Free Markets never fail

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Apr 21

RE: Free Market failed Canada on pharmaceutical development.  An op-ed piece written by Gabriel Deveaux and published in the Hamilton Spectator 10 Apr 21.  Ms Deveaux is a master’s candidate in Public Health studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

It’s not unusual today for a student of Public Health to opine on matters of economics, thinking that their budding credential in one field grants them credibility in another.  Such explains the outburst from Gabriel Deveaux, who advances the Marxian idea that the “free market” failed Canada - in the realm of vaccines.  She holds out Connaught Labs, when it was owned by the University of Toronto, as the market ideal to be recreated.

Ms Deveaux is probably too young to remember the discrediting that Marxism received after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Tiananmen Square massacre.  The internal contradictions of Marxism caused the economies governed under its rules to collapse.  Like a cancer thought to be excised, Marxism is experiencing a great resurgence these days in North America.

Economics exists in the presence of scarcity, and the characteristic of man to look after himself first.  We call the buying and selling of goods and services activities of “the market,” and a free market exists in the absence of factors external to the parties involved in the transaction.  Politics can impose factors which distort “the market”, and we say governments distort “the free market,” but a free market is a principle and an idea that doesn’t fail or succeed.  The “free market” is not a thing that physically exists, like a farmer’s market. 

In economics, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.  The trade-off for cheap drugs in Canada is no original research, and the trade-off for no tort protection for vaccine manufacturers is no manufacturing of vaccines.  Such are the economic consequences of political decisions made by Pierre Trudeau in, oh, 1974.  And mendicant agencies that produce nothing and can produce nothing of political advantage to the governing party is going to find itself eventually cut off from the public teat, with the money going to something that does benefit the benefactor.  This too is an economic trade-off.

-30-