We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Just to avoid any possible confusion, I should probably point out here that the Samizdata Illuminatus is a collective pseudonym used when any of the regular writers of this site wants to publish something anonymously. The author of this post is actually in London, not Massachusetts
Dale posted below about the idiotic rules he encountered when attempting to buy asprin in (I presume) Northern Ireland. I cannot answer the question as to whether the situation with asprin is really as absurd as his pharmacy said it was, but in answer to the question of whether it could be that absurd, I can assure him that the answer is very definitely yes. In this regard I have a little story of my own.
I have a hiatus hernia, which causes acid reflex in my oesophagus, which is intensely painful and uncomfortable, makes it difficult to eat certain kinds of food (anything at all acidic), and if untreated could lead to longer term problems that are even more serious (In the worst case cancer of the oesophagus). There is a class of drugs called proton-pump inhibitors that are used to treat this condition, and they are simply wonderful. You take one pill a day, and all your symptoms go away. They are really this good. The best known of these drugs is omeprazole, sold under the brand name “Losec” in Europe and “Prilosec” in the US. To get this drung, I could get a prescription from a doctor, but I would rather not have to deal with the NHS, as I find doing so to be too soul destroying.
However, the drug is available in the UK without a prescription, so no problem.
Well, not exactly. Omeprazole is a “behind the counter” drug in the UK, meaning that it is only available in pharmacies and you cannot simply pick it up off a shelf and then take it to the cashier and pay for it, but you have to actually walk up to the pharmacy counter and ask for it, supposedly so that you can receive proper advice. However, the nasty sting is that pharmacies tend not to display the price of such drugs in clear view, so you don’t usually find out the price until after you ask for the drug. They are relying on people being too embarassed to say that the drug is too expensive after having asked a pharmacist for it, so “behind the counter” drugs tend to be priced much higher then they would be if they were on the regular shelves.
To make things worse, the law states that the over the counter version of omeprazole must be sold in 10mg pills (the standard for the prescription version is 20mg) and in packets containing no more than 14 pills. There is nothing stopping you from buying a larger number of pills to obtain a larger dose, other than the fact that the way the drug is regulated and sold makes it expensive to do this. I am charged about £8 for such a pack of 14 pills, but as they are half dose pills, this is only a week’s supply. (This is almost entirely profit for the pharmacy, as the patent on the drug has expired).
So, although the drug is very effective for people with certain ailments, not prone to any kind of abuse, pretty much completely harmless, out of patent and very cheap to manufacture without any intellectual property issues, I cannot buy it without vast numbers of rent seekers in the medical and related professions profiteering from doing so (either by charging me directly or charging the government via the NHS) and the price being pushed up to a level I find annoying.
The US lacks this “behind the counter” racket, and omeprazole is also available over the counter in the US in large packets of proper 20mg pills, so there is nothing preventing me from buying it in large quantities at Wal-Mart when I am in the US, for about a quarter of what I pay for it in the UK. However, the Americans have lots of other rackets and the situation with this drug is sadly not typical, as American regulators (under pressure from doctors groups) are extremely reluctant to reclassify other prescription drugs as over the counter.
Sadly, though, I visit the US only once a year, if that, and my supplies seldom last until the next trip. Recently, I have found another solution, however, which is to buy the drug on eBay from people in Delhi. The price in this case is much less than I would pay even in the US, and less than a tenth what I would pay in the UK. It is possible to argue about the ethics of importing patented medicines from abroad, but in a situation in which the patent has expired, parallel imports are definitely something to be encouraged. It is probably not technically legal for me to conduct my own parallel imports from abroad, but I really do not care.
And there is something supremely ironic about using India to get arount the permit-Raj of the developed world medical bureaucracy.
Here is a great new book to cheer libertarians as we draw close to the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service. Written by the director of Nurses for Reform, Dr. Helen Evans, and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?’ not only shows that the country’s top 100 health opinion formers no longer actually believe in nationalised healthcare but, gloriously, this book fundamentally challenges the medical monopoly inherent in all health systems around the world.
Citing a huge array of free marketeers the work is awash with glorious quotes like this one from David Friedman:
Both barbers and physicians are licensed; both professions have for decades used licensing to keep their numbers down and their salaries up. Government regulation of barbers makes haircuts more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have fewer haircuts and longer hair. Government regulation of physicians makes medical care more expensive; one result, presumably, is that we have less medical care and shorter lives. Given the choice of deregulating one profession or the other, I would choose the physicians.
Quoting our own Brian Micklethwait we again read:
Far from being obvious to me that a truly free medical market would be disastrous, I believe on the contrary that such arrangements would be of huge benefit to mankind, and that the sooner medicine is done this way the better.
Things would not, inevitably, be perfect. Some fools would make crass blunders, by ignoring manifestly superior medical services for the most frivolous of reasons, and by patronising the most notoriously incompetent. Some such fools would perish from their foolishness. Others would merely be unlucky. No law can prevent either stupidity or bad luck, although the world is now filled with the particular stupidity which consists of refusing to face this truth, and with the many luckless victims of this stupidity.
Powerfully, he concludes:
Given that for most people the avoidance of suicide rather than suicide is the objective, a truly free medical market would enable them, for the first time ever, to purchase steadily improving medical advice and medical help, and at a steadily diminishing price.
One of the most pernicious restrictions on medicine imposed by the current medical regime is the restriction on advertising. In a free market rival medical procedures, rival medical ‘philosophies’, rival views on the relative importance of confidentiality, hygiene, speed of treatment, riskiness of treatment, and so forth, would all battle it out in the market place. ‘Alternative’ therapists would be allowed to prescribe potentially dangerous drugs, as only government favoured therapists may now. It would be up to the patients to pick therapists who seemed to know what they were doing and their look out if they chose badly. The already thriving medical periodical press would assist with voluminous comparative advice, praise and criticism.
In such a free market, any number of different medical styles could be practised, and patients would make their choices.
Evans’s book is a must read for libertarians. It is also a tonic for the period of NHS propaganda we will no doubt endure over the next couple of weeks.
“Freedom is participation in power.”
– Mike Gravell, on Thom Hartmann’s Air America show.
“O, RLY?”
– Commenter Sunfish, when he heard that.
Yes, Sunfish, ‘Freedom’ is the freedom to join a gang and fight over who gets plundering rights on ‘your’ turf, I thought everyone knew that!
What it [the UK Libertarian Party] will do, like the Libertarian Party has done in the United States, is to tarnish the libertarian brand, allowing the crazier aspects of libertarian thinking to come to the fore, and achieving nothing of any merit.
– Alex Singleton, ‘How Libertarians undermine liberty‘
Just straying off the Samizdata reservation for a moment…a pointer for Nine Inch Nails fans: Trent Reznor is giving away his latest record The Slip, and it is 100% free… to download it, go here. Reznor has released it under Creative Commons, which is a very interesting development.
Overheard this morning on Topsail Island, North Carolina, not far from USMC Camp Lejeune…
Two Chinook helicopters flew down the coast at low level, almost directly over the beach:
Male Person on Beach: Damn I hate it when they fly right down the coast like that, it’s inconsiderate.
Female Person on Beach: Well I kinda like it, honey. That there is the sound of Freedom.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that the establishment of a formal, state-run empire was a mistake, both from the point of view of the conquered peoples and from that of Britain. The first phase of British expansion – our informal mercantile dominion – was much the more successful. It is at least arguable that the nationalisation of the East India Company marked the moment when things started to go badly wrong.
– Daniel Hannan
It is not the level of wealth that makes us happy. Instead, it is the process of betterment – the pursuit of it – that makes us happy. Whether we are twice as rich today as in 1971 has little bearing on our happiness, because it is in the past. Whether people can see their lives improving in the future is what counts. That is why economic growth remains a key component in happiness, despite what the happiness researchers might tell us.
– Alex Singleton, Comment is Free
Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper’s way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.
– W. W. Bartley, Philosophia (September–December 1976)
The BBC is under fire after altering a news story about global warming as a result of activist pressure. Tim Worstall writes that:
I must say, I think this is an absolutely marvellous advance. We pay for the BBC, after all, so we really shouldn’t have any of that elitist nonsense about a factual reality or anything. No, news should be presented to show the world as “you” believe it to be, not as some impartial reporter of the facts would have it.
That, at least, was the view of one Jo Abbess, a climate activist (and a remarkably confused one at that, a little googling reveals that she worries about both global warming and Peak Oil: mutually exclusive concerns one might think. Bless.) who… did indeed manage to have a BBC news report changed to reflect her views. We mustn’t actually talk of static temperatures, or even worse, of 1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we’ve had cooling) because that might make people think that the world has, umm, not been warming and might even have been cooling since 1998. Can’t let the proles know the truth now, can we?
Will the BBC’s Roger Harrabin please put the article back to how it was before the lobbying started? Email him your views at roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.
It has been revealed that the Europhiles in the Tory party, led by John Maples MP, rigged the Tories’ recent primary for Members of the European Parliament in order to prevent the deselection of Europhile incumbents and to promote women that had received too few votes. ConservativeHome has the full, sordid account.
‘Market’ was the sixth word I ever learnt – after ‘This little piggy goes to…’
– Dr Eamonn Butler, author of The Best Book on the Market. Isn’t it great how we get children understanding buying and selling months if not years before the anti-market teachers can get their claws on them?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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