"Government is not reason; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master - George Washington

When government meddles in the economy, businesses don't know how to rationally predict the future. This is clearly shown in this Wall Street Journal article about Big Pharma. The article "Big Pharma Sells Out" describes how Jeffrey Kindler the CEO of Pfizer has decided to play the Washington game in an attempt to protect its own skin. George Washington once said:

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

When the government is meddling in every aspect of our lives, the people, have no recourse because the government uses force to make us submit. Businesses want to survive and if they are targeted by government they can submit or stand up to government and pay the consequences. So we have the specter of businessmen making decisions not based on the market place but on what the government will do to them if they choose their own path and not the government's path. Yes we have the power of the vote - for now....but our liberties are being chipped away year by year.

...In other words, the industry is trashing the very Senators who stand the best chance to rescue it from government control. Instead, the drug CEOs are making themselves complicit with the Washington mentality of seeing only the costs of medications, not benefits like longer lives or fewer hospitalizations. They are ensuring that they will always be a political target and making the extortion easier in the bargain.
The shame is that there be will fewer resources for the research and development that drives innovation, particularly for the smaller biotech companies that are the future of cutting-edge medicine. When it takes about a decade and a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, a CEO of a smaller drug company told us recently, most firms are "living on the edge of extinction."


...The irony is that if business began to educate the public about what the current bills will mean for U.S. health care, it might be able to defeat them and force a more modest, sensible reform. National Journal's composite of all health polling finds that 50.9% of the public now opposes health reform in general, up from about 15% in February. Only 43.9% are in favor. The most recent polls put support even lower: Just 35% from Quinnipiac, 38% from Rasmussen.

A Washington Post-ABC poll found that 52% of the public believes ObamaCare will increase their personal health costs and that 37% expect their quality of care will deteriorate. They're right. A survey of registered voters by Public Opinion Strategies found that the more people hear about the plan, the less they like it, and that voter hostility is higher now than it ever was for HillaryCare.

Yet now this son of HillaryCare is headed toward passage, and when shareholders start griping about lousy returns, Mr. Kindler and his fellow executives will be long gone. It's one more reminder that when it comes to protecting economic freedom, you can never trust big business. The biggest losers will be patients, who lack the millions to lobby Congress and in the future will have fewer innovative medicines. READ at WSJ