and long term care facilities. It's not about care anymore. It's all about profits. And, most long term care facilities in the US are now owned by large corporations. The care is often terrible and the workers are treated poorly. Due to a shortage of health care workers, conditions have become even worse for the residents of these places.

As far as big corporations go, I think they've become more oppressive over the last few decades. My husband worked for Carters, the makers of children's clothing, and we saw things get worse over the ten years that he spent working there in IT. At first, the hours were reasonable, and the employees were treated fairly. But, then manufacturing was sent outside the country, f its to Mexico and Costa Rica, but eventually to China, where labor was the cheapest. At the same time, he was expected to work many hours of over time, unpaid because he was salaried. Health insurance premiums began to increase and upper management acted more like tyrants. I don't think all corporations are as bad as that, but I really don't know. Perhaps some would like to share their own experiences.

The purpose of my posting this is to give those who disagree, something different to consider, as well as offering some interesting facts about the history of capitalism in the US. If you disagree, please provide some believable evidence as to why you do. Basically, why can't we make our capitalistic system more equitable? Other countries have made progress. Why can't we?

Well, Slavery has been around forever. Certainly since the dawn of our civilization. It continues today. I couldn't access the link. NY Times is a great newspaper. I'm going to subscribe to it someday when I have more time. But I didn't understand some of the quotes from the article above. What does excel spreadsheet and depreciation have to do with labor camps? (BTW: depreciation forces companies to delay recognizing equipment expenses into the future. Companies would pay less taxes if they could expense equipment year one, not delayed). I would agree that there are some bad companies. But there are a lot of good companies to work also.

 

[Bomb#20]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

Evidently not. If this were a capitalist society, a capitalist system and had capitalist rules, then anybody capable of doing it competently would be allowed to manufacture and sell Daraprim -- and an Australian high-school science class whipped up a batch for 40 cents a pill -- or else buy it from a reputable British pharmaceutical company for the going price in Britain -- $1 a pill -- and resell it in the U.S. for $1.50. To get $750 a pill for it in the U.S. what you need is not capitalist rules and a capitalist society, but rather an anticapitalism government that illegally* prohibits any capitalist in America from selling it unless she "acquires the rights" -- i.e., gets some government official to sign off on a piece of paper that says she's the person the government is ordering patients to pay $750 to if they want the government to give them permission to have a pill. Capitalism, my ass.

(* Every federal law telling Californian patients what drugs we can or can't buy from California manufacturers is blatantly unconstitutional. Calling what we buy and sell to one another in our own state "interstate commerce" is not "applying an expansive interpretation". It's "lying".)

 

[Horatio Parker]

Well, Slavery has been around forever. Certainly since the dawn of our civilization. It continues today. I couldn't access the link. NY Times is a great newspaper. I'm going to subscribe to it someday when I have more time. But I didn't understand some of the quotes from the article above. What does excel spreadsheet and depreciation have to do with labor camps? (BTW: depreciation forces companies to delay recognizing equipment expenses into the future. Companies would pay less taxes if they could expense equipment year one, not delayed). I would agree that there are some bad companies. But there are a lot of good companies to work also.

Not all slavery systems are the same. The US system was race based. Just one difference; traditionally, the children of slaves were born free - but not here. In antiquity, slaves were war captives or bankrupted persons. In the Barbary States, a slave could free themselves by converting to Islam(in theory anyway).

You can't just wave your hand saying we've always had slavery.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Well, Slavery has been around forever. Certainly since the dawn of our civilization. It continues today. I couldn't access the link. NY Times is a great newspaper. I'm going to subscribe to it someday when I have more time. But I didn't understand some of the quotes from the article above. What does excel spreadsheet and depreciation have to do with labor camps? (BTW: depreciation forces companies to delay recognizing equipment expenses into the future. Companies would pay less taxes if they could expense equipment year one, not delayed). I would agree that there are some bad companies. But there are a lot of good companies to work also.

Not all slavery systems are the same. The US system was race based. Just one difference; traditionally, the children of slaves were born free - but not here. In antiquity, slaves were war captives or bankrupted persons. In the Barbary States, a slave could free themselves by converting to Islam(in theory anyway).

You can't just wave your hand saying we've always had slavery.

I'm not hand waving. Do you have a source that shows that children born of slaves were born free in antiquity? I doubt the slave masters of today follow any rules. But regardless, my more subtle point was that as Americans, we tend to over dramatize our roles! Capitalism and Slavery were started before the states were founded.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Well, Slavery has been around forever. Certainly since the dawn of our civilization. It continues today. I couldn't access the link. NY Times is a great newspaper. I'm going to subscribe to it someday when I have more time. But I didn't understand some of the quotes from the article above. What does excel spreadsheet and depreciation have to do with labor camps? (BTW: depreciation forces companies to delay recognizing equipment expenses into the future. Companies would pay less taxes if they could expense equipment year one, not delayed). I would agree that there are some bad companies. But there are a lot of good companies to work also.

Not all slavery systems are the same. The US system was race based. Just one difference; traditionally, the children of slaves were born free - but not here. In antiquity, slaves were war captives or bankrupted persons. In the Barbary States, a slave could free themselves by converting to Islam(in theory anyway).

You can't just wave your hand saying we've always had slavery.

I'm not hand waving. Do you have a source that shows that children born of slaves were born free in antiquity? I doubt the slave masters of today follow any rules. But regardless, my more subtle point was that as Americans, we tend to over dramatize our roles! Capitalism and Slavery were started before the states were founded.

My source is "The Peculiar Institution" by Kenneth Stampf. Good read.

My point is not that you're hand waving, but that systems of slavery were different. America's was race based and harsh. The basic thesis makes sense to me, because slavery and cotton growing scaled along with the industrial revolution. Though it seems to me manufacturing scaling up would have need of similar if not the same tools.

 

[Bomb#20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece

Generalizations like "traditionally, the children of slaves were born free" or "traditionally, the children of slaves were born slaves" are unsupportable. There was no standard practice in antiquity -- antiquity was just too diverse for that. Different places, different times, different degrees of enslavement, and different levels of enforcement of whatever rules there nominally were all made a difference.

In Athens birth wasn't a major source of slave supply -- it appears slaves were so cheap and readily available that raising your slave's baby to an age where he was useful was simply more expensive than buying POWs or debtors or piracy victims.

The helots of Sparta were predominantly the descendants of a conquered enemy tribe. A helot baby was by default a slave too, but individual helots or whole groups were often freed (usually partially) when the state found it expedient.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Point taken.

SLAVE LAWS PASSED IN VIRGINIA:

1640 — 1660: The Critical Period: Custom to Law when Status Changed to "Servant for Life"

1639/40 - The General Assembly of Virginia specifically excludes blacks from the requirement of possessing arms
1642 - Black women are deemed tithables (taxable), creating a distinction between African and English women.
1662 - Blacks face the possibility of life servitude. The General Assembly of Virginia decides that any child born to an enslaved woman will also be a slave.

https://www.history.org/history/teaching/slavelaw.cfm

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't have time to research it right now, but in all my studies of Rome and the ancient world where slavery was an integral part of the economy, I don't recall any instance of a slave being parent to a free person.

How would slave provide for a child? There's certainly no inheritance waiting for the child of a slave.

 

[Treedbear]

...
The purpose of my posting this is to give those who disagree, something different to consider, as well as offering some interesting facts about the history of capitalism in the US. If you disagree, please provide some believable evidence as to why you do. Basically, why can't we make our capitalistic system more equitable? Other countries have made progress. Why can't we?

Making capitalism works comes down to making it easier for all adult citizens to acquire capital (i.e., savings). I think Europe is doing this by helping to prevent people from losing all their capital due to medical bills or suddenly losing a job. But if a society systematically excludes people of a certain class from earning a living that provides a sufficient wage to afford savings then it's not capitalism, now is it? When people are able to save and have the confidence of knowing they'll be able to continue to build that savings they'll naturally try to better themselves. If they don't have reason to believe that's true then they'll give up on capitalism and spend their money as soon as they get it.

 

[Politesse]

I don't know where this misinformation is coming from regarding Greek slavery. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the "facts" about ancient slavery probably originate with American scholars shortly before or after the Civil War era, and have just been getting passed along without context since then. You definitely do not get the impression, from reading actual ancient texts, that most slaves had anything other than lives of misery. There were different classes of slaves, and it mattered whose house you were joined to. To be a king's personal slave was a cushy position and you had a good chance of being eventually freed. But that is a tiny minority of the slave population, not the normal situation. And all slaves lacked some fundamental rights. In many cases the law protected slaves from crimes like rape or murder, but if there was a suit over such a crime, it was paid to their owner or to the state, not to them personally and definitely not to their spouse or children. Their situation was unlikely to improve in any way from the exercise of the law, whose goal was the proper moral conduct of citizens rather than the rights of the slaves as such.

As to family: Most Greeks thought that Athenian slaves were treated with an absurdly gentle hand, but slaves did not have legally recognized families at all under Athenian law, except for the family to which they were joined; they often married other slaves and had children, but these were informal, unrecognized unions and the children were bastards. They couldn't inherit status from their father, even if their master was also their biological father, and said master could scatter them at will. In general, the goal of most slave-owners was to avoid having such children be born in the first place, it being much cheaper to buy a slave than slowly raise one. So male and female slaves were usually housed separately, for instance. And most slaves weren't expected to live especially long anyhow, unless they were in household positions. The mines of Athens did not afford a lot of opportunities for fathering children before one's swift, torturous end. The fate of the children of brothel slaves was especially heinous; they were likely to simply be killed as a fetus or shortly after birth. That said, there were many different classes of slavery that existed at various points in time, all with their own changing legal status, so perhaps someone here knows about some particular cases that I do not. We know more about some of these slave institutions than others. In Sparta, slaves were apparently treated more brutally, and the Helots were absolutely recipients of a heritable slave caste, but we don't know as much about their legal situation. If interested in the topic, I recommend the classic "Slavery in Ancient Greece" by Yvon Garlan.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Evidently not. If this were a capitalist society, a capitalist system and had capitalist rules, then anybody capable of doing it competently would be allowed to manufacture and sell Daraprim -- and an Australian high-school science class whipped up a batch for 40 cents a pill -- or else buy it from a reputable British pharmaceutical company for the going price in Britain -- $1 a pill -- and resell it in the U.S. for $1.50. To get $750 a pill for it in the U.S. what you need is not capitalist rules and a capitalist society, but rather an anticapitalism government that illegally* prohibits any capitalist in America from selling it unless she "acquires the rights" -- i.e., gets some government official to sign off on a piece of paper that says she's the person the government is ordering patients to pay $750 to if they want the government to give them permission to have a pill. Capitalism, my ass.

(* Every federal law telling Californian patients what drugs we can or can't buy from California manufacturers is blatantly unconstitutional. Calling what we buy and sell to one another in our own state "interstate commerce" is not "applying an expansive interpretation". It's "lying".)

The patent is long expired, anybody can produce and sell Pyrimethamine. It's just that it's going to cost you a fair amount to build the plant and convince the FDA of the quality of your product. If you do that you will get in a price war, the price will be driven down to where it should be and you'll have a hard time recouping the cost of setting up for production.

These days the demand for the drug is quite low because for most purposes there are better, safer drugs.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

Evidently not. If this were a capitalist society, a capitalist system and had capitalist rules, then anybody capable of doing it competently would be allowed to manufacture and sell Daraprim -- and an Australian high-school science class whipped up a batch for 40 cents a pill -- or else buy it from a reputable British pharmaceutical company for the going price in Britain -- $1 a pill -- and resell it in the U.S. for $1.50. To get $750 a pill for it in the U.S. what you need is not capitalist rules and a capitalist society, but rather an anticapitalism government that illegally* prohibits any capitalist in America from selling it unless she "acquires the rights" -- i.e., gets some government official to sign off on a piece of paper that says she's the person the government is ordering patients to pay $750 to if they want the government to give them permission to have a pill. Capitalism, my ass.

Talk about naive. You went to the hospital and you still ended up dying, therefore the hospital and doctors are why you are dead. I know, I know, I hate analogies, but in general, I'd say this covers it well.

The late 19th Century saw monopolies arise everywhere. So did the 20th Century. And thanks to record low interest rates, the 21st Century has seen large established corporations devour the competition by buying them all up. Money is like cholesterol. It clumps by nature. The idea that capitalism is some sort of utopian ideal is just out of this world ridiculous. Money wants more money. A company does best when it has no or very limited competition. Why should Facebook allow other social media companies to establish themselves when they can just buy them up and absorb their product instead of needing to compete with them down the road?

The US and the globe did unregulated before. It didn't work well. Capitalism needs checks, a lot of them. And Britain has more on the medical insurance industry than the US.

 

[ralfy]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

Evidently not. If this were a capitalist society, a capitalist system and had capitalist rules, then anybody capable of doing it competently would be allowed to manufacture and sell Daraprim -- and an Australian high-school science class whipped up a batch for 40 cents a pill -- or else buy it from a reputable British pharmaceutical company for the going price in Britain -- $1 a pill -- and resell it in the U.S. for $1.50. To get $750 a pill for it in the U.S. what you need is not capitalist rules and a capitalist society, but rather an anticapitalism government that illegally* prohibits any capitalist in America from selling it unless she "acquires the rights" -- i.e., gets some government official to sign off on a piece of paper that says she's the person the government is ordering patients to pay $750 to if they want the government to give them permission to have a pill. Capitalism, my ass.

(* Every federal law telling Californian patients what drugs we can or can't buy from California manufacturers is blatantly unconstitutional. Calling what we buy and sell to one another in our own state "interstate commerce" is not "applying an expansive interpretation". It's "lying".)

The second sentence of your message refers to the need for "capitalist rules" but the third sentence argues that we don't need them.

 

[Bomb#20]

The patent is long expired, anybody can produce and sell Pyrimethamine. It's just that it's going to cost you a fair amount to build the plant and convince the FDA of the quality of your product. If you do that you will get in a price war, the price will be driven down to where it should be and you'll have a hard time recouping the cost of setting up for production.

These days the demand for the drug is quite low because for most purposes there are better, safer drugs.

What it costs to convince the FDA of the quality of your product is not a feature of capitalism; it's a feature of the FDA's government-granted monopoly on safety certification. If the pharma industry were capitalistic then it wouldn't be the FDA you'd need to convince, but rather your insurance carrier, which is going to be on the hook for the damages if your product is defective. When it's a drug already known to be safe and effective all they'd need to establish is purity. How much can it cost to put a random sample of pills in a mass spec and check if they contain anything they aren't supposed to?

But what it costs to convince the FDA is also a feature of the FDA's internal culture, which is to err on the side of "No". The FDA has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans by dragging its feet on medications already approved in Europe and Japan. Which brings us to the other way it was anticapitalism that created Shkreli. Even if you're right -- even if a home-grown start-up competitor really would be scared off by the upfront cost exceeding its potential profits at competitive pricing -- what's that got to do with Glaxo-Smith-Kline? They already built their plant. They already convinced their government of the quality of their product. So what rational reason does the U.S. government have to rob an American of $749 by prohibiting him from buying a pill he needs from GSK for $1? What, is the FDA so much better at product safety than its British counterpart? Are Britons dropping like flies from contaminated medicines approved by incompetent British regulators?

Prohibiting drug imports is pure mercantilism -- the government is stomping on all the thousands of little American capitalists who'd love to get into the import business, on behalf of a handful of big American pharma companies lobbying the government not to allow competition, just as if Adam Smith had never lived and it were still the 1600s and the first thing an entrepreneur with an idea for a business venture would do was offer the Stuart king a cut of the profits in exchange for a royal order prohibiting anybody from competing with him.

 

[Bomb#20]

The second sentence of your message refers to the need for "capitalist rules"

You mean "If this were a capitalist society, a capitalist system and had capitalist rules, then anybody capable of doing it competently would be allowed to manufacture and sell Daraprim -- and an Australian high-school science class whipped up a batch for 40 cents a pill -- or else buy it from a reputable British pharmaceutical company for the going price in Britain -- $1 a pill -- and resell it in the U.S. for $1.50."? Not seeing a reference to a need in there. I'm describing cause and effect.

but the third sentence argues that we don't need them.

You mean "To get $750 a pill for it in the U.S. what you need is not capitalist rules and a capitalist society, but rather an anticapitalism government that illegally* prohibits any capitalist in America from selling it unless she "acquires the rights" -- i.e., gets some government official to sign off on a piece of paper that says she's the person the government is ordering patients to pay $750 to if they want the government to give them permission to have a pill."? That's a statement about the anticapitalist rules people like Shkreli need in order to get outlandish profits; it says not a word about what rules we do or don't need.

So you're reading stuff into my statements that isn't there. You must have had some point to make. What are you getting at?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What it costs to convince the FDA of the quality of your product is not a feature of capitalism; it's a feature of the FDA's government-granted monopoly on safety certification. If the pharma industry were capitalistic then it wouldn't be the FDA you'd need to convince, but rather your insurance carrier, which is going to be on the hook for the damages if your product is defective. When it's a drug already known to be safe and effective all they'd need to establish is purity. How much can it cost to put a random sample of pills in a mass spec and check if they contain anything they aren't supposed to?

While I do like the idea of using insurance in place of regulation in many cases I don't think it's going to work too well here.

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.

(And note that a drug doesn't need to be safe in order to be approved. Lots of decidedly unsafe drugs are quite correctly approved--what the FDA cares about is how the drug compares to not taking it, and in some cases how it compares to other drugs for the same purpose. 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.)

But what it costs to convince the FDA is also a feature of the FDA's internal culture, which is to err on the side of "No". The FDA has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans by dragging its feet on medications already approved in Europe and Japan.

Does the name "thalidomide" mean anything to you?

Which brings us to the other way it was anticapitalism that created Shkreli. Even if you're right -- even if a home-grown start-up competitor really would be scared off by the upfront cost exceeding its potential profits at competitive pricing -- what's that got to do with Glaxo-Smith-Kline? They already built their plant. They already convinced their government of the quality of their product. So what rational reason does the U.S. government have to rob an American of $749 by prohibiting him from buying a pill he needs from GSK for $1? What, is the FDA so much better at product safety than its British counterpart? Are Britons dropping like flies from contaminated medicines approved by incompetent British regulators?

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.

 

[ralfy]

The second sentence of your message refers to the need for "capitalist rules"

You mean "If this were a capitalist society, a capitalist system and had capitalist rules, then anybody capable of doing it competently would be allowed to manufacture and sell Daraprim -- and an Australian high-school science class whipped up a batch for 40 cents a pill -- or else buy it from a reputable British pharmaceutical company for the going price in Britain -- $1 a pill -- and resell it in the U.S. for $1.50."? Not seeing a reference to a need in there. I'm describing cause and effect.

but the third sentence argues that we don't need them.

You mean "To get $750 a pill for it in the U.S. what you need is not capitalist rules and a capitalist society, but rather an anticapitalism government that illegally* prohibits any capitalist in America from selling it unless she "acquires the rights" -- i.e., gets some government official to sign off on a piece of paper that says she's the person the government is ordering patients to pay $750 to if they want the government to give them permission to have a pill."? That's a statement about the anticapitalist rules people like Shkreli need in order to get outlandish profits; it says not a word about what rules we do or don't need.

So you're reading stuff into my statements that isn't there. You must have had some point to make. 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."

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

 

[Bomb#20]

Talk about naive. You went to the hospital and you still ended up dying, therefore the hospital and doctors are why you are dead. I know, I know, I hate analogies, but in general, I'd say this covers it well.

And I'd say it has squat to do with what I wrote. Show your work.

The late 19th Century saw monopolies arise everywhere. So did the 20th Century. And thanks to record low interest rates, the 21st Century has seen large established corporations devour the competition by buying them all up. Money is like cholesterol. It clumps by nature. The idea that capitalism is some sort of utopian ideal is just out of this world ridiculous. Money wants more money. A company does best when it has no or very limited competition. Why should Facebook allow other social media companies to establish themselves when they can just buy them up and absorb their product instead of needing to compete with them down the road?

Indeed so; but nobody here claimed that capitalism is some sort of utopian ideal. I didn't even advocate capitalism; the point in dispute is southernhybrid's claim that Shkreli is an example of capitalism being brutal. You might have good reasons to disapprove of capitalism but that doesn't make capitalism the cause of every random bad thing somebody associates it with.

As far as monopolies go, yes, monopolies are a part of capitalism when they're created and maintained by buying up the competition. But Shkreli didn't do that. He got his monopoly courtesy of the U.S. government's corrupt and protectionist regulatory system. Without that sort of government support, monopolies in capitalism tend to die a death of a thousand cuts as little companies form for the profit of getting "just bought up and absorbed", except when the product is a "natural monopoly" with large barriers to entry and a big advantage to being first. Most medications, including Daraprim, are way too easy to make to be natural monopolies.

The US and the globe did unregulated before. It didn't work well. Capitalism needs checks, a lot of them. And Britain has more on the medical insurance industry than the US.

Certainly. So why the hell can't Americans buy British pills?