The market will bear no more
During the first few years of the new millennium, our newest means for communicating with one another - the Internet - has created all kinds of new marketing opportunities. Porn has proliferated as never before, bookstores are booming and regular folks are trading stuff over electronic bazaars like e-bay.
One obvious but overlooked result of all this communicating, however, is that people are now able to backlash against inflated prices by sidestepping the "legitimate" markets to deal direct with "black market" operators. Napster, for example, allowed consumers to swap music files. The old marketing maxim, "whatever the market will bear," gave the recording industry a rude jolt when they woke up to discover that consumers were no longer willing to pay the inflated prices they charged for CDs - which, in many cases, have only one or two decent tracks on them, anyway.
It was theft, pure and simple, and the recording industry has responded with highly publicized lawsuits against, in many cases, children who didn't know any better. But, with much foot dragging, complaining and victimy whining of the sort we expect from socialists, music companies are slowly responding with capitalist measures by lowering their prices:
"The world's largest recording company said Wednesday it would slash wholesale compact disc prices in hopes of reviving music sales, which have dropped 31 percent industrywide in the last three years. The suggested sale price on a majority of its CDs will be cut by $6 to $12.98, said Universal Music Group representatives." - CD prices could fall to $10 as music giant acts to spur sales, by Alex Veiga, The Associated Press, and Steve Maynard, Tacoma News Tribune, September 4th, 2003
The e-FreeMarket
Other representatives of capitalism who are responding to all this free trade with socialist whining are the drug manufacturers, who are retaliating against both legal and illegal means of obtaining prescription drugs via the Internet. Canadian pharmacies offer a low cost source of the same prescription drugs available in the U.S., so safety is less of an issue, if it's an issue at all, than are drug company profits:
"U.S.-based Pfizer Inc., the world's largest pharmaceutical maker, in August became the fourth drug company to act against the sale of discounted Canadian prescription drugs to Americans, following similar moves by GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP and Wyeth.
A letter Pfizer sent to dozens of Canadian pharmacies said it would only sell its products directly to the pharmacies instead of through wholesalers. If a Canadian pharmacist orders more than its domestic market dictates, Pfizer can cut the supply to prevent the medicine from being resold to Americans." - Drug industry hurts U.S. sales of Canadian meds, by Tom Cohen, The Associated Press Toronto, Daily Olympian, September 4th, 2003
The clear message to American consumers and Canadian pharmacists was, "Free trade for American corporations good, free trade for American consumers bad." And such is the power wielded by the drug manufacturers that now they even have God on their side.
Yes, this is true, in a Washington Times article loaded with lies, half-truths and hate, Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell viciously attacked the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act, which would harm the profits of Drug Manufacturers by protecting the right of Americans to shop for better prices abroad:
"The issue centers on a piece of legislation known as the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act. According to news accounts, the bill is scheduled to come to a vote within the next two weeks. It would serve to essentially open the floodgates to drugs from outside the country, allowing drugs with unknown origins, production methods, packaging guidelines and transportation standards into the American prescription drug supply." - Choose life, not drug importation, by Jerry Fallwell, The Washington Times, July 08, 2003
God and the Corporate Communists
Ostensibly, Chancellor Fallwell isn't so much opposed to lower prices for prescription drugs as he is with attacking "the so-called Life Extension Foundation (LEF)," which he describes as "a rabidly anti-life organization." (For the Foundation's response to Fallwell, see Jerry Falwell Attacks Life Extension Foundation, LEF Magazine, October 2003.) But the result is the same: maintaining the American Drug Manufacturers' anti-free-trade stranglehold on the American market. A stranglehold which has created a "shadow market" in prescription drugs that directly threatens the health and lives of American consumers:
"Isolated problems have attracted the interest of some state and federal prosecutors and resulted in lawsuits. But the increasing recalls of tainted medicines, overdoses on Internet-bought drugs and cross-border pharmaceutical trade are part of a larger pattern. Taken together, the worst elements of the shadow market constitute a new form of organized crime that now threatens the public.
The shadow market takes advantage of technology, global trade, vast disparities in pharmaceutical prices, the explosive growth of enticing new miracle drugs and the self-medicating habits of an aging baby-boom population. It extends from small, backroom operations to buck-raking Internet pharmacies to the warehouses of the nation's largest drug distributors." - Rogue trade undermines prescription drug quality, by Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty, The Washington Post, in the Seattle Times, Sunday, October 19, 2003
Black markets and shadow markets don't happen just for the fun of it, but, to put it into economist-speak, are a response to economic distortions caused by government interference in the marketplace. In other words, when the law over-regulates the marketplace, as when it enforces socialist policies for the benefit of multinational corporations which otherwise loudly proclaim their support for international free trade, people will respond, as they always have, by creating a black market, or "shadow market," to get around it.
The corporations can whine about that all they like, but more than anything else what they accomplish when they do is to reveal themselves as Corporate Communists.
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