Lead Toys, Dangerous Drugs

Day-after-day, year-after-year I wonder why Libertarians seem to think they've found the Holy Grail of governance. From the free-rider problem of Public Television, the rising-tide of government works to the despair and death of Gilded Age capitalism, surely they could weigh the evidence and see their theories are nonsensical.

I guess, unlike them, I paid attention during 8th grade history and I learned how big businesses act when not regulated. Specificially the Gilded Age, a laissez-faire economy that was a horror-fest of poverty, exploitation and early death for the working-class people stuck in servitude to the Company Store and Factory Landlord. Practices that took fifty-years to reign in, much of which to be credited to trust busting of Roosevelt and Taft after we, as a country, got incensed to the dangers to which the Robber Barons exposed, and in the poverty they kept, us in their pursuit of profit.

Which is why I am not surprised the problem with heparin seems (though not proven yet) to be coming from China. Today, once again, the benefits of a strong regulatory presence over business is demonstrated. Not by the successes we take for granted, and thus never notice, but because of the costs of the failures we don't otherwise see:

RUGAO, China — With reports of more than 400 patients in the United States suffering serious complications after receiving the blood-thinner heparin, American investigators are trying to determine whether the raw material for the drug, made from pig intestines, became contaminated on the journey that begins in the slaughterhouses of China.

If you need this drug, you need this drug because your life is on the line. The last thing you need is to deal with the additional problems of a contaminated medicine attacking your weakened body.

The Chinese heparin market has become increasingly unsettled over the last year, as pig disease has swept through the country, depleting stocks, leading some farmers to sell sick pigs into the market and forcing heparin producers to scramble for new sources of raw material. Traders and industry experts say even big companies have been turning more often to the small village workshops, which are unregulated and often unsanitary.

In the gilded age, profit was everything. And we had to force big business to be safe. Now, in the laissez-faire, gilded-age business environment in China we have the same conditions. Women and children in horrible, working-poverty conditions while being exploited by profiteering industrial barons who are an insignificant portion of the population who make their money by squeezing the life out of others who have few honest choices in the matter. This, also, would include the drug companies who are so busy cutting costs to keep their incredible profit margins inflated beyond reason.

The authorities have not determined that problems with the heparin supply chain led to the deaths and adverse reactions, first reported last month in Missouri. Nor have investigators determined that heparin from China was the culprit. Baxter also gets some of its ingredients from a plant in Wisconsin. Neither S.P.L. nor Baxter has been accused of doing anything wrong.

Even so, the problems involving heparin have again focused attention on the quality of products from China and the gaps in regulation by both the Chinese and United States governments. S.P.L.’s plant in Changzhou was certified by American officials to export to the United States even though neither government had inspected it. The plant has been exporting heparin to Baxter since 2004.

Thank you Reagan, Bush and the anti-government lunatics that have done their best to destroy our county in their delusional hatred of all things government. Once again, a strong government is the only thing that stands between most of America and back-breaking, spirit-crushing poverty we see in the second and third world countries around the globe.