Adam Smith’s capitalism is as different from Mitt Romney’s as a robin is from a buzzard.
Understand please that humans throw around terminology that has dubious relation to reality but how might one not be able to distinguish a small greedy street peddler struggling for survival with a giant corporation raiding other giants for all their cash and readily salable assets, loading it up with debt to further enrich the plunderers and then shipping the pitiful remains to China or other poor countries where they may survive only through the use of even child or slave labor?
The latter tend to represent socialism (in its true sense) more than anything remotely resembling the theories of Adam Smith. Europe’s prosperous northern tier of “socialist” countries are not socialist at all in any meaningful sense such as the kibbutzim of early Israel that produced wealth but weighed too heavily on the people to continue long.
It is hardly unknown for poisons to be utilized as medicine with beneficial effect.
As children we got into an old visiting doctor’s bag in a day when doctors made house calls. I was startled even at a very tender age to find a container of strychnine used to poison coyotes by whipping up the heart beyond the limits of its ability.
The doctor explained that he was able to use the strychnine in what could be fatal doses for healthy people to sometimes revive a dying heart patient.
Vampire bat saliva has been used for strokes, proteins from the rabies virus may be more efficacious in smuggling drugs across the blood-brain barrier than Vitamin C.
Most all vaccines utilize a poison, an adjuvant, to alert and direct the immune system to vigorously attack a pathogen or even an internal enemy like cancer.
Prof. Yvonne Paterson spent decades experimenting with the often lethal Listeria bacterium as a vaccine adjuvant but Big Pharma shuddered in fright at the thought of giving deathly ill cancer patients (the primary target) with blasted immune systems a shot of Listeria, even in a weakened form. Today they are far more interested in pushing conventional and junk branded medicine than in ultra-expensive risky research, let alone what Yvonne Patersonm had to offer.
Much smaller fry were not tempted either.
Then one courageous, daffy sort raised money from the most notorious of all financial predators with death spiral convertibles to run a Phase I trial and had blazing success IMO. Of 13 patients, 2 had their widely metastasized cancers disappear without a trace.
This was not the diabolical melanoma that seems capable of doing a disappearing act with most anything and then rapidly mutates and returns with a vengeance, meaner and more hurtful than ever. It was cervical cancer that is easily cured in early stages but very aggressive and mostly impervious to any attack in later stages.
Then the company and the vaccine were dead again – a bled out corpse done in by the financial predator.
Then it was resuscitated with a ton of money and a mighty struggle by a tainted promoter and now it may well die again. Angry shareholders who dreamed of a cornucopia of wealth quickly are mad, mad, mad and want to sue and want Big Pharma to buy what they didn’t want before and lawyers may be preparing for their favorite chase: ambulances.
This puny capitalist has pitched some pennies in the pot (literally pennies – I may be stupid but that doesn’t necessarily mean I am a fool). I do love inventors and people doggedly pursuing their dreams and hate cancer.
Maybe then after all, I am a fool as well. I have seen Lazarus walk [not a dead Lazarus but a doomed Lazarus]. Probably would have been better had I not.
The very bad guys will probably win again Friday and Lazarus can remain safely in his grave.
Best, Terry