The Dish

A reader writes:

I’m keeping my beard. And keeping it trimmed short. An unruly beard is an unsightly beard and properly an object of mirth among the young. But beardlessness can be equally funny, apparently. The last time I shaved mine off (once in thirty-five years), my son and his friends literally rolled on the floor laughing.  As my son said, "Dad, some guys are MEANT to have beards, and you are one of those guys." Shortly thereafter, at a fairly large party, my hostess handed out ballots and asked the guests to vote "Willard’s beard: Yes ___   No ____." 

The only "No" vote was my mother’s, who, incidentally, a month earlier had greeted me at a family funeral (the first time she saw me after the shave), by extending her hand, saying "Hello, I am Margaret Henson – so happy to meet you," passing on by and continuing to work the room.  Oh, and don’t be surprised if your dogs bark at you. Mine did every time I entered the house until I grew it back. As for the "minimalism" of hairlessness, please. It takes a lot more work.

If you need tips, here’s the best guide to growing and maintaining a beard I know. I’m not trimming mine till after Ptown’s Bear Week next month. But my mother is very unhappy about my having one for the wedding. So the follicular surge may fade by the end of August.

(Photo: James Russell Lowell, one of the founding editors of the Atlantic with a killer beard.)

Oxfordshire, England, 7 am.

For a newly updated, global gallery of Dish readers’ window views, click here.

Kevin Drum says there’s no evidence that pharmaceutical companies in socialized systems are less innovative. He cites a handful of big drug companies that have headquarters in Europe. But my point is not their nominal headquarters in a mutlinational world, but where the cash for their R&D comes from, and where they have been moving their operations under price pressure from the governments in Europe. Take GSK. Yes, it’s still nominally British. But Wiki revealingly tells us that

The majority of its activity is in the United States, although the company has a presence in almost 70 countries.

GSK isn’t alone. Check out Novartis, a nominally Swiss company Kevin cites that is also heavily based in the US. The reason is the size of the US market but equally the prices it can charge for its drugs here. Take that away, and you will surely have a drop in drug R&D. Yes, there is flim flam and abuse and corruption in Big Pharma. But not enough to ease the pain of the price restraints the Democrats are eager to slap on pharmaceuticals. Mark Kleiman makes my point better than I did:

Where a drug is invented doesn’t really matter much. A company that invents a drug in Europe still gets much of its profit from the American market. So the question is, what would be the effect on innovation of squeezing down on pharmaceutical prices in the U.S.?

My first guess is that it would slow things down. If both Wyeth and Novartis have to consider that their next blockbuster drug is going to bring in less revenue, the probability that Drug X will be that blockbuster has to be higher in order to justify spending the money to find out. That means some good prospects get overlooked; presumably not forever, but for now.

If every country tries to free-ride by making sure that its consumers don’t pay their share of the cost of innovation, it figures that there will be less innovation. Maybe that’s not right; maybe drug companies, faced with a somewhat less creamy American cash cow, would be able to negotiate up prices in Europe and Asia. (That’s Kevin’s guess.)

But one or the other is going to have to happen, or some combination. It’s not the case that reduced prices can come out of pharmaceutical-company profits; those firms have to raise capital in the same market as everyone else, and their risk-adjusted returns on equity aren’t out of line with those of other companies. (Pfizer’s market capitalization is just shy of $200 billion, which is something less than two months’ worth of U.S. health-care expenditure.)

So it’s true, to some extent, that the U.S. is effectively cross-subsidizing pharmaceutical consumption in other countries, either by sparing them higher prices or by keeping up the pace of innovation.

Kevin doesn’t worry, because we’re "over-medicated" anyway. Well, that’s a concession of the trade-off I’m asserting. For my part, I don’t think I’m over-medicated. And I do think that without the private healthcare system in the US, I – and millions of others – would be dead by now, and that includes the poor and the destitute with HIV in the developing world, who get a free ride off American capitalism as well. You want to throw global medical research into a depression? Back socialized medicine in America. Maybe the trade-off of fewer treatments tomorrow for more drugs for more people now is worth it. But you don’t get something for nothing.

Just in case you didn’t realize he’s a domestic liberal:

The report by Reform, the think-tank, said that the key policies of the Blair decade, such as high spending, increased taxes and a greater role for central government, had blocked public service reform and created new pressures on vulnerable groups such as the young.

In 2008-09 the tax burden will reach 38.1 per cent of gross income – its highest level for 25 years, Reform claims. This is one of a worrying "cocktail of factors" damaging the economic position of the young, it said.

Bush has laid the path for the Democrats to do the same, compounding the massive spending and entitlement increases of the Bush years with higher taxes and even bigger government. The next generation, as in Britain, will be faced with the bill.

Nancy Grace is expecting twins. (Hat tip: Jason.)

The headline is about their increasing liberalism, and that’s true so far as socialized medicine is concerned, alas. But what strikes me most about the latest poll of the next generation is the distinctions they make. Instead of seeing "drugs" as an amorphous category, they distinguish between largely harmless marijuana and an addictive upper like cocaine. Instead of conflating all the moral issues, they have no problem with gay dignity and equality, but retain many of the moral conflicts of their parents with respect to the far more troubling issue of abortion. This doesn’t strike me less as a sign of their liberalism than of their intelligence and experience. You simply cannot persuade most sane people who have smoked pot, or know people who do, that it is even a minor threat to social order or cvilization. And you cannot tell people who know and have grown up around gay people that we are the threat to the family that the Christianists claim. All of which should make us more optimistic about the future, because it suggests that, in the long run, reason and experience actually do work to make the world a marginally less stupid and cruel place. In the case of the lives of gay people and their families, it already has.

"A government that is big enough to give everything that you need and want is also big enough to take it all away," – Barry Goldwater.

A worthwhile blast of the bleeding obvious. Money quote:

Six months ago, the Iraq Study Group endorsed a gradual downsizing of American forces in Iraq and the evolution of their mission to a support role for the Iraqi army. I do not necessarily agree with every recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, and its analysis requires some updating given the passage of time. But the report provides a useful starting point for the development of a “Plan B” and a template for bipartisan cooperation on our Iraq strategy.

We should understand that if the re-deployment of a downsized force is to be safe and effective, our military planners and diplomats must have as much time as possible to develop and implement the details. We will need the cooperation of the Iraqi government and key states in the region, which will not come automatically. The logistics of a shift in policy toward a residual force will test military planners, who have been consumed with the surge. In 2003, we witnessed the costs that came with insufficient planning for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. It is absolutely essential that we not repeat the same mistake. The longer we delay the planning for a re-deployment, the less likely it is to be successful. 

This will become the next sane Republican consensus. But it is anyone’s guess whether the Bush administration will listen. My bet is they won’t – unless they really have no option (which, with Cheney’s contempt for the constitution, never seems to happen) .