Big Pharma reaps what it has sown

In hopes of avoiding price controls and reimportation agreements, Big Pharma made a deal with the devil last month, promising Congress $80 billion in help lowering costs for drugs for seniors. Guess what: They're getting the price controls and the reimportation anyway -- on top of the revenue reductions they've already promised, and on top of the higher taxes Congress wants to impose upon their operations.

The lessons of Atlas Shrugged have become clearer to me in the last few months through a deeper reading of the novel and the recently published volume Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Unfortunately, they're also now becoming clear through observation of what's going on in Washington. In Atlas, delivering concessions to the Capitol Hill cretins didn't cause politicians to walk away, satisfied that they'd gotten what they wanted, and leave businessmen to do their work without further intrusions. Instead, one unchallenged government control led to another -- because compromising with thugs and goons only emboldens them. If a burglar enters your house and you give him your DVD player so that he won't take your TV set, he'll be back next week for the TV set, and the week after that, for everything you own -- because by compromising with him, you've left unchallenged his premise that he has the right to enter your home. Thus also with Congress. No one from Big Pharma is armed with the ideas to say no, we will not compromise -- there is no right to healthcare -- you have no right to tell us what we can and cannot charge for our products -- hands off!

And so Big Pharma reaps the seeds of compromise -- lawmakers who now feel empowered to seize even more than they would have otherwise.