I just found out your patient isn't taking these FDA-approved gummy vitamins.
He came in here once for advice.
And I had no idea what what he does outside of this hospital.
The FDA just confiscated twenty thousand Mexican gummies from his apartment,
lineman wine naranjo and they say he is distributing them to his friends through a
buyer's club.
Actually, I have been reading a lot about buyer's clubs and they've been having some success
eliminating the symptoms with some of these new drugs.
Yeah, but I don't care about how they feel. I care about the regulatory system.
I care about special interests like the Sperck Corporation.
They wrote the legislation. They play by the rules and they manufacture these worthless,
potentially harmful gummies.
Now, grab some gummies and let's get to work.
Hello, I'm Andrew Heaton and you're watching EconPop -- the show that sifts
through the haystack of popular culture to find the needle of economics within
and then stabs you with it!
Today, we're talking about the Oscar-winning film, Dallas Buyers Club.
Meds and the treatments are free, but membership is $400 a month.
Now you got to sign a waiver. We are not responsible
for the drugs that we give you. You croak, you croak.
It's not our problem, it's yours.
Dallas Buyer's Club takes AIDS and economics, quite possibly the two most dismal subjects imaginable
and combines them into a surprisingly good film. I say good film
but I wouldn't recommend watching it on date night and unless whoever you're
seducing hates the Food and Drug Administration
in which case pop a couple of FDA-approved aphrodisiacs and settle in for a fun evening.
Matthew McConaughey plays a skeleton who
unfortunately, contracts HIV. There are drugs that can extend his life
but, unfortunately, they're not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration
So, he has to go to Mexico where they're legal to save himself.
He did realize that he can buy them in bulk and sell them in Dallas
turning a profit.
hang in there I'll get you hooked up shortly.
And that's largely what entrepreneurship is seeing a need and innovating a way to fill it and making some money in the process.
Noted in the film the Dallas buyers club isn't a non-profit entity.
Matthew McConaughey's character is making money but by doing so he simultaneously
providing life-saving drugs to other HIV patients.
His financial gain is nonetheless a social benefit.
You're treating these people?
I'm letting them treat themselves.
With what?
Vitamins, peptide tea, EDC
anything but that poison you're hocking.
All too often people think that making money is at odds with helping people.
That's not the case. Think about Steve Jobs who made billions developing mobile
phones smaller than a brick.
Or the Sports Illustrated zero-g bikini photoshoot of Kate Upton.
That was a for-profit venture but my life certainly improved for it.
That said, there's a nice moment in the movie where an older gay couple gives
McConaughey a house. Not to get rich themselves, but to help what he's doing.
Now, you don't try a con on me.
The house is free. We want to help.
Well, that's good news.
Unlike McConaughey, they're engaging in private charity,
voluntarily giving money to help others. Entrepreneurship and charity go hand in hand.
A free society isn't sheer unbridled darwinian greed.
It's also people voluntarily helping people. So, how does the government fit into this?
Pretty poorly in the Dallas Buyers Club. The Food and Drug Administration
makes it difficult for McConaughey to run his business.
In fact, it's so restrictive that nearly kills him by denying the drugs he needs.
All allegedly for his own benefit.
People are dying and y'all are afraid that we are going to find an alternative without you.
See, the pharma companies pay the FDA to push their product.
Bleep...they don't wanna see my research.
I don't have enough cash in my pocket to make it worth their while.
Consider this, you're an FDA bureaucrat. There's a drug which might potentially
save a hundred thousand lives
but there's a possibility that it might kill two thousand people
if you approve the drug and two thousand people die
you're going to get in trouble. Might be fired or even jail
but if you don't approve the drug no one ever knows.
That's what we call an opportunity cost. It's also apparent that in the film the
FDA and Big Pharma
are friends with benefits. This is one of the problems with large government agencies.
The threat of crony capitalism. Crony capitalism is regular capitalism's
inbred cousin. It's where the government passes out favors
to favorite companies and hurts little ones that don't have connections
One major way this happens is through regulatory capture. This is when large
companies wind up writing the legislation that they are meant to be regulated by
and they use the opportunity to carve markets for themselves
and to squash competitors. Let's use something less scary than AIDS as an
example. Let's say cupcakes.
Imagine that someone dies from cupcake poisoning in Meth Shack, Virginia.
Seemingly helpfully, the biggest cupcake manufacture in America goes to congress
with an army of lobbyists
and says it agrees with Washington -- there needs to be more regulation.
For instance, every cup cake factory should have an anti-terrorism specialist
a certified electrician, a nutritionist on staff and lots of other safeguards
It turns out that the big company already has all of these things.
It's making a cookie cutter shape law around itself.
Tiny cupcake companies that can only afford one or two employees can't comply
with these new regulations
and they go out of business which is great news for the big cupcake conglomerate.
I've got a court order permitting us to confiscate any and all non FDA
approved drugs or supplements.
One of the things that I find interesting about the film is that Matthew
McConaughey's character is not particularly likable.
At the beginning at the film he's a bigot, he's a homophobe.
You can infer he's probably a racist. He's a hard drinker. There are a lot
of reasons not to like him as a person.
But throughout the film he develops as a character and as a human being.
By the end of the film he's very close to many gay people that he would have detested
at the beginning at the film and a lot of that came through the interaction that
he had with them
through trade. Commerce brings unlike people together all the time.
And this doesn't just happen on a one to one level this happens on a macro level
as well
entire nations trade with one another and are thus less likely to go to war
with one another.
It's no longer there economic self-interest but beyond that the people
in them get to know each other
and thus their humanizing one another. This even happens on a personal level in
my case
for instance, I used to hate the Welsh and I don't know why
but I started trading cupcakes with them and now I'm on excellent terms with
the entire country.
Gleniff festion a Lemony Snicket to my Welsh friends or
hello as you'd say in Welsh.
And now it's time for everyone's favorite part of the show
Subjective Value -- where we invite famous economists to give us their two cents.
It's a pun.
Today, we have George Stigler.
Well, hello, Andrew. Thank you for having me. Did you know that I too am a great friend of the Welsh.
Yes, I've spent many a night bivouacked beneath the stars of Gonet.
Have you ever heard a story Andrew of the stone of Cloghorn Ardu.
It's said that if two people spend a night beneath the stone
one will become a great poet while the other will become insane
Well, I spent a night there Andrew which do you think I became?
hmmmm.... 4 Stars
Well, That's our show. Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
If you're looking for more information about regulatory capture and the economics of
Dallas Buyers Club
you can download the EconPop podcast on iTunes.
with Steve Horowitz, Paul Cantor, and myself.
See you next time!