Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money.… - Linda McQuaig
" "Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist...This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease...killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma.
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About Linda McQuaig
Linda Joy McQuaig (born 1951) is a Canadian journalist, columnist, non-fiction author and social critic.
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Linda Joy McQuaig
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Additional quotes by Linda McQuaig
It is almost enough to make one's jaw drop to think that officials at the World Bank and the IMF would suggest that they have poverty alleviation in mind when they force governments to withdraw subsidies that enable poor people to get clean water to drink. If this is a policy aimed at helping the world's poor, it's interesting to imagine what a policy aimed at hurting the world's poor would look like.
All our confidence in our ability to act collectively is being undermined, with the subtext message Whatever it is, the private sector can do it better. Never mind that there's no evidence for this. Never mind, for instance, that the private US health-care system is 40 percent more expensive per capita than the Canadian public system, even though the Canadian system provides full coverage for all Canadians and the American system leaves some forty-three million without any coverage at all. This isn't because Canadians are smarter than Americans - it's because we have a public system and they don't.
One of the striking aspects of the new trade deals is that while they have invested corporations with a new set of rights, they have attached no responsibilities to those rights. Notice how the lawsuits all go in one direction - corporations sue governments for infringing their corporate profit-making rights. A government can't sue a corporation for infringing the rights of its citizens by, say, polluting local drinking water.
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