“A new type of superstition has got hold of peoples minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!” - Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government.
Nah bro, you are not to blame.
Bloom, are you from long Island?
Lol no, why?
Never mind [:D]
Nah bro, I’m from the ATL [:D]
Ever heard of march of dimes? It was an an agency created when Roosevelt was in office to find a polio vaccination for children. Funded Jonas Salk who was the creator of the vaccinations.
To be honest there would be no real growth in the medical field out government and you can only get so far just thinking. People don’t realize that knowledge is expensive and time consuming and no other entity has the kind of money and time that government has.
Tell that to robin hood.
The March of Dimes is not an agency. It is a charity. Politicians, including FDR, encouraged their constituents to donate to the March of Dimes. This does not, in any sense, amount to government funding.
This renders the rest of your post null and void, by the way.
And, this, incidentally, is one of the few things that FDR did that I approve of. Ironically, he thought that government solutions were the answer to every problem in human life, except that problem that personally affected him.
I think you have a distorted view on how the government gives money out. The scientist that are given these grants do not have to pay the money back. You can’t look at this field in terms of economics because the government is not out to make a profit. It is out to be self-sustaining.
Again in this realm of research you can’t use and economic analogy. Nothing many come of research or the next cure for cancer could be found its really up in the air. You should be more worried about free-market companies funding scientists then filling the reports with bogus information in order to sell their product but that another thing entirely, and this does happen often my father is a biologist and is constantly asked by companies to fudge his data so that a product can look better or that a chemical does not look as harmful.
Where is he anyway? Mods / Admin?
Prove your assertions. I cannot stress this strongly enough. Prove. Your. Assertions.
this thread will lock
but who helps support march of dimes?
Dang.
That the March of Dimes is funded by government today is irrelevant to the point being discussed here.
First question first. I know that the polio vaccine that killed polio was developed by Jonas Salk, whose wife had perished from polio. He thus had a great personal incentive to put an end to polio, and received a great deal of funding the the March of Dimes, which appears to have relied on voluntary contributions.
Now, according to Kevin Trudeau, the author of several books on alternative health care, the pharmaceutical industry has a vested interest in NOT curing disease but instead developing and marketing medicines to treat symptoms for perpetuity. The pharmaceutical industry, then, suppresses “natural cures” legally through medical licencing, FDA drug approval requirements, laws regarding intellectual property, mandatory vaccinations in schools, etc. etc. etc. Even back in 2003, he was saying that the anthrax letters were sent by American bioscientists to try to boost profits. Of course, Trudeau is just a crazy conspiracy theorist; we all know that the government would never ever, ever do anything to hurt us.
Another crazy conspiracy theorist argues that the government has a long, shameful history of human experimentation and offensive biowarfare. But, since that is also just a bizzare fringe conspiracy theory, we shouldn’t worry at all about excessive government funding of medical research.
All these crazy conspiracy theories can really make one wonder why we can build supercomputers, clone sheep, split the atom, and put men on the moon, but we have so far failed to cure cancer or AIDS. Perhaps it has something to do with the immense corruption in scientific industries. You notice that genetic engineering and biotech is more geared towards suing farmers for patent infringement than it is about increasing crop yields. Likewise, nu clear power plants have been built primarily for producing plutonium for weapons, and if they can make money selling electricity in the process, so much the better.
Which brings me to question two, or why the hell you feel the need to debate people on facebook, of all places. Personally, I have a facebook account, but I have NEVER once used it to promote some variety of market liberalism or engage in a tirade like the one I just did. My facebook account, after all, has my real name and photograph, and friends who know me personally. Mises.org is a much safer place to have this kind of discussion, away from the prying eyes of girlfriends or potential employers.
I just read every article on a google news archive search of [“march of dimes” polio congress] from 1938-1951 (1951 being the year before the polio vaccine was discovered), and I found zero articles that showed even one penny of government funding for polio research. If government provided funding for the March of Dimes prior to 1952, then there was a conspicuous lack of news coverage of the fact.
Nice try, though.
???
I have just a phrase for you: viral cancer theory. You may not remember it but back in the '70s it was “the next step forward” in medical research. Government and Big Pharma poured untold billions into it: the idea was that developing a number of antiviral drugs most types of cancer could be cured quite easily. There were even talks of “cancer vaccines” for some particular tumors. Forty years later all that’s left is a dubious and potentially harmful vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV): it’s supposed to prevent radically reduce risk of cervical cancer in women if administered at an early age but given the fact medical trials have been run on adult subjects this claim has been often questioned. If all the previous useless research work on antivirals is taken into account this is by far the most expensive drug/vaccine in human history.
Truth to be told Big Pharma and research labs always had doubts about the viral theory but they simply played along since governments all over the world could be milked for research funds. If you submitted your request for funding “studies into the link between X virus and Y tumor” you were almost sure to be granted money without too much questioning and if your research turned out a drug which was useless against cancer but had other interesting “side effects”… it was free money after all! So we lost thirty years in the cancer war and it took lots of effort by committed and brilliant researchers to show cancers are a bit more complicated than originally thought.
This wouldn’t have happened if Big Pharma had been forced to answer to a free market: no hospital would have purchased a useless drug and no GP would have inoculated a patient with an untested and potentially harmful vaccine. After seeing research was leading nowhere they would have turned to other areas of cancer research which held more promise.
That’s the same with every single health service: a free market would quickly weed out useless drugs/therapies. Research institutes and pharmaceutical companies, devoid of the big and clueless government spenders, would be forced to develop something that really works.