Many people are holding out the hope that the government can somehow substitute for the pharmas, bolstered by the ludicrous claim that the government really discovers all the drugs. This is arrant nonsense; government-funded research discovers targets that might someday turn into drugs, if the Big Pharma chemists can: find a molecule synthesis can be economically mass produced; keep the molecule from killing rats, mice, dogs, or humans; get the molecule into a form that does not have to be directly injected into the bloodstream; tweak the molecule so that the liver doesn’t immediately chew it into pieces that no longer affect your target; and shepherd the entire thing through years of clinical trials. That’s just off the top of my head; research chemists will undoubtedly have more.

Megan McArdle, as part of her excellent continuing series on pharmaceutical companies and US policy regarding them.

Let’s say that the government subsidized the price of bananas, you bought so many bananas, put them on your roof, and then the roof collapsed. Is that government failure or market failure?

Tyler Cowen, George Mason Economics professor, discussing the “housing bubble” and “subprime mortgage crisis” on his blockbuster blog Marginal Revolution.

People strike back at what they perceive to be injustices. Having a lot of money is not an injustice. To repeat an idea from my review: people hated the Robber Barons because they were robbers and barons, not because they were rich. The labor movement was strong when it was perceived that firms were making superprofits that could be more equitably shared with the workers. Gender inequality and racial discrimination are opposed because they are unfair, not because they lead to an unequal division of wealth.

–Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Herbert Gintis, regarding his (negative) review of Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal, and his view that American “liberals” are unproductively obsessed with the concept of economic inequality.

Unfamiliar observers should note that Gintis is about as far to the “left” politically as it is possible to be in the US without being a full-fledged Marxist (he would probably consider himself a Marxian-inspired heterodox economist). He is however, an insightful and fair-minded thinker who has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care about developing good rhetorical points for political debates, but rather about studying social problems such as poverty and poor schooling so that these problems can actually be ameliorated.