With strong virtue requirements for our allies, we may have a very virtuous movement, but also a very small one.
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During Kamala Harris’s campaign last fall, many people on the left of the party were angered by the fact that billionaire Mark Cuban was a prominent surrogate for the campaign. I didn’t share the outrage.
To be clear, I’m not especially a fan of Mark Cuban, or any billionaire, although I will say that he is much better than the pathetic buffoons that have kissed the ring and gone full MAGA. But there is something more fundamental at issue. While it would be great to have a major political party that was going all out in attacking the rich and reducing inequality, I just can’t see how a party taking that path would have a chance of winning a national election.
As much as I would like to see us take big steps in reducing the inequality that our policies have generated in the last half century, I can’t see a political coalition that can accomplish this goal that doesn’t include some billionaires among the allies. There seems to be an idea that if we just lay down a solid progressive agenda, with big taxes on the rich and strong antitrust measures, tens of millions will rally to the cause and carry us to victory. I’m afraid that I don’t find that very credible.
We can talk about the importance of grassroots organizing and building a party from the ground up, but what’s the timeline on that? In a dream scenario, does anyone think this can be successful enough to win a national election in 2028 or even 2032? Given the pressure on labor unions at the moment and the effectiveness of the Right in disrupting the progressive organizations now in place, I would not even be confident we would be in a better situation in 2032 than we are today. That may not be a pretty picture, but we are not going to make any headway by living in an imaginary world.
That is why I would make a case for pushing for important but limited goals. I mentioned tobacco and guns in the title because these are two areas in which the Democrats have been successful in putting together a large coalition in opposition to a major industry. In the case of tobacco, this coalition has been successful in hugely increasing taxes, imposing large court settlements, and drastically reducing smoking among the population.
This is a huge victory for public health and a big defeat for what had been a politically powerful industry. Going back a half century, when almost no restaurants restricted smoking, and people openly smoked on airplanes and in college classrooms, it would have sounded almost unimaginable that most office buildings are smoke free, and that people are prohibited from smoking even in bars.
The story with guns is more mixed. Support for gun control is virtually universal among Democrats. Some types of gun control also enjoy overwhelming support from the general public. However, a far-right Supreme Court has blocked most measures that would have any real impact. While we have less cause to celebrate with guns than tobacco, it is important that a major industry is now viewed as a pariah by most of the public.
We need to recognize these successes and try to replicate them elsewhere. The prescription drug industry is an obvious target. It is thick with corruption, as best demonstrated by the opioid scandal, where it lied about the addictiveness of the new generation of opioids to increase sales.
Unfortunately, the opioid example is not an exception. The industry routinely exaggerates the effectiveness of their drugs and understates safety risks. That is their modus operandi.
This is not just the usual case of saying that companies try to maximize profits. Of course they do. But in the case of prescription drugs the reason why the profits are so high is that the government grants them patent monopolies that allow them to sell drugs for prices that are several thousand percent above the free market price. Right now, we are having huge arguments over 10 percent tariffs that Trump wants to impose on goods imported from China and 25 percent tariffs on goods that we import from Mexico and Canada. In the case of prescription drugs the patent monopolies are equivalent to tariffs of many thousand percent.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider the case of the hepatitis-C drug Sovaldi. This was a great breakthrough drug in that it actually cured hepatitis-C, rather than just alleviating the symptoms. It was originally sold in the United States for $84,000 for a three-month course of treatment. A high-quality generic was available in India for $800 for the three-month course of treatment. In this case, the patent monopoly raised the price more than a hundredfold, equivalent to a tariff of 10,000 percent.
It is also important to realize that there is an enormous amount of money at stake here. We will spend more than $650 billion this year on drugs that would sell for around $100 billion in a free market. The difference of more than $500 billion comes to $4,000 a year for an average family. This is real money and it flows from the rest of us to those in a position to benefit from these monopolies.
Patent monopolies do serve a purpose: They provide incentives to develop new drugs. But they are not the only way to provide incentives. We can have direct public funding — as we already do, to the tune of more than $50 billion a year, through the National Institutes of Health. We would need to double or triple this sum to replace the research now supported by patent monopolies. (I discuss a mechanism for expanding funding in Chapter 5 of Rigged [it’s free].)
Is Mark Cuban in on this big anti-drug company agenda? I have never spoken to him, so I have no idea; but he has aggressively pushed generic drugs that have undermined the industry’s hyper-profitability in many areas. But the point goes beyond Cuban’s particular political agenda. If we can get some rich allies in an effort to push free-market drugs, we should take advantage of that fact even if we may not like how they got their money or other things they do or say.
If we have strong virtue requirements for allies, we may have a very virtuous movement, but also a very small one.
I don’t mean to say that the pharmaceutical industry is the only one that can and should be targeted by progressives. Private equity operates on a quasi-criminal level and richly deserves to be reined in. The same is true of many other actors in the financial sector. And we have plenty of demons in the tech sector who need to be forced to respect the law.
But the point is that we are not going to be able to battle everyone at once.
It takes big bucks to run successful political campaigns, especially in a world where the Right controls most of the media and the huge social media platforms. That means that we may need to have allies who we have good reason not to like. We don’t have to be happy about this, but that is the world.
Reprinted from Dean Baker’s Beat the Press, with the author’s permission.
Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and is author of several books, including Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (with Jared Bernstein); The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive; Taking Economics Seriously; False Profits; Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy; and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.
