For decades now we have been going down the road of deregulation and privatization. The promise is always the same. Competition, leading to more choice, more efficiency, lower prices. 

We also know what the reality has been every single time. Consolidation. Monopolies or near monopolies. Less choice. Lower quality. Higher prices. Lack of oversight and checks and balances leading to abuses. Whether it was the savings and loan industry, electricity and energy production and distribution, commodities and stocks, the results have always been disastrously the same. And yet the conservatives keep pushing the "government is bad and ineffective, let the free market works its magic" message for everything.

One of the latest areas of deregulation to catch my eye is that of telecommunications and the cable industry. In large part this is due to personal experience. We have underground utilities in our neighborhood and so the cable wire comes in through the basement. We have bundled services through the cable company: cable, internet and the land line phones. Until we bundled our services,  the internet modem, and our wireless router, were on the second floor of the house, in the study where our desktop computer still resides. However apparently that was too far away from the initial point of entry (the basement) to provide a strong enough signal for the land line. And so the modem and router were moved to the basement.  

We adjusted to that. But lately, at least every other day, there comes a time during the day where the internet is "lost". Cable and phone will still be working, but the internet is down. One of us has to go down to the basement, unplug the modem from the strip it's plugged into, count to 10, and plug it back in. Then the internet "reappears". 

And don't get my wife started on the cable itself. Remotes that don't work. Features heavily advertised that it turns out you have to pay extra for. Down times where suddenly you can't DVR programs. And then to find out that other people we know in town are being called by the cable company offering them free services or reduced rates, to make up for the inconvenience of this DVR outage. The calls were initiated by the cable company mind you to these friends and relatives, but we get no such calls or offers. We suspect it is because we already have a fairly high number of optional program services so there is less opportunity for the company to entice us to upgrade or add services than there might be for others by "giving" them free trials.

So all this led me to do a little research. I remembered hearing that our experience in the USA is not the norm in other modern, industrial countries, but I figured I'd take a look. Sure enough, the wonders of the free market, free from government interference and regulation, means that Americans are paying more for less service. Sound familiar?

For example, people in the U.S. pay about twice as much for slower internet connection speeds. According to a study by the New America Foundation, in New York City you pay approximately $70/month for slow to moderate download speeds of under 20 mbps (megabits per second). Meanwhile in South Korea you would pay the equivalent of about $28/month for download speeds of about 45 mbps.

A comparison of bundled packages (internet/cable/phone service combined) that includes low to mid-range download speeds found the following internet charges for American cities:

San Francisco $99/month
New York $70/month
Washington DC $68/month.

For the same service in representative international cities:

London $38/month
Paris $35/month
Seoul $15/month.

So why do we find this pattern? According to Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy, "Americans pay so much because they don't have a choice". 

The deregulation of the telecommunications industry has led to consolidation and even more monopolies in the cable/internet marketplace than existed prior to deregulation. The result, in another quote from the BBC News Magazine article where Ms. Crawford's quote was found, is that "companies face neither competition nor oversight". And so there is no incentive for internet service providers to expand broadband or to build faster networks. The New America Foundation study concluded: 

"...the most affordable and fast connections are available in markets where consumers can choose between at least three competitive service providers." This is not the case in most American cities or regions.  

Ah, taste the freedom as the dollars fly out of your wallet. 

I keep hearing this rumor that the Republicans are the party of small government. The party of getting government off your back. The party of getting the government out of the way so businesses, entrepreneurs, and the wonderful, all-knowing free market can work their magic.
At least that's what I keep hearing them say. The markets pick winners and losers, not government. Local and state governments know better, not Washington. People can be trusted with decisions over their own lives, their own health, their own money, not politicians or bureaucrats.
But then they do stuff, and I get really confused as to what this party really does believe.
Take Tennessee for example. Please. [Rimshot]. 
Volkswagen has a plant in Chattanooga. This week the workers at the plant are voting on whether or not to join a union, specifically the United Auto Workers. And the company is taking a neutral, hands-off approach to the vote. In fact at times the corporation has sounded supportive of the idea. You see they want to institute a works council at the plant, which is a committee that includes management and workers. They have one at every other VW plant in the world. To have one here requires a union. So they will not be upset to see a pro-union vote.
But you know who will be upset and is doing everything they can to stop a 'yes' vote? Yes the Tennessee Republican party. The Governor, U. S. Senator Bob Corker, various GOP members of the Tennessee legislature have weighed in. They have threatened to withdraw the tax breaks VW was given to open the factory in Chattanooga should a union be brought in. Billboards have been taken out about the invasion from the "union" for "up north". I mean, really? And as I said this is not coming from the corporate management. It's those damned politicians butting in. 
Sen. Corker has even gone so far as to say if the vote goes pro-union VW will probably take the jobs for the SUV's built there to other plants. Or that he has been assured, by people unnamed, that a "no" vote assures expansion and more jobs at the Chattanooga plant.
Of course a VW executive denied this. He said the decision of whether to expand in Chattanooga or instead to expand an existing factory in Mexico would hinge on other factors, not the union vote. After all that plant in Mexico? Wait for it - it's unionized.
So suddenly we see the "trust the people" Republicans jumping into an issue that you would think does not concern government. It's an issue between the company and its workers and the decision is up to the workers. I thought that's what Republicans were all about, people making their own decisions without interference from the big, bad "gummint"? Instead it looks like they're trying to interfere with the market.
But this is just another example of the divergence between what the GOP says and what they actually do. They rail against Obamacare as government intrusion and scream how medical decisions should be up to you and be between you and your doctor. Unless of course you're a woman and the decision is to use birth control, or for whatever reason make the gut-wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy. Then you can't be trusted apparently and the government must stop you. It must tell your doctor what he or she can or can't tell you about your healthcare options. The government in some states must even mandate medically unnecessary procedures and threaten the doctor with penalties if he or she fails to perform them.
Or if you're a state that has decided to allow same sex marriages. Then apparently Washington knows best and there should be federal laws or Constitutional amendments to override the wishes and laws of the individual states.
So it looks like all the Republican talk about individual freedom, freedom from government interference and intrusion is just that - talk. They trust you to make your own decisions, until those decisions run counter to their ideology or their religion. Then they are all too happy to have the government jump into your bedroom, your boardroom, your doctor's office as quickly as possible. They are very eager and willing to have the government intrude to enforce their ideology and religion on you and make you abide by it. 

 

So the other night I'm randomly channel surfing while getting ready to hit the hay. I came across a PBS Frontline story entitled, "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria". 
 Being an old chemistry major and being interested in science in general I was quickly reeled in. 
Specifically the feature focused on outbreaks of KPC, an increasingly found form of gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to known antibiotics.

From a paper found on the National Institutes of Health website by Ryan et al.:

Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC)-producing bacteria are a group of emerging highly drug-resistant Gram-negative bacilli causing infections associated with significant morbidity and mortality. 

Basically this once rare form of bacteria has had outbreaks at hospitals, beginning in the New York and New Jersey area. Since it is not impacted by known antibiotics there is no known cure. It has proven fatal and other survivors have lost limbs. They live in fear of the infection returning.
There are other gram negative bacteria as well, deadly and resistant to existing antibiotics, that are showing up as well. From an article in the New York Times:
The bacteria, classified as Gram-negative because of their reaction to the so-called Gram stain test, can cause severe pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract, bloodstream and other parts of the body. Their cell structure makes them more difficult to attack with antibiotics than Gram-positive organisms like MRSA.

On a more general level the story dealt with the lack of development of new antibiotics to combat these increasingly prevalent and potent bugs. There are many reasons for this but the market does play a role.
According to the story it costs between $600 million and $1 billion dollars to develop a new drug and bring it to market. Obviously the pharmaceutical companies have to recoup that money and eventually show a profit. For antibiotics that can prove problematic.
Antibiotics have been over prescribed and overused. The two biggest transgressors are medicine and agriculture. Antibiotics are prescribed routinely at the first sign of a sniffle. They are extensively used in modern factory-farming agriculture in the raising of livestock. They get into the food supply and water supply.
With all this use comes decreased effectiveness as the bacteria mutate and develop resistance to the drugs. Evolution can be a bitch.
The other part of the scarcity is the economics of it all. There is a recognition that antibiotics are overused. And by their very nature antibiotics, even when used properly, are only intended for a finite period of time until the patient gets better. 
Therein lies the rub. Why spend a billion dollars developing something that should be used sparingly and only for a short period of time? 
As one pharmaceutical company worker put it (paraphrasing), I can produce a cholesterol drug that people need to basically take every day for the rest of their lives, and make billions in profits, or put a billion dollars into developing a new antibiotic that even those using it will only need for a period of days or weeks.
In the face of these increasingly toxic gram negative resistant bacteria there are now only one or two major companies working actively on new lines of antibiotics. Pfizer built a whole new facility to work on the issue but pulled the plug a couple of years ago. As the report stated we are about to enter a brave new world of increasingly deadly bacteria combined with decreasing availability and efficacy of antibiotics. The studies in the U.S. have not been done to determine how many of the approximately 99,000 bacterial deaths each year are from Gram negative bacteria. But in Europe where such studies have been done it is thought that 2/3 of the 25,000 bacterial deaths each year can be ascribed to the gram negative strains. Source for these figures is the same New York Times article cited above.
As I watched this show it struck me that here again we see the practical limits of leaving everything up to the free market. The pharmaceutical companies are not villains in this story, they are pursuing profits in a legal and lawful way, nothing egregious about that. But you can't argue that having no research and development of antibiotics is in the public interest.
The free market tells the companies to develop and market drugs for chronic conditions. The public interest says we need sane policies about antibiotic use and a steady supply of existing antibiotics and development of drugs to combat the gram negative bacteria. 
So there are several ways to address the issue. The free market purists say "oh well the increased mortality we are about to experience is the price of freedom." Most humans would find that answer unsatisfying and at some level, grotesque. On the other side one might argue for government takeover of something so important and vital to the public health and safety. In between are a range of other options. 
It would seem to me that between the NIH and CDC here, or maybe even under the guise of the WHO of the UN, governments could direct and fund independent research and development of necessary, but not profitable, drugs. Or governments could provide incentives and money to private companies to ensure the work was done and new antibiotics were available. The mechanics of how the costs and profits are split would be an interesting detail to work out.
But the larger point is this, the free market does not always arrive at the answer that is in the best interest of the public, or the nation, certainly not in the long run. 
We saw that with the whole discussion over energy policy in the late 70's and early 80's. We started down the path of energy independence and government providing seed money into the development of clean, renewable energy sources. Then Reagan pulled the plug on all of it and said the free market would decided what energy sources were best. Since the production and distribution channels already existed for fossil fuels we know what answer the market came up with. And as a country and a planet we would have been in a much better place if the Carter initiatives around energy had been allowed to continue.
The whole matter of development and availability of effective antibiotics is just another example. The market doesn't know public or national interest. It does not take a long range view in its cost/benefit analysis. That is why we have governments.