Corporatism Demonstrated in Drug Research

Corporatism, which some would say is very similar to garden-variety fascism, is on display with news that the U.S. Government will now fund pharmaceutical research. Natural news notes that, "The new government drug research center will operate under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and be called the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, says he hopes Congress will increase funding of the center to at least $1 billion annually."

We are already the most medicated nation in human history, but I guess that the market is not producing enough new drugs for some people. Somehow we have to have the government fund drug research and then apparently hand the results over to Big Pharma. Taxpayers foot the bill for research, Big Pharma rakes in the profits from the medication- in many cases by getting government to make use of their vaccines "mandatory." That's corporatism at work. Corporations fund politicians, who in turn give taxpayer subsidies to the corporations, mandate the purchase of their products, and enact regulatory burdens to potential competitors. Where does the average citizen figure in with all this? They are merely tools for the "persons" who really matter, the corporations and the political class. Those two groups have a system which mutually fund one another from our pockets.

One might say that drug research is declining because the FDA makes it so hard to get a new drug to market. Maybe, but is the answer to a problem caused by government interventionism in the market supposed to be solved by more intervention on the other side of the equation? The answer is to make the FDA more like the patent office, which is self-funding. Their approval in this system would not be required to sell a drug, but it would be a selling point if a drug had it, and the approval could be tied to patent protections that a drug would enjoy if it had such approval.