Soundings, July/August 2001

In April, the online magazine Slate sponsored a debate about the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry. Defending the industry and economic freedom was Andrew Sullivan, who writes the weekly TRB column for the New Republic: "To my mind, this is one of the critical debates now going on-the real fault line in the new politics. And it pits, as the old politics did, the culture of achievement against the culture of resentment. Guess which side I'm on. . . .

"There's a reason why the international pharmaceutical industry is now almost entirely based in the U.S. This country is the last place on earth that values innovation and success over envy and resentment. That's why 10 years ago, five out of the top 10 best-selling drugs came from Europe, and now only three of the top 25 do. . . .

"Let me address the hard question for my side. There's a brand new drug, the product of expensive research, that ameliorates, say, Parkinson's. But it's too expensive for most Parkinson's patients. What do you do? My view is: nothing. It's a brutal consequence of a system that generates this kind of innovation that its products will not be instantly available to everyone as soon as they are produced. Once a patent runs out, the drug will be affordable. Until then, medicine is a product like any other-you can only buy it if you can afford it."

"Altruism," Ayn Rand wrote in her "Introduction" to The Virtue of Selfishness, "declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value-and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." "Anything" apparently includes betraying one's country.

"FBI agent Robert Hanssen, charged with selling secrets to Moscow, reportedly sent $20,000 of his spying earnings to the late Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity on the advice of a Roman Catholic priest. . . .

"A former spiritual advisor to the order, Father Le Jolly, said this is not the first time that the Missionaries of Charity had been dragged into controversy over dubious donations. Mother Teresa in the past had accepted donations from the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. "I don't ask from where the money comes. I distribute it all to the poor," she said at the time of the controversial donations.

"Le Jolly said the order should provide the information if it has received money from Hanssen. 'If he actually donated what he had earned from the KGB, it should give some ground for reprieve from the federal judges, though he may not be totally exonerated from the guilt,' he said" (CNSNews.com, June 19, 2001).

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