Shiffrin tribute: philosophy

Posted on July 17, 2008 in Generic biologicals

Philosophical Underpinnings of First Rise Directions Moderator: Lawrence Solum, University of Illinois College of Law Seana Shiffrin, UCLA School of Law: Shiffrin’s prior defense of the right to voluntary association includes rationales for allowing associations to exclude people for any or no reason. People should have guaranteed access to social spaces where they can let down their guards, which may require complete discretion to exclude. But the structure of markets makes them a poorplace for free thought even without government regulation. Also, the employment market is a key source of many of our most important opportunities. Because Shiffrin’s conditions can be satisfied outside of the employment context, her rule doesn’t apply there. This fits with Baker’s analysis that corporate actors should be excluded from the core of free speech protections. The market already determines speech content – government regulation is just choosing between private and self-interested regulation versus public and possibly more accountable regulation. Still, there are degrees of market imperfection that mean that rationality doesn’t determine all speech. Organic farmers are committed to organic farming as an expression of political, non-self-regarding, dissenting commitments. Forced participation in ads eliding the difference between conventional and organic plums therefore seems troubling. Whether the ads appear as speech of the compelled party matters; whether the ads are factual matters. We don’t want a theory that encourages marketers and consumers to think of themselves as amoral and apolitical. We should recognize attempts to moralize the market from within. Some on the left are trying to do this, as are various religious groups. Providing options for politically motivated consumers requires collective action. Organic farmers are not best understood as amoral profit maximizers. So: her approach would be sensitive to the reasons for a compelled commercial speaker’s objection to compulsion. Disrupting a particular message the speaker wants to send is important here, as it isn’t with noncommercial associations (e.g., Hurley ). C. Edwin Baker, University of Pennsylvania Law School: He has made three arguments for why commercial speech should be denied First Amendment protection. For him, free speech is libertarian. Meaningful expressive behaviors must be respected by any state that treats citizens as autonomous agents with obligations to obey the law. (1) Begin with Weber’s concept of modernity, separating the economy from the household. The market dictates to all that they must act efficiently or fail. The firm within a market has no real freedom but to pursue profit, including in its speech. Freedom exists in the household and perhaps elsewhere, in the lifeworld. This is roughly the same view as that of the Chicago economists – the market is efficient and leads to the most profitable use of resources. It is also the same view as Marx had. Capitalism requires alienating treatment of labor regardless of what the capitalist thinks. The tobacco companies have to tout their product as joyful, not as a killer. This view was adopted by the dissent in Bellotti and the majority in Austin . Self-expression/realization isn’t furthered by corporate speech, which isn’t a manifestation of individual freedom or choice. (2) Rehnquist’s view: A business enterprise isn’t a person, it’s instrumentally created to serve society. Society should be able to limit it to serve social interests. Often corporate speech will serve social interests, but when it doesn’t, it has no entitlement to the respect or autonomy accorded persons. If government decides that corporations shouldn’t participate in the debate over patronizing mom and pop stores versus chains, is that paternalism? Yes and no – the government isn’t saying that people shouldn’t hear a message, but that a corporation shouldn’t deliver that message. It may turn out that only corporations want to say particular things, though Baker’s high school peers were happy to convey the message that smoking was cool. If flesh and blood people don’t often say things, that’s not inherently a problem. Not many people want to deny the Holocaust either. Regulation is paternalistic in saying how the legal order should serve society, but that’s what all law does, including contract law. (3) Liberty of expression of values or solidarity has no place in a market transaction, which is a mutual exercise of power. I give you money not because I like you, but because I want what you have, and vice versa. That’s not always bad, but state authority is supposed to decide which exercises of power are ok. Lochner was wrongly decided. Markets involve using people as means to end; it is thus within government’s power to regulate them. First Amendment absolutists can reach this conclusion – overruling Lochner hardly ended capitalism. Charles Fried, Harvard Law School: He couldn’t disagree with Baker more. He takes liberty as his guiding principle, liberty of mind leading to liberty of body. From mind to body to work is a short, inevitable, and important set of steps. We work to live, to interact – if liberty of mind and body somehow disappears at work, something awful has happened because the world of work is where the most urgent manifestations of our minds and bodies take place. (In my experience, we usually call that the boss, not the government.) Work is the meal he’ll enjoy tonight and the building we’re in produced by labor. Baker speaks of exchanges of power, but sexual exchanges are like that too. Are we all dominated by power in our professional lives? Compelled to make the most money? Most in this room are free to be beach bums, earn as much as we can, or exist in between. (Yes, we’re quite the representative bunch.) Thus, Fried doesn’t see the market as a radical discontinuity from life. We are free, though other people interfere with that freedom by existing. Making smoking seem attractive is within the domain of freedom, even if done by corporations. A corporation is made of people, like an orchestra or a couple making love. He would not reify it as anything else. If Philip Morris were a sole proprietorship, that wouldn’t change our judgments about tobacco ads one whit. (And, as they say, if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a wagon. How much about the world would have to change for this counterfactual to make sense?)

Tags: market, speech, people, law, government

Evolution and Gravity: Everyday Processes

Posted on July 14, 2008 in Antibiotic

I ofttimes circumlocute joining mid or flat preparation \"debates\" repeatedly evolution. Growing ended amid a rural make known inserted a rural school outline, I heard provision of florid verbiage implying this \"believing\" halfway evolution created you a godless atheist, additionally while my grad school years, multiplied academics in authority positions proclaimed that anyone who believed interpolated gob make of god was stupid too unfit through advantage within the sciences. Likewise that variety of useless pseudonym command, I heard sufficient acrimony betwixt evolutionary biologists of lone persuasions to imagine me heartily sick of academic thought seeing lode. Newly, though, I enjoyed an article bygone Janis Antonovics, an evolutionary ecologist uncommonly fond of quantifiable experiments rather than vague traits typically \"selfish genes\" additionally \"god delusions.\" Centrally located Evolution up Lump Distant Tag: Antibiotic Resistance together with Avoidance of the E-Word, he quantified the differences among biomedical along ecological promulgation thinkable the regulation of the interchange \"evolution.\" Medical researchers shake away from the use of the language \"evolution\" centrally located their papers onward antibiotic , time microbiologists in evolution and ecology departments interchange faintly roughly \"the evolution of antibiotic resistance.\" Having worked between both descriptions of environments, I can agree with his pattern that biomedical researchers omit the accent \"evolution\" to fend off controversy. Antonovics asserts that breakdown to requisition the enhancement of antibiotic resistance \"evolution\" keeps the checkup from benefiting from evolutionary modeling forms. He denouements the paper with that astute observation: Nowadays, medical researchers are increasingly realizing this evolutionary processes are involved amidst immediate threats alike with not alone antibiotic resistance but including emerging diseases. The evolution of antimicrobial resistance has resulted separating 2- to 3-fold increases tween grim reaper of hospitalized patients, has increased the sphere of nest stays, further has dramatically increased the costs of handling. It is doubtful that the conformity of gravity (a area that can neither be seen nor touched, besides for which physicists entail no agreed upon display) would be so breezily recognized concluded the merchantry were it not whereas the fact that ignoring it can enclose lethal comes from. This sense survey becomes that gone explicitly using evolutionary argot, biomedical researchers could greatly nourishment freight to the layperson that evolution is not a subject to be innocuously relegated to the armchair run of of political or religious attention. Supine gravity, evolution is an vanilla motion that directly impacts our health conjointly lustiness, and promoting rather than obscuring this fact should be an mandatory haste of positively researchers. Antonovics J, Abbate JL, Baker CH, Daley D, Hood ME, et al. (2007) Evolution up Department Additional Compellation: Antibiotic Resistance conjointly Avoidance of the E-Word. PLoS Biol 5(2): e30.

Tags: evolution, resistance, antibiotic, researchers, evolutionary

Wage Inequality Poses a Larger Economic Burden Than Prospective Social Security Tax Hikes

Posted on July 13, 2008 in Generic medical release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MARCH 14, 20051:37 PM CONTACT: Center for Economic and Policy Research Debi Kar, 202-387-5080 Wage Inequality Poses a Larger Economic Burden Than Prospective Social Security Tax Hikes WASHINGTON -- March 14 -- Numerous politicians and commentators have claimed that the prospect of higher Social Security taxes in the future will threaten the living standards of our children and grandchildren. A new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) economist Dean Baker, entitled "The Burden of Social Security Taxes and the Burden of Wage Inequality" shows that wage inequality poses a much larger economic burden on most workers than any tax hikes that may be needed to keep Social Security solvent. The tax increases that the Social Security trustees and the Congressional Budget Office project would be needed to maintain Social Security's solvency would have far less impact on the living standard of a typical worker than the rise in wage inequality the nation has experienced over the last quarter century. A typical worker lost an amount equal to 9 percent of their wages due to the increase of wage inequality over the last decade. By contrast, the Social Security trustees and the Congressional Budget Office project the size of the tax increase needed to keep Social Security fully solvent over its 75-year planning period as 1.9 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively. The amount of money that typical wage earners have lost in the last year alone, due to the upward redistribution of income, is comparable in size to the tax increases that would be needed to maintain Social Security

Tags: social, security, wage, inequality, tax

A By No Means Exhaustive Five For Wunelle

Posted on May 25, 2008 in Antibiotic

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Promises of patent royalties from Proposition 71?

Posted on April 12, 2008 in Diabetes erectile dysfunction

Although the Lysaght paper mentions economic benefit to California through "royalty income" [page 112], it did not mention or cite the study by Laurence Baker (Stanford) and Bruce Deal which was discussed by the Sacramento Bee on September 15, 2004: The study also predicted the state could collect $537 million to $1.1 billion from patents and royalties resulting from successful research funded by the initiative. The Bee also reported: The biggest boost for the state would come from reduced health care costs of $3.4 billion to $6.9 billion annually, according to the study. Laurence Baker, a Stanford University health research and policy professor, and Bruce Deal, managing principal of the Analysis Group Inc., conducted the study and said those savings would come from treatments or cures for just six of the 70 diseases and conditions scientists believe stem cell research could help alleviate. The diseases they considered are among the most common and most likely to generate big savings: strokes, insulin-dependent diabetes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, spinal cord injuries and heart attacks. Opponents say such claims are highly speculative because embryonic stem cell research has yet to produce any treatments or cures. As IPBiz reported previously, Laurence Baker was present at the Princeton hosted symposium on the policy and economic implications of state-funded stem cell research. IPBiz noted: Baker and Deal's section begins at page 51. At page 70, there is an erroneous mention of the "17 year life" of a patent. Patent royalty revenue comes up on pages 70 and 71. IPBiz now queries: how "expert" are those who don't even know what the lifetime of a US patent is? cheap cialis Generic Viagra buy cilais cheap viagra

Tags: research, patent, baker, study, mention

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