What We’re Reading: Comrade Sanders; Is Uber The Man?; Pell Grants & Prisoners

+ Uber and co. aren’t fighting the man, they are the man, argues The Guardian:

a republic can’t run without authorities who follow the rule of law. Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy firms now flouting basic employment and anti-discrimination laws would like us to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance, rather than segregationists’ massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful, nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”.

As Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel has demonstrated, the goal of tech firms is not to compete — it is to so monopolise a sector that they basically become synonymous with it. Uber’s and Airbnb’s self-reinforcing conquests of markets attract more venture capital (VC) investment, which in turn enables more conquests, which in turn attracts more VC money. As that concentration of economic power continues apace, it’s more vital than ever to dispute Silicon Valley oligarchs’ self-aggrandising assertions that they follow in the footsteps of civil rights heroes.

All of this may well be true, and yet I just made another two reservations via AirBnB and I can’t tell whether I should feel guilty about that.

+ The US government is going to reinstate Pell Grants for prisoners! Doing so isn’t simply good-hearted, it’s practical, as education helps with recidivism:

A 2013 study by the Rand Corp. found that inmates who participated in education programs, including college courses, had significantly lower odds of returning to prison than inmates who didn’t.

+ Bernie Sanders comes off as a cantankerous old socialist in this interview, a really smart one, and I’ve kind of developed a crush on him, help.

Here’s one long answer of many:

A lot of the money in health-care research goes into me-too drugs, copycat drugs where they will come up with another drug that really doesn’t substantially increase the kinds of benefits that it has on the patient. In my view, the high cost of prescription drugs is a huge issue — it’s an economic issue, it is a moral issue — and I very much reject what goes on in this country right now. Right now in America, uniquely among major countries, drug companies can double the prices for a drug tomorrow for no particular reason, just because they can make more money. We have seen that with name-brand drugs; now we’re seeing it increasingly with generic drugs.

I think absolutely that the cost of prescription drugs should be regulated. I will never forget taking a group of Vermont women across the border to Canada, where they purchased medicine they needed for breast cancer at one-tenth the price they were paying in the United States of America. I also find it very interesting that many of my friends who are great free traders, who want to see lettuce and tomatoes brought in from small farms in Mexico, have no problem with the fact that we cannot import name-brand prescription drugs from other countries around the world. That speaks to the power of the pharmaceutical industry.

I talk to physicians who work in working-class communities, and they tell me one-quarter of the prescriptions they write are not filled. That is insane. I think we need to deal with the cost of prescription drugs very, very differently than is currently the case.

Especially relevant since Big Pharma continues to consolidate and has put us on notice that they want to hike prices again.

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