These days, far too many people think that “the market” is not a good enough determiner of what should be available. Not surprising, as many people also think that “intelligent design” makes more logical sense than evolution. But as I pointed out some time back, free market capitalism is to central planning as evolution is to Creationism. And in evolutionary systems, if you are not able to compete in the existing environment, you either adapt or you die. This applies to businesses every bit as much as organisms and species.
Take, for instance, the pharmacy business. There are some products commonly carried by pharmacies that give many people pause on moral grounds, typically religion-based. Some pharmacists don’t want to sell contraceptive products – birth control pills, condoms and especially “morning after” pills – because they feel they are immoral. While I happen to disagree with their logic, I agree with their right to stock whatever the hell they want… and to not stock whatever the hell they *don’t* want. And by “they” I mean the owners of the pharmacies. If the owners want to have a complete supply of condoms, and the pharmacist employed there doesn’t want to sell them… then somebody needs to find a new job. And what sort of job? Why, how about starting their own pharmacy, where they can stock their own products as they choose.
And then the market can decide.
And let’s see how that works out….
The article points out that similar pharmacies elsewhere are doing well. But those successful, limited-product pharmacies tend to be in rural areas with minimal competition. In this case, however, there *was* competition:
Unfortunately, the location was within walking distance of at least one other drugstore and across the street from a Kmart with a pharmacy.
Ooops. A dodo bird is a fine survivor on an isolated island with minimal competition, but import dogs, pigs and European men with guns, nets and a hunger for big-ass drumsticks, suddenly things don’t look so good.
13 Responses to “The Invisible Hand”
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Laughed out loud. Thanks Scott. Too bad the people who are simultaneously so adamanat about a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body even as they advocate for government-controlled health care will never, ever read this article.
> a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body
I fall squarely in the “Neither” camp when it comes to the “Right To Life/Anti-Choice” vs “Right to Choose/Baby-Killer” debate. I am dogmatic on very little of the topic; I can see both sides. If I had me a woman who was pregnant with my child, and the pregnancy was going to kill her and the only possible way to save her was to hoover that lil’ bastard out and feed it through a Cuisinart… then that’s what I’d do. On the other hand, somewhere along the line, an undifferentiated blob of tissue becomes a human, and that “somewhere ” is well prior to birth at 9 months. Where, exactly, I don’t know. My handwave would be “when it has a functional nervous system.”
So while I’m willing to accept abortion as sometimes being required, using it as birth control gives me an uncomfortableness. Apart from the “rape/incest/medical emergency” aspect… it seems to me that abortions are largely due to several people acting irresponsibly. And killing a human because someone else got likkered up and partied a little too hard… again, that gives me an uncomfortableness. A day after pill? Sure, I got me no problem with that. Partial birth abortion of a third trimester baby? Hell no. Somewhere in between… hell, I dunno.
So “right to do with her own body” fails at some point, when it becomes “right to kill another person.”
One sentence. Location, location, location, it all comes down to location.
Oh, and abortion is a medical procedure, and it is not going away. My objections are to the use of forcibly collected tax dollars to pay for said medical procedure, or any other, for that matter.
I wonder if it would still be a “medical procedure” if they executed death row inmates with a steel tube to the skull so they could suck their brains out? I’m fairly certain those in defense of late-term abortions would show their hypocrisy almost instantainiously.
I am pro-choice, but I too agree that person A should not be forced to pay for the medical procedures of person B, said procedures including abortion. So while I did not agree with Stupak’s reasons for his refusal of health care (until his idiotic last-minute capitulation, of course), I did agree with his actions.
I am cognizant of and sympathetic to the arguments against abortion, and I don’t think anyone really enjoys the idea of terminating a pregnancy (myself obviously included). I also disagree with the idea of using it as birth control, though using it when you get pregnant in spite of using effective birth control (which happens) doesn’t worry me as much. However, I don’t think that anyone could honestly make the argument that aborting a pregnancy in the first trimester is the same thing as killing a thinking human being. I also agree with 2hotel9 that as a procedure that has been going on since before the dawn of recorded history, abortion is not going to go away anytime soon no matter what law is passed, and given that, I’d rather see abortions happening in clinics as opposed to back alleys with coathangers.
I also happen to have no problem with the death penalty, so at least nobody can accuse me of the pro-life, pro death penalty hypocrisy 😛
Funny thing about being likkered up: that’s how I got here. For whatever reason, alcohol has very little effect on me; it doesn’t do much to my son, either, but my daughter can get bad-movie drunk fairly quickly. I suspect my father had a couple of beers with my mother and never considered the possibility that she was impaired in any way. In those days, no one got an abortion easily.
Many moons later, Jennifer asked me what I knew about abortion. Not much, I said, too aware that she was on her way to being an MD. So she got up, collected a metal coat hanger, and bent it into the tool she had been taught was used in the back-alley abortions of the 60s. That little demonstration put me off the idea.
Since then, it seems to me that abortion is better than bringing into the wold a child not wanted. But by seven months or so, the child is very much a child, and the matter becomes something else entirely.
I find it amazing that the Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy survived as long as it did. I would not have expected anyone that near to D.C. would wish to limit their personal choices.
sferin? You nail it. I know a lot, make that A LOT, of people who are vocally pro-choice, and stridently vocally anti death penalty. And I laugh, and call them hypocrites to their faces, and many of them I have known for most of the last 30 years. Few of them have changed either stance.
And in the name of full disclosure I am 100% for the death penalty. You kill with no more justification than you needed $25 for Blahblah or because you want a thrill, or arrghrrrarrr, you should be hanged by the neck until dead. Same for child molestation, violent rape and treason. Not necessarily in that order.
Michael? Yes indeed, once the end of the second trimester is reached it becomes an entirely different matter.
Because what the hell… abortion humor:
Admin wrote:
“These days, far too many people think that “the market” is not a good enough determiner of what should be available. Not surprising, as many people also think that “intelligent design” makes more logical sense than evolution. But as I pointed out some time back, free market capitalism is to central planning as evolution is to Creationism. And in evolutionary systems, if you are not able to compete in the existing environment, you either adapt or you die. This applies to businesses every bit as much as organisms and species.”
Oh, there’s intelligent design in creation now, if not originally.
We’ve made all sorts of adjustments to animal and plant species by selective breeding, and more recently by direct genetic manipulation.
So if it’s okay to modify corn so it has more and larger kernels, turkeys and hens so they yield a lot more meat per bird, and cattle so they give more milk, what seems so strange about also intervening in the world of finance to also make that more optimal to our needs?
If you really wanted to get back to some ideal and primitive version of a free market, step one would be eliminating all money and going straight to barter for all business transactions, as even gold isn’t of much worth if what you need is food and water rather than shiny jewelry.
Then we could go to phase two and realize the quickest way to get goods you need or desire from someone isn’t to trade for them, but simply kill the person who has them and take them.
Although this would have definite evolutionary effects on a populace, I doubt it would be much of a fun place to live, as you would hardly dare sleep for fear that as soon as you nodded off someone was going to kill you and take whatever you had, then some relative of yours was going to kill them for revenge and to get back what was taken.
Even the Vikings thought that was counter-productive, so they instituted jury courts and fines for crimes, rather than having everyone running around slaughtering each other 24/7.
> what seems so strange about also intervening in the world of finance to also make that more optimal to our needs?
Because modifying plants and animals to be better for our needs has been a task that has been controlled by – wait for it – the market. When the experiments didn’t work, producing, say, corn that tasted like crap, customers wouldn’t eat/buy it, and thus that experiment was terminated. But governmental tinkering ion finances and economies? No matter how bad of a failure they are (see: “Great Society,” “War On Drugs,” etc.), the experiments are not ended.
In any event, making finances more optimal for our needs would involve vastly *less* governmental involvement in the economy.
> If you really wanted to get back to some ideal and primitive version of a free market, step one would be eliminating all money and going straight to barter for all business transactions
Ah, no.
> If you really wanted to get back to some ideal and primitive version of a free market, step one would be eliminating all money and going straight to barter for all business transactions
That’s the socialists approach. See: Kulaks.
So if it’s okay to modify corn so it has more and larger kernels, turkeys and hens so they yield a lot more meat per bird, and cattle so they give more milk, what seems so strange about also intervening in the world of finance to also make that more optimal to our needs?
Also, we actually know HOW to manipulate the genome for these things to produce the desired effects. If anyone has shown themselves capable of manipulating borrowing interest rates for the greater good such that we will never have a recession, a bubble or a crash, I have yet to see it.
If you really wanted to get back to some ideal and primitive version of a free market, step one would be eliminating all money and going straight to barter for all business transactions, as even gold isn’t of much worth if what you need is food and water rather than shiny jewelry.
Money was specifically invented to facilitate trade. Gold was used as money for far more reason than its objective value in jewelry making. After all, shells, corn, tobacco, beads, flint, and other precious metals have been used as money, and they never caught on quite the way gold did. The reasons gold works best are
1) A small amount has a high value, making it easy to carry/use
2) It’s easy to maintain purity/quality
3) Gold does not rust/tarnish
4) It’s easily divisible into small quantities
5) The supply can only be inflated with difficulty (mining), and that inflation stops when the money supply has inflated such that it costs more to get new gold than gold is worth
The reasons politicians hate gold is because it keeps them honest; when the money supply is tied to a physical object, it creates hard limits on how much inflation can occur before the politicians are called on their bluff via bank run. This is essentially what happened in 1933, when we went off the gold standard domestically, and in 1971, when we went off the gold standard internationally. We didn’t have enough gold to redeem our currency, so rather than face deflation we simply cut our currency’s ties to gold.
If you want to understand some very important, basic, completely untaught things about money, I have actually written a couple of articles
http://opinion-forum.com/index/2009/12/the-hidden-tax/
http://opinion-forum.com/index/2009/12/the-debt-economy/
Then we could go to phase two and realize the quickest way to get goods you need or desire from someone isn’t to trade for them, but simply kill the person who has them and take them.
Yeah, today. What about the day after next? Where do you expect to get cars and refrigerators and houses after you have killed the contractors and manufacturers and retailers? Seizing the wealth works great until you’ve run out of wealth to seize, than without the creators of wealth, all of the wealth-seizers are free to starve together in equal misery.