rowyn

One of my leftist friends was talking to a conservative, and one of the things the conservative said was 'Liberals live in a very different world from me. I don't think I'd like it there; it seems like a very bleak and depressing place'.

My friend defended herself ably from this contention, but it run a chord with me nonetheless. My liberal friends do have a very bleak outlook on the direction the world is going in.

On reflection, I don't think it has anything to do with liberals being particularly pessimistic, or conservatives being optimistic. I think it's more about empowerment. American liberals are living under a Republican Congress and Republican president, and they quite naturally feel that this government doesn't reflect their political ideals. We're on the wrong track; of course things -- politically, at least -- are bound to get worse instead of better. I see the same pessimism in many conservatives, for that matter, because a lot of them aren't getting what they want either. Y'know, like some people on the left are ticked because we don't spend enough money on schools and we have a patchwork hash of a healthcare system, while some on the right hate the national gov't is still spending hand-over-fist and digging us deeper into debt. Which is funding, among other things, a hugely expensive drug benefit for Medicare. I don't actually know anyone on any side who's actually voiced approval for that drug benefit. You'd think it'd make someone happy but I don't know that it has.

Anyway, part of my point is that political orientation is so much more complex than our "two party" system represents. A lot of my friends are so far from identifying with either that it doesn't much matter which party is in power: they're still going to feel disenfranchised. They know how they want the government to work, and neither mainstream Republicans nor mainstream Democrats agree with them, so they're not going to win no matter which side comes out on top.

Funny thing is, that last describes me pretty well, too. I still vaguely consider myself small-L libertarian: fiscal conservative, social liberal. The Libertarian party is never going to go any where, and Republicans have been doing at least as much tax-and-spend as Democrats do, just on different issues. (Sometimes.) "Family values" and "war against terror" gets a lot more lip service than "civil liberties" nowadays (has it always? Are civil liberties just not sexy, in the same way that small government and untargetted tax cuts are not sexy?)

And yet I'm basically optimistic about the state of America and the world. I don't know why that is, exactly. I just have this peculiar faith that things are going to be OK, that the police and the military are not going to be overwhelmed by corruption and powerlust, that we're not going to lose our prized freedoms, that the economy is not going to face-plant into the ground. This isn't a factor of "my guys" being in power. I felt just the same when the Republicans took Congress in my liberal days in the 90s, or when I'd switched to libertarian leanings and Clinton was still president. "It'll be all right."

Maybe it's that I think the nation is resilient, that there are enough good people in the country that it doesn't matter which monkeys you put in Washington.

Or maybe I'm just not that convinced that my politics are right. Hey, it's the way I think the country should be run -- but I could be wrong. Maybe it's just as well that my side isn't in charge. Who knows what hash we might make of things?

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From:

kelloggs2066.livejournal.com

It's been my observation that whoever's party is Not in the Whitehouse get kind of grumpy and moody. Particularly to those to whom politics is close to their heart.

It's also been my observation that cartoonists of political bent are more creative under fire than when not:

Doonsbury wasn't nearly as funny when Clinton was in office, and Mallard Fillmore wasn't as funny after Bush was elected.

I think politics can drive people in ways that few people suspect.

I just try to remain hopeful.

From:

gleef.livejournal.com

Which is funding, among other things, a hugely expensive drug benefit for Medicare. I don't actually know anyone on any side who's actually voiced approval for that drug benefit. You'd think it'd make someone happy but I don't know that it has.

Pharmaceutical companies, it makes pharmaceutical companies very happy. Also, the lobbyists and lawyers they hire, and the individuals in government (both elected and regulatory) they funnel money to. That's one of the things that really depressess those of us on the more liberal/progressive side of the fence, just how much money the Federal Government is borrowing to essentially give away to unaccountable corporations. I find it politically, socially and fiscally irresponsible.

Anyway, part of my point is that political orientation is so much more complex than our "two party" system represents. A lot of my friends are so far from identifying with either that it doesn't much matter which party is in power: they're still going to feel disenfranchised. They know how they want the government to work, and neither mainstream Republicans nor mainstream Democrats agree with them, so they're not going to win no matter which side comes out on top.

Yeah. That's one of the reasons one of my big issues is alternative party rights (even the alternative parties I disagree with). I don't think this country is going to be able to have a healthy political system unless and until we can encourage a richer and more nuanced party system to thrive. New York State is especially bad when it comes to the rights of alternative parties.

And yet I'm basically optimistic about the state of America and the world. I don't know why that is, exactly. I just have this peculiar faith that things are going to be OK, that the police and the military are not going to be overwhelmed by corruption and powerlust, that we're not going to lose our prized freedoms, that the economy is not going to face-plant into the ground. This isn't a factor of "my guys" being in power. I felt just the same when the Republicans took Congress in my liberal days in the 90s, or when I'd switched to libertarian leanings and Clinton was still president. "It'll be all right."

Optimism is good. I'm optimistic too, but I am only optimistic to the extent where people can be convinced to pay attention to government, and hold them accountable. Democracy cannot be a passive thing, where you sit back and let the leaders do what you assume is the right thing. The people have to be involved in what is happening.

I'm optimistic because I see many people remembering that now.

From:

rowyn

Pharmaceutical companies, it makes pharmaceutical companies very happy.

Really? Where did you hear that? IIRC, the Wall Street Journal said that big pharm was generally not happy about Medicare providing a drug benefit, because any time Medicare gets into a field, they drive prices down.

That's one of the things that really depressess those of us on the more liberal/progressive side of the fence, just how much money the Federal Government is borrowing to essentially give away to unaccountable corporations.

Yeah, gotta agree with you there. Drives me NUTS when cities pay a fortune to build a stadium for a football team, for example. I live near two enormous stadiums and the city is talking about forking out more money to build a bigger & better one. :P If the government wants to help out businesses, I'm happy for them to do across-the-board tax cuts. But targeted supports aimed at propping up a specific business or industry make me sick.

From:

gleef.livejournal.com

Really? Where did you hear that? IIRC, the Wall Street Journal said that big pharm was generally not happy about Medicare providing a drug benefit, because any time Medicare gets into a field, they drive prices down.

That was probably before the bill included a rider that restricted Medicare from negotiating favorable prices on the drugs in the plan; or about how the companies were worried about the recent Senate propoal to allow Medicare to negotiate.

New Drug Benefit Questioned
Buy Pharmaceutical Stock, Don't Get Sick
Medicare Drug Benefit May Cost 1.2 Trillion
Drug-Price Surge May Erode Savings from Medicare Card

What continues to baffle me is, considering how much cash, regulatory support and just plain gifts (eg. patents that should be public domain) both the Clinton and Bush administration have given the Pharmaceutical companies outright, how badly they appear to be doing anyway, but that's a different issue. We don't have a responsibility to spend billions propping up companies like Pfizer if they can't figure out how to run themselves.

From:

zaimoni.livejournal.com

The EU and Canada certainly think they have a responsibility to force Big Pharma to not charge enough to cover costs. Not all of that stiffing is passed on to the U.S. in above-market prices.

Also, R&D in that industry is more than a little like playing roulette at Las Vegas. Statistically, they've had a string of bad luck the past few years.

From:

gleef.livejournal.com

The EU and Canada certainly think they have a responsibility to force Big Pharma to not charge enough to cover costs. Not all of that stiffing is passed on to the U.S. in above-market prices.

Yeah, funny that, putting the needs of their citizens above corporation's profits. They ought to know better ;-)

From:

zaimoni.livejournal.com

Forcing negative gross margin is extortion.

This particular extortion is legal because it's the government doing it. That doesn't make it ethical. Without the U.S., the world (including the EU and Canada) would be hosed because there would be no replacement antibiotics for vancomycin in research.

To be fair:

Classically socialized healthcare works better than the U.S. model for predictable illnesses with relatively inexpensive treatments. Specific examples I have researched include psychiatric care, and preparing for Avian flu. On conventional vaccinations for diseases of childhood, the two appear to be comparable.
The U.S. model works better for superheroic treatments. We don't have waiting lines for medically necessary surgery, except as limited by organ donation. The EU and Canadian waiting lines are often at least a year long.

So, it's a matter of which needs of citizens the various governments put first.

From:

gleef.livejournal.com

Forcing negative gross margin is extortion.

Perhaps, but nobody is forcing negative gross margin here. The pharmaceutical companies have very high gross margins (sales - cost of goods sold). However, then they, of course, have to adjust their figures to account for their R&D costs (high) and Marketing/Lobbying costs (even higher) and other fixed expenses that aren't covered by cost of goods sold. They have, by their reconing, a negative adjusted margin that they like to pretend is their gross margin. I think it's reasonable to disagree about how such fees are accounted without resorting to accusations of extortion.

This particular extortion is legal because it's the government doing it.

It's only extortion if there's a threat of violence if you don't hand over something of value. I see no threat of violence here. I'm just trying to picture Canada invading New York City to lay siege to the Bristol-Myers Squibb headquarters on Park Avenue.

Without the U.S., the world (including the EU and Canada) would be hosed because there would be no replacement antibiotics for vancomycin in research.

Vancomycin? I don't understand. Vancomycin was discovered by in 1953. It was discovered by Eli Lilly, in Indiana, but I see no reason why it would have been impossible to discover by other people later, Lilly just found it first. The 1950s pharmaceutical industry was also very different then, not as bad in the ways I'm griping about them now.

All patents for Vancomycin and any fancy processing needed to keep it from killing people (it gathered dust for almost two decades because of toxicity problems with early formulations) expired by the '80s. It's now a generic medication made by multiple companies in multiple locations. I believe China has been making it for a while, as well as Xechem who outsources much of their production to India. What about the US would hose the world regarding Vancomycin?

So, it's a matter of which needs of citizens the various governments put first.

I wasn't even getting into the difference between our health care system and other countries'. I was getting into the question of who should, for example, France put first, Eli Lilly or the French people? That sort of question is illuminating regardless of health care model.

From:

zaimoni.livejournal.com

For reference: vancomycin happens to be the "master antibiotic". Any bacterium that ignores vancomycin, by definition ignores all other antibiotics based on persuading bacteria to commit suicide.

If nothing is researched in time, we fall back to 1920's healthcare for bacterial diseases. Staph and strep (the two major bacteria killers pre-penicillin) will return at full force, completely untreatable.

Preventing that is an example of what the U.S. is bankrolling, because the EU and Canada won't pay their way.

From:

gleef.livejournal.com

I'm ok with deleting advertising costs from the calculation. However, the R&D costs to be amortized include all failures and orphan drugs covered by the blockbuster (at a rate of 15 failures to each good pharmaceutical). So the EU and Canada are still forcing gross negative margin: the price reductions in question are well over the 20%-30% of the costs attributed to advertising.

I have no specifics figures, and I wasn't even saying that they don't have a right to charge for R&D of failed drugs. I was, however saying that there's no sane way that they can claim that R&D on a failed or commercially unsuccessful drug counts towards the gross margin of another drug.

To my knowledge, nobody is forcing any company to sell drugs at a loss. Those occasions where countries asked the pharmaceutical companies to sell at a loss, (eg. drugs used in AIDS treatments), the companies just refused to sell there (which is justifiable), and in some cases the countries decided to develop their own generic alternative. No force, no extortion, just two entities with different goals doing what they needed to do in a bad situation.

I was thinking of EU-based corporations like Astra-Zeneca, Glaxo-SmithKline, and Roche, more than U.S.-based ones.... If nothing is researched in time, we fall back to 1920's healthcare for bacterial diseases. Staph and strep (the two major bacteria killers pre-penicillin) will return at full force, completely untreatable. Preventing that is an example of what the U.S. is bankrolling, because the EU and Canada won't pay their way.

I'm confused, you list three enormous European pharmaceutical companies, and then go on to imply that Europe isn't researching antibiotics? I find that hard to believe. First off most new categories of antibiotics were developed in Europe: Penicillin was British R&D, Sulfonamides was German R&D, Cephalosporin was Italian research and British development. Many new individual antibiotics were developed in Europe as well, Cipro, Rocephin and Zinnat, among others. If by some freak tragedy of economics, the US pharmaceutical companies all go bankrupt from long-overdue corporate reform, there is still plenty of research and development being done outside the country to keep us from all dying of strep while we fix whatever went wrong here.

From:

zaimoni.livejournal.com

Nobody is forcing the companies to see at a marginal loss. But the physical cost of manufacuturing currently runs at about 10% of the U.S. retail price of a pharmaceutical. So it is quite possible to force companies to sell at a negative gross margin because of the R&D costs.

And the R&D for the failures and orphan drugs has to be covered from somewhere. It's either covered by the blockbusters, or...you shut down research to what can be sustained by annuities, endowments, and government grants (the last of which is too unstable to be relied on).

I'm implying that Europe is not paying its way for the researching of antibiotics. Rather, the U.S. is subsidizing research by European companies.

The European companies, in general, are in comparable fiscal shape to the U.S. ones. The weak ones were merged out in a wave of mergers from 1999-2001. I'm not seeing any going under from anything less than Great Depression II.

From:

zaimoni.livejournal.com

Ok, I see some hyperbole in my last reply.

Reduce U.S. prices to EU-controlled levels, and researsh (both U.S.-based, EU, and other) has to be cut back dramatically. I'd have to do some work to see how much of this is a negative spiral. But what stops this spiral is trust and government funding. With the long time scales, government funding is not reliable.

Note: an orphan drug is defined as a drug that works, but that doesn't pay for its own research. In practice for a chronic disease, about 10,000 patients/year is the threshold.

What I'd like is for a research core to be funded out of a corporate trust, rather than be subject to market and government whims.

From:

zaimoni.livejournal.com

[Medicare drug benefit]
I don't see why it should be any more popular now than in 1988(?), the first time it was passed.

Difference is, last time it got voted out of existence after one year. This version looks like it'll stay a bit longer.

From:

shockwave77598.livejournal.com

There are truths and falsehoods in both the liberal and the conservative position. Therefore, the reality of the matter lays somewhere in between. The world is more complicated and needs more specific remedies that take a little from each side than either side wants to admit. Both are adamant that they and they alone are correct; both are wrong in that.

Life is not a math problem where there is only a single correct answer. Would that the universe was such a simple place - life would be much simpler.

From:

jordangreywolf.livejournal.com

I don't remember being horribly pessimistic about the world while Clinton was in office, just because the Democrats were in power. I also don't remember feeling "empowered" during the 80s. But then, on general principle, I wouldn't think that I would make a good, unbiased judge for comparing the "me", then and now.

Most of the people I know who grouse all the time have a more liberal political view than I do - at least, that's what I gather. But then, that doesn't prove a thing: It may well be that I just happen to be in circles that comprise of:

a) A lot of people who have a lot to complain about,

and,

b) A lot of people whose leanings are further left than mine.

For point A, a LiveJournal, for instance, naturally lends itself to a higher percentage of "grousing" than I might run into, in normal conversation. And for B, well, my workplace is very, very liberal. (I know of no one, no one, in my workplace who is of a conservative leaning, or who quietly sits out on political and/or religious discussions. The fact that I don't participate probably pegs my opinion for everyone else.)

For what it's worth, I'm pretty optimistic. I am not complete. I am hard-pressed, for instance, to give a really good and articulate "apology" for my faith and the reasons behind it - at least, to any level that would satisfy a non-believer. I think I'd probably feel a lot more optimistic if I not only believed I was right, but could explain exactly, with no gaps and no openings, with absolutely every base covered, why.

But nonetheless, mine isn't a gloom-and-doom worldview. There is life and death, and evil (and plain ol' jerkishness) will always be with us. But there is a lot of good. Even among those who I disagree with from time to time, I believe that they believe in what they say. I may not believe that their approach to goodness is the right one, but I am heartened that at the very least they agree that "good" is a good thing. (I just wish I could persuade many of them to believe the same of me and mine. ;) )

From:

level-head.livejournal.com

I am hard-pressed, for instance, to give a really good and articulate "apology" for my faith and the reasons behind it - at least, to any level that would satisfy a non-believer.

Perhaps you're just hanging out with the wrong non-believers. ];-)

In all seriousness, I treat matters of faith as being in a different category entirely from matters of politics or history or science. If you are sincerely convinced that there is a benevolent God watching over us, I accept that. I know that I cannot prove that this is not true -- nor am I interested in doing so -- and I'm content with the situation. I've seen a fair amount of word games on both sides of the issue, and I'm too good at word games to invest much in them as a source of truth. But word games, whether poor theology or poor secular semantics, don't determine this issue.

When religion stumbles into science, I sometimes see conflict, and that can be addressed -- as a matter of science. But just as surely, I see politics stumble into science, with often regrettable results.

I am loathe to challenge someone merely for holding a different political opinion -- though when they express some underlying data that they are basing it on, I can sometimes contribute different information.

But as to religion ... it's at its essence unchallengeable, generally does good for a lot of people, and even good for people not part of the religion (faith based charities, for example) -- so I'm happy with it.

Good and evil are simplified concepts, of course. But when you look at the world, you can find much that fits pretty cleanly into these definitions. Those things that are good should be increased, and evil fought against -- and the shades of gray pushed toward good wherever possible.

I remain optimistic, including optimistic about the fact that these things can be done. And that there are being done, to a certain extent. So I am a believer, too -- a believer in mankind.

===|==============/ Level Head

From:

telnar.livejournal.com

As with most generalizations, I can think of lots of counterexamples to this, but I suspect that conservatives are more likely than liberals to think of their happiness as being within their control.

I know that in my own case, I tend to view government policies as constraints on the process by which I try to maximize my happiness rather than as key inputs. So, if the government is making it difficult for me to do something I would like to do one way, I try to find some other way to do it.

I've been fortunate in that there always has been a way to at least mitigate the effect on me of whatever silly policy I want to avoid. For example, if the cost of living is too high in New York City because of rent control, taxes, and excessive regulation of building permits (as well as other things which aren't the government's fault), then I have a countermeasure: living outside of NYC.

While not everyone is always similarly fortunate, I think that many people imagine an impassible obstacle when the fence they are standing in front of is only a foot or two high, and that more of those people seem to be liberals than conservatives at least based on their writings that I've seen.

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Hope and Politics.

Hope and Politics.

Hope and politics make for strange bedfellows.

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