Population Medicine is much worse than just a very bad idea

Here are the comments of Apu,owner of the Kwik e Mart after Homer Simpson quite his job there:

"He slept,he stole,he was rude to the customers.Still, there goes the best damned employee a convenience store ever had. "

In a way a free market based society is something like that. With freedom and capitalism there are booms and busts, there are demonstrable inequalities  among various parameters,there is information asymmetry, externalties, and apparent market failures.Still it is the best damned economic, social system a country ever had.


Quoting Deirdre McCloskey speaking on why freedom and markets are better than central planning:.

"How do I know that my narrative is better than yours?  The experiments of the 20^th century told me so.  It would have been hard to know the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or Matt Ridley or Deirdre McCloskey in August of 1914, before the experiments in large government were well begun.  But anyone who after the 20^th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing 19^th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention."

 Those medical progressives who champion the medical collectivism euphemistically referred to  to as population medicine have not been paying attention.

The 20th century made it crystal clear that collectivism does not work.Marx et al promised prosperity and equality by doing away with private property and individual liberty and delivered mass murder and starvation. The greatest welfare program in the history of the world was when Communist China did away with collective farming.

And astonishingly there is a faction of the medical leadership in this country who would institute a system of collective planning in regard to everyone's health  replete with acceptance of sacrifice of the individual to some purported calculable greater health metric for the group.

The very old wine in new bottle is labelled population medicine.


Population medicine is wrong on so many levels.It is antithetical to not only traditlonal medical ethics but also to classical liberal thought as well as Rawlian ethical precepts. It is something that both Robert Nozik and John Rawls would oppose.