Political MoJo

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post reports today that drug company executives have "acknowledged that they had gone overboard in advertising some products and laid out a set of voluntary guidelines for doing better in the future." That sounds nice, but what are the guidelines? Here:

They require companies to provide doctors with more timely information about a drug before touting it on the evening news. They should result in ads that give consumers more useful information and present a better balance between medical risks and benefits. And they may even reduce the risk that you'd have to interrupt the Super Bowl to explain erectile dysfunction to your inquiring 8-year-old.

Better than nothing, I suppose, but this doesn't begin to scrape at the problem, not so long as drug companies increasingly find ways to market new and controversial diseases—diseases that usually just so happen to require drug therapy—and not so long as doctors, many of whom have an overly cozy relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, tend to offer pills for nearly any ailment you can think of. Meanwhile, the new guidelines don't restrict advertising for the many brand-name drugs that offer little or no benefit over cheaper generics. Pearlstein is right on when he notes that most drug advertising is aimed at "artificially creat[ing] the impression in the minds of consumers that such a need exists," even when such a need doesn't exist. And so long as the industry is able to peddle that impression, Americans will continue to spend more and more on drugs they may not even need or benefit from, while premiums and public spending continue to skyrocket.

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Yesterday, Democrat Paul Hackett came within about 4,000 votes of being the first Iraq War vet to be elected to Congress, and the race was far closer than most predicted. Today's post-election run down from the Cincinnati Enquirer doesn't contain much of interest, except for the revelation that Bush had the Republican candidate, Jean Schmidt, hand-deliver a condolence letter to a family in the district whose son was killed in Iraq.

I could understand that sort of action if the candidate were the district's sitting representative, or if the president had sent Ohio's Republican governor, or someone like that. But Schmidt was just an ex-state legislator who led Cincinnati's Right to Life group. Her only qualification to deliver a presidential letter was that it might help her party get another seat in Congress. That might be smart politics, but it's a pretty craven way to manipulate the war dead for political gain. Welcome to Congress, Representative Schmidt. You'll fit right in.

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This morning the Washington Post reports that prior to the invasion of Iraq, the CIA had funded, trained, and armed an Iraqi paramilitary group, the "Scorpions," to "foment rebellion, conduct sabotage, and help CIA paramilitaries who entered Baghdad and other cities target buildings and individuals." Then we learn that the Scorpions helped the military interrogate and torture officers captured in Iraq. Not al-Qaeda detainees, not Taliban detainees, not people who were planning to blow up anything in the United States. By the way, given that we invaded Iraq, the Geneva Conventions should very clearly apply there—none of this murky business that the president thinks should apply to al-Qaeda. But guess not. Laws are for pansies. Go read Marty Lederman's analysis here and here. As Lederman says of an Iraqi general who was beaten to death by Army officers:

From all that appears, this was a concerted, planned, systematic and extended series of brutal interrogations, carried out by numerous persons and entities, within the military and the CIA, in a manner that they all considered to be authorized. No rotten apples. No nightshift. Official U.S. policy and practice.

Meanwhile, this is going on, as well as this.

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Arnold Kling isn't happy with those who argue "that the market power of corporations is something to be feared, while the coercive power of government is not." I don't know many people who argue both points—the true Stalinists are in pretty short supply these days—but perhaps he means liberals who often prefer a regulated economy to an unregulated one. Well, then. His big argument, it seems, is this:

The best statement of the philosophical case against antitrust is in philosopher Harry Binswanger's essay, "Antitrust: 'Free Competition' at Gunpoint." Binswanger draws a fundamental distinction between economic power and political power. Economic power, he notes, is simply the power to produce and trade, whereas political power is the power of the government and necessarily rests on the use of force or threat of force.

The flip-side of this, meanwhile, is that much political power just isn't particularly threatening in any meaningful way. Somewhere in the world, a trust fund exists for highway projects. If I choose to drive, I have to drop a few bucks into it. I can choose not to, though. Then the highway agency build roads and other stuff. It's all big government, and sometimes it generates waste, fraud, and abuse, but the idea that whatever government agency builds highways has "power" over me in a way that, say, Verizon doesn't just seems a bit odd. The same goes for Social Security, which often gets blasted as some monstrous state apparatus. Really, though, it's just an agency that collects money in and sends checks out. On the other hand, when the president of the United States decides he can override the law and hold without trial anyone he deems an "enemy combatant," well, sure, that's the sort of political power one should fear, but that sort of thing doesn't seem so incompatible with the rise of corporate power, now does it?

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