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By A Smith (anonymous) | Posted January 26, 2009 at 13:38:55
Mr.Meister, if the market was allowed to function without government interference, drug costs would fall dramatically. Therefore, the notion that government needs to correct one wrong (imposing high costs for drug development and testing) with another (monopoly on product sales) is ridiculous. If the individual "adult" consumer was allowed to use his own brain, rather than be protected by the all-knowing government employee, we would have many more safe drugs , much cheaper than we do today.
All one has to do is look at the illegal drug market to see evidence of this. In this market, the goal is to sell as much product as possible, however, this means not killing your client base in the process. Furthermore, any organization that gets a reputation for selling dangerous drugs, soon finds itself without any customers. This is just common sense. In business, it pays to treat your customers with care.
That is the great thing about the free market, it automatically filters out the people who produce shoddy goods, in favour of those who go the extra mile to help their customer. It uses reputation in place of regulation and if it had been working in the banking industry in recent years, there would have been far less problems than we see today.
For example, most people believe that banks are inherently safe companies. However, as we are finding out today, they are anything but. In fact, most people don't even realize that their deposits are in fact investments in the economy. They assume (because the government promotes this idea) that their deposits are sitting in a vault, safe from theft or destruction, when this is not the case at all. Banks are actually massively leveraged investment companies, not much different from a hedge fund.
If government dislodged itself from this industry (abolish deposit insurance), there would still be leveraged financial institutions, however, there would also be more banks akin to a vault. These banks would charge people higher fees to safe keep their assets, but the end result would be an industry far less risk tolerant and much more conservative when it comes to allocating capital. The economy would still make loans to good businesses, but these would based on higher standards and not simply the band wagon effect we have seen in recent years (housing bubble).
Government assistance is nothing more a false promise. It never actually helps the people it is intended to, because all it does is displace our natural tendency to protect ourselves. We have all been given a brain and the trick is to use it. By allowing others to do our thinking for us, it is like asking drivers to watch out for us when we cross the road, easier, but really stupid.
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