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Jewish World Review May 25, 2012/ 4 Sivan, 5772 Big business gets the Hollywood treatment By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
According to various news reports, the winning submission at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is "28 times cheaper" than existing tests and far, far more accurate. Andraka received This comes on the heels of another teen wunderkind. In December, Zhang and Andraka can probably spend the rest of their high school careers playing video games in the basement, given that their college search is going to be pretty stress-free from here on out. But that's the real world for you. Impressive kids -- or grown-ups -- invent fantastic things, potentially benefitting millions of people, if not all of mankind. The inventors are rewarded, consumers benefit, and the economy grows. Woo-hoo! Of course, the real world isn't the world many people imagine it to be. In the After all, cures and cheaper tests hurt the bottom line of those evil corporations, and we all know profit is all they care about. I mean, haven't you read or seen "The Constant Gardener," the John le Carré book and movie about evil corporations testing drugs on Africans and offing the whistle-blowers at every turn? That's what corporations do, right? At least that's what my kid is taught. In " When kids get older, they learn from At No wonder that when these kids grow up, some of them make documentaries about how vast conspiracies keep the electric car and, no doubt, the Everlasting Gobstopper off the market. Even more of them uncritically accept this stuff. After all, everyone knows big businessmen are evil. So the ones getting involved in politics, at least Republican politics, must be the sorts of bad guys we've all seen in the movies.
Now, truth be told, I'm no lover of big corporations, but not because I think they want to poison their customers or shoot my dog for target practice. My problem isn't that they're too rapaciously capitalistic. Rather, it's that they're too opportunistic, too eager to abandon the free market and work with the government under the false flag of the greater good. In a free market, businesses are in a relentless competition to improve products and satisfy the needs of the consumer. "A new test for pancreatic cancer? Great! Let's be the first to get it to market." In the cozy world of government-business collusion, the state counts on the status quo existing far out into the future, for that's the only way to preserve and plan out "the system." There's got to be a good a movie plot in there somewhere.
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
