Frédéric Bastiat
The Bastiat quote is on point if your criticism of Purdue Pharma is that it profited from the medical licensing laws and drug prohibition laws that unfairly proscribes teenagers from buying madak cigarettes on the free market.
If the criticism is merely that they made money selling addictive drugs, this really isn't what the quote is about.
They did not make billions from selling yet another opioid of which there are dozens available cheaply. They made billions by subverting the medical system largely though completely legal means. Essentially they sold yet another synthetic street drug through Doctors rather than on street corners. And this worked because they jumped through the correct hoops and advertised in the correct manner.
If they went and produced 'Oxycotin gets you high and it is legal!' like a head shop the operation would have not reached multimillion dollar size before it got cracked down.
Jumping through the hoops is the part the system understands as important though.
Those two differences although irrelevant to end outcome being bad and condemnable are pretty damn big distinctions akin to claiming you "unleashed a savage wolf to attack unsuspecting children" when you sold out a pit bull puppy who was sourced from a dog fighting ring and the dog mauled a kid who yanked on his tail.
Outside the pandemic, we see oil companies and other manufactures move their operations overseas to countries without power or understanding that the earth is being pillaged, or that the big company is there because they don't have modern labor laws or laws that protect their environment.
Hell, the amount of beer cans on the side of the road in my suburban neighborhood and surrounding parks areas indicates that there's a portion of the population that can't handle not drinking and driving.
I wonder if this is specific to America/capitalism, but I don't really have a frame of reference for other cultures that champion values like community over the individual, following the rules, etc.
This is another one of those situations where the crazies are driving the conversation, because they are much louder than their actual portion of the population. According to Gallup the portion of their panel who “never” wear a mask outside of their home is 10%, while those who “rarely” wear a mask is 2%.
The vast majority of the population wears masks “always” (50%), “very often” (27%), or at least “sometimes” (11%). The vast majority of us are complying with mask regulations; we’re just not making a lot of noise about it.
They repeated the stunt approximately yesterday but one of the organizers was arrested this time; he handcuffed himself to a chair but didn't consider that it was on wheels, so they just rolled him out of the building. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/906046911/ammon-bundy-is-arre...
This family made billions as opium dealers whose impact has been seen nationwide. But since it was 'just business' they get to turn a blind eye to the impact.
I understood the quote to be a comment on the idea that once morality free enrichment becomes codified into law what would seem to be morally 'wrong' is justified and even looks 'good' since what they are doing is legal.
I took it to be a criticism of American culture.
We’re in the midst of a series of lawsuits and criminal probes seeking to do exactly that. When public pressure rushes prosecutors, we get nonsense like Arizona getting rejected for original jurisdiction by SCOTUS.
We have due process. Not mob rule.
We have due process for the privileged. Tell all of the poor defendants who have been held in Rikers for over a year without a trial that they have due process.
Yet this reporter was able to assemble the trail from court documents.
For every person creating Byzantine structures there are several adept at untangling them.
> Tell all of the poor defendants who have been held in Rikers for over a year without a trial
Not arguing that they aren’t getting an advantage. Just that there is zero evidence so far that they’re going to get away with it.
Also, New York has abolished cash bail. If someone is in pre-trial detention, it’s because they were deemed to be a flight risk. Not because they couldn’t afford bail. (EDIT: Never mind, we rolled back most of the changes in April after a purported crime surge)
It's hard to make a case for something being prosecuted in good faith if there is never any attempt at using the tools that are otherwise so vastly abused in prosecuting the most meaningless "crimes".
Give me a break, legal system never changes itself.
From Ghandi, Bolshevik revolution, Solidarity, French revolution to MLK.
Change only occurs due to mass civil dissonance or armed revolutions.
Never because you talk in a court and all people in power agreed you make sense.
What I was getting at is that protesting is not a very reliable way to effect change either. The "other side" of any protest is also trying to change the narrative and can often just wait out the protests. Look at how the various Occupy movements eventually dissolved after a few months because they weren't getting anywhere. Even the "main" camp (if one can talk about such a thing with Occupy) was eventually cleared by the police and didn't bother reforming somewhere else anymore. The gilets jaunes in France are currently experiencing the same problem.
I'd be quite interested in a way to reliably bring about societal change in a reasonable amount of time and in a morally defensible way, but I have not found any yet. Since philosophers have been debating this since the days of the ancient Greeks I'm a bit doubtful that this is the time when we'll finally figure it out.
Proper protests etc. are direct action by the people against capital. There are still disadvantages, but they can be drowned out by simple numbers.
Seriously, all of those who goofed off in home ec and math complaining years later that they don't know how to cook or balance a checkbook.
The immediate resources were often subpar I will admit but don't say you weren't taught.
Its easy to start. Just pick up some textbooks.
Sounds like it was worded wrong (depending what you mean by "protests"). "fight your battles in the courts" is generally a statement about non-violence, meant to suggest metaphorical fighting in courts instead of actual violence.
Basically yeah.
The "war on drugs" was pathetically laughable for reasons like this.
And yes, I have heard that PR companies exist to clean up reputations, but it should be possible to at least make it clear what happened.
I think I read somewhere that a hedge fund had decided not to take an allocation from the Sacklers. That's exactly the kind of thing reputation is supposed to do. It's a blunt instrument, but people deciding to partially ostracize those who have done wrong is how things should work.
It will talk about how the heir has become an active philanthropist, dedicating his/her life to “making things right”. It will list their accomplishments since the family was exposed. It will end with an open ended question about “the sins of our fathers.” It will really make you think.
They will spend their life slowly giving away half their fortune, one gala at a time. They will start a foundation. It will have a name not too dissimilar from a pharmaceutical brand name—meaningless but vaguely positive (too bad Altria is taken). They will max out that foundation’s board with Big Names in that world—just so long as their name isn’t Sackler.
Their investment of half of the payout they kept will grow larger than the original started at, and they’ll never pay more than a nominal dime in taxes thanks to those sweet 501(c)3 write-offs.
Their reputation will be laundered, at least enough for their checkbooks invited back to the parties. And their kids? Home free.
In a few generation the hundreds of thousands of deaths on their hands will be forgotten, except by the families of the victims that were just the cost of doing business for them.
They were billionaires yesterday and they’re going to be billionaires tomorrow. Their reputation is going to be fine because we live in a society that absolutely worships money and those who have it. People with that kind of money can pay to scrub the internet.
No, but I don’t see how that deters them from misbehaving. How many billionaire oil or pharma magnates just wish they had a little more respectability? You think they care at all what people think about them? If they did, they wouldn’t have done what made them their blood money in the first place.
The Sacklers enabled the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and yet which did they choose to protect: their money or their reputation?
I'm sorry but this is so naive.
Maybe true if you've got a bit of money and a little bit of notoriety, but I don't think that it would be possible to dissociate the Sacklers' name from the opioid crisis anytime soon.
Attention is short. I wouldn't rule it out; pr goes a long way. Spend a couple million on a completely unrelated but well regarded cause of charity and folks who don't have skin in the opioid-game won't associate them for the bad they did (but for their most recent memories).
What will keep the association alive for a while will be documentaries and those who watch them, but lets be real: that's not the public.
I think this is too big to be easily cleaned up.
Never argued against that, and I don't disagree with that at all. But if someone cares to do even the bare minimum of research, it's easy to come up with the Sacklers. What I am arguing against is that the Sacklers will somehow be able to use their wealth to scrub Google et al of their association with OxyContin.
> It’s not like they absolutely have to donate using the Sackler name.
For folks like them, though, then what's the point? After a certain level of Midas-like wealth, the only point is societal standing and legacy. The Sacklers don't seem like the type of folks who are going to get inner joy by donating anonymously.
Aye, there's the rub.
The Sacklers have been donating huge sums to put their name on things for a long time.
You should make people aware of it when they invite you to events or places with their name on it. I've seen people call out Jeff Dean for inviting people to some Sackler named event; he seemed pretty horrified as well he should be.
But yeah, take all their money. The actions described in TFA obliterate the corporate veil. Frankly I don't know how they've avoided assassination attempts by the families of addicts.
More importantly, this is a part of the larger narrative that everything has been caused by overprescribed opioids. However, there's no correlation between increased prescriptions and increased illicit usage [0]. Rather, it seems there's been a large growth over time of illicit opioid use [1]. The only place this sort of thing has been effectively combated is in Portugal due to its decriminalization and attempts to make things safer. Politicians caused this with their stupid "war on drugs". They are now pointing and saying, "Look, the big bad Sacklers did it!" so their own failures are ignored. Stop scapegoating one family for a political and societal issue.
0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330922982_Today%27s...
1: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180920161028.h...
All that said, I generally favor your stance that ending prohibition would yield the greatest harm reduction.
Justice is inherently subjective. A "justice system" to you is a facist dictatorship as implemented because it inherently relies on all justice coming from the subjective opinions of a single person, you.
But we don't have a justice system. We have a legal system, and a financial system.