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And with actions like that taken by the thai government, it's effectively saying that it's okay to steal the results of research without just compensation.
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just compensation? a non-profit can use revenues for salaries. that is just compensation. profit is not.
stealing? you act as though existing ip law, existing conceptions of property and property relations are not political expressions. any legal parameter is a political parameter as well. in a case like this one, the thai government is effectively rejecting the political logic and enframes drugs as property in the way that a lawnmover is in the way that a hat is. seen from this angle, their actions are a political act. another reason perhaps why the americans and their lackies in the wto have no moved against thailand over this may be that big pharma and the governmental apparatus that serves as its proxy does not want to find itself in a public legal fight in the context of which it would actually have to defend the "right" of tncs to subordinate the well-being of actual human beings to profit. such a proceeding would do irreperable damage to the logic that you would defend, fta: as theater, as political theater, forcing big pharma into basing a legal action on this logic would place them in a wholly untenable position.
there is a problem in this. the problem is that the choice human well-being without regard to income vs. the desire of pharmaceutical firms to generate profits for shareholders IS an ethical problem and that there is no way to generate an ethical argument FOR the subordination of human life to profit.
on the question of health care as a basic human right: this too is a political question wrapped around an ethical core: at issue is the kind of society would would prefer to see: one that views human well-eing as a central collective goal, a kind of infrastructural feature, or one that views profit for the holders of capital as the paramount collective interest. this does not turn on the question of business yes/no as business can operate in either context: it is a question of the politics of that context, of collective values. in the states, we have experienced some 25 years of neoliberal ideology in a position of such hegemony that it does not even have a name domestically: within this ideological context, wherein almost all relay systems (media) are held by for-profit corporations, it is not surprise to find that. absent significant masspolitical opposition, we have been subjected to 25 years of illusion, 25 years of self-evidently false claims that there is no meaningful choice to be made between corporate profits and overall well-being of a society.
to see that this is false, look around.
the united states is a brutally stratified class society: the dominant ideology addresses this by pretending that class is no longer a variable. everybody is middle class. this is self-evidently false empirically--ideologically, however, is must be held to be true because it functions as a demonstration of the otherwise vacant claim that capitalist markets, left to themselves, can be confused with the rational, that no-one is responsible for attending to the human consequences of capitalist operations because to do so would be like trying to stop the tides----because markets are necessarily rational. the fact that this flies in the face of 150 years of the history of actually existing capitalism is apparently of no consequence: the population functions with a deep historical ignorance it seems and an even deeper desire to believe what they are told so long as what they are told comes packaged in simplistic formulas and reassuring slogans--particularly of the type that reassures the television viewer that this brutal systems is in fact the same thing as a free system, that this powerlessness is in fact power, that this irresponsibility is the fullest manifestation of responsibility, that the distinction between actual holders of capital and the rest of society can be erased behind a myth of universal social mobility in which isolated, powerless individuals can, through gumption and other such subjective attributes, become part of the bourgeoisie--this because people apparently would rather believe in a simple pretty myth than look at a complex and ugly reality....
(all the above applies in spades when you start thinking about northern hemphere.southern hemisphere socio-economic relations, profoundly assymetrical relations fobbed off for domestic television consumption as transient distortions which are only comprehensible as distortions because you as a viewer already believe such nonsense as "the level playing field" and the "virtues of competition between manly firms in a free market"--both of which effectively make it impossible to even begin to understand what his happening behind the facade of "globalizing capitalism")
people in the states like to pretend that belief in the illusory capacities of markets to "float all boats" (or whichever of the equally empty and misleading metaphors for market rationality you prefer) casts market rationality (whatever that is--markets dont embody reason, they do not have natural tendencies, they are not natural formations--historicall speaking if markets tend to anything , it is toward concentration) as a type of Fate which enables you to explain away the consequences of capitalist relations as if markets were the instrument employed by some god--so that all the human consequences of a profoundly irrational socio-economic system become non-issues because all is in a sense written or determined in advance by this god (market rationality, whatever that is) and so people deserve whatever happens to them.
at all points, people who are not you are treated as things, signs of a divine order, debris thrown aside by the March of Captialist History--and no-one, anywhere, ever has to take any responsibility for any of it--except perhaps in the context of some televised documentary that illicits these empty feelings of pity the primary function of which in this ideological context is not to reveal something about the irrationality of the order itself that would produce such consequences on other human beings--rather, these documentaries provide an occaison for you to congratulate yourself on the fact that you are not the people you are watching, but rather are among the set of people sitting in their living rooms watching those people. so even when you are shown the human consequences of this system, you interpret those human beings as signifiers, as things. and the ideological framework you bring to bear on the watching leave you no reaction but this meaningless, empty pity, which leads you to nothing once the brief period of self-congratulation ends. except maybe for a subsequent period of shame for that moment of self-congratulation. but that passes, like gas.
it is a beautiful ideological framework. from it follows the possiblity that one could claim that corporate profits are more important than allieving human suffering and disease. this priority accorded to profit is apparently the amurican way.
that we operate within an ideological context that divorces the idea of ethical choice from those of the consequences of the normal operation of capitalism does not mean that we, collectively, do not still make ethical choices. we do. we make really bad ethical choices that, like big pharma and the us government and the wto, we are unwilling to face down. so we prefer to avoid the questions, avoid the problems. pretend they are something else. and like big pharma, the us government and the wto with respect to thailand, this becomes clearest when a situation arises such that the frame of reference within which this facing-down unfolds cannot be controlled.
so i dunno: human well-being vs. corporate profits. if you cannot accept the premise that these are identical functionally speaking, then there is an ethical problem. that the united states functions within a system that self-evidently privileges profits over human life is a bad ethical choice. bad ethics, bad politics, bad context, bad for business, bad for people. the question of one's attitudes toward health care, its availability and its costs, is but an index. it is an unpleasant one, because it is far too easy to think about actual human beings across this. better to run away into the mythologies of how wonderful "free marekts are" and with that to run away from reality.