(if I were the) King of the Forest

If we want to make drugs affordable in the third world, we must find a way to rein in the health care advocates who would use that as a moral platform to transform the American and European markets. Protected from such a threat, the drug companies would, I’m guessing, cooperate. But as long as Americans agitate to be treated – at least for purposes of pricing – the same as their peers in the marginal markets, the drug companies will do all they can to protect their domestic profits – which ultimately protects the R&D pipeline that benefits both the first and third worlds.

As both an option-holder and a shareholder in various companies I agree that options should be reported in some manner other than a footnote, but I vehemently disagree that calling them an “expense” – on a par with cash outlays like salaries – is the correct accounting form.

This sounds to me like a success of ethical government. It sounds to me like a refutation of the clamor we’ve heard for the last six months from the news media and the Democrats that the Bush administration is “in Enron’s pocket”.

In a world of boundless resources, where no worthwhile project went undone for lack of funding or attention, we could eliminate arsenic and a host of other environmental poisons to arbitrarily small tolerances with impunity. In the world outside of utopian fiction, however, limited resources must be allocated, and what is used for one thing is unavailable for another….It may be that as a society we conclude that reducing arsenic levels is the best use for those resources, but that conclusion is neither obvious nor unanimous and has nothing to do with science.

I tend to be cynical about government so government ineptitude rarely shocks me. The electricity crisis in California provided an exception. It wasn’t just the up front stupidity that amazed but the refusal to acknowledge it even after the fact. It was bad enough that the original “deregulation” program included such regulatory aspects as freezing retail prices, forcing distributors to pay the highest bid price on the wholesale market, and mandating utility divestiture of power plants; the legislature later added a prohibition on entering into long-term contracts, thus guaranteeing all purchases had to be made in the spot market. What is amazing is not that there was a crisis, but that it took so long to happen.

I am bemused by the recent spate of articles in both the Mercury News and the Chronicle bemoaning the fact that gasoline prices vary across California, and are generally higher in the Bay Area than in other parts of the state. The raw facts – which should be neither surprising nor of particular concern to anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of free-market economics — have been veiled in mystery and innuendo, implying some vast oil company conspiracy and the specter of evil oil companies (gasp!) actually profiting from our addiction to automobility

I started this book by announcing I knew how to reform the health-care system; it seems appropriate, then, that I end it with my health-care reform proposal.

It takes money to make money. Especially here in the Silicon Valley, where high rewards come from high risks bankrolled by big bucks.