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The case for an antibiotics tax

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#41

Post by fleitz »

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #39
Xdes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FRIEDMAN There is room for some public health activities to prevent contagion, such a thing as for example.. And then Friedman gets cut off when he is about to get into the examples. Knowing Friedman I would assume his examples would consist of incidents that the the private industries have quite a deal of trouble handling such as a violent outbreak or an extreme vaccine shortage. I would not play off Friedman's wor…

Antibiotics do constitute a violent outbreak, or at least direly threaten to release one.

An antibiotics tax won't solve anything.

About the only effective thing you can start doing is MSRA wards in hospitals and a system of rotating antibiotics. Developing new antibiotics would probably also be a good idea, no idea what the situ looks like there.

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#42

Post by fleitz »

spacehome wrote: post #16
drjesusphd wrote: post #2

This is a great idea. The point of a tax is to impose penalties that exist in real life, but are not part of the original transaction: externalities. Widespread use of antibiotics has a cost associated with it that must be paid by someone, and it should be part of the price of antibiotics. Much like there's a cost associated with income inequality, so we tax the rich more to supposedly cover that cost. Costs associat…

> Much like there's a cost associated with income inequality, so we tax the rich more to supposedly cover that cost. That's a fairly disturbing way to frame progressive taxation. In the other examples of taxing externalities, we intentionally discourage the behavior by taxing it. Do you intend to discourage people from becoming rich by taxing it? Also, it takes both rich and poor to have inequality. Why not tax poor…

Progressive taxation? That's a good joke.

In what countries that have 'progressive taxation' do the rich actually pay a higher percentage of tax on all sources of income / wealth?

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#43

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

fleitz wrote: post #41
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antibiotics do constitute a violent outbreak, or at least direly threaten to release one.

An antibiotics tax won't solve anything. About the only effective thing you can start doing is MSRA wards in hospitals and a system of rotating antibiotics. Developing new antibiotics would probably also be a good idea, no idea what the situ looks like there.

A tax won't solve anything, agreed, unless it's on the order of 10,000% or more.

Restricting antibiotics (further than they are currently) may or may not help, but is certainly within the purview of a limited libertarian state.

Restricting most (all?) other medications is not.

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#44

Post by breischl »

dnautics wrote: post #35
drjesusphd wrote: post #2

This is a great idea. The point of a tax is to impose penalties that exist in real life, but are not part of the original transaction: externalities. Widespread use of antibiotics has a cost associated with it that must be paid by someone, and it should be part of the price of antibiotics. Much like there's a cost associated with income inequality, so we tax the rich more to supposedly cover that cost. Costs associat…

sorry, generally speaking the point of a taxes is NOT to cover externalities, it is to control the populace and to fill the coffers of the state. Exactly what externalities do cigarette taxes cover? International trade duties? Taxes generally fail in the pursuit of correcting externalities because taxes are set by policy and committees are notoriously bad at pricing. The generally better way to cover externalities is…

I agree with your overall point. However, the implicit claim that there are no externalities to cigarette smoking is silly. There are clearly effects on everyone who might be nearby when you're smoking.

In the event that you're covered by any sort of public health insurance, which is nearly certain in old age with Medicare and increasingly probable at younger ages, then the effects on your own health become a problem for everyone else.

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#45

Post by ronaldx »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #8
ronaldx wrote: post #3

The primary use-case of antibiotics remains: curing bacterial illnesses. We should not seek to increase the price of this for the least well-off in society. This would potentially have a net negative effect as it allows bacterial infection to spread, requiring increased antibiotic use. Besides, a tax on use wouldn't impact upon doctor's behaviour in the desired way (reduce non-essential use): since the doctor is stil…

RTFA. It's a tax for use of antibiotics on livestock, not humans.

RTA yourself (and then I'd appreciate an apology).

The article is proposing that the tax be applied to every use: "But why limit it to farms?".

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#46

Post by ronaldx »

ericcumbee wrote: post #9
ImprovedSilence wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTFA. It's a tax for use of antibiotics on livestock, not humans.

Which the cost will be passed along to the consumer.

I'm sorry that you've been downvoted - because you are right.

This is a tax on poor people that won't affect the majority of readers... it increases the minimum cost of producing meat.

If we can't figure out high-production meat farming then eventually we're saying that meat should be something only for the wealthy.

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#47

Post by noarchy »

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #28

My fellow libertarians: Milton Friedman, freedomist gadfly, was in favor of government regulation to protect the population from contagion. The regulation and restriction of antibiotics falls firmly within even a minimalist state's purview. In other words, the government has a clearer mandate to restrict antibiotic use than it has to restrict heroin use.

Name-dropping Milton Friedman would be useful to court Friedmanites, not necessarily libertarians. I'm guessing that his son David (http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/), who is even more libertarian than his father, would likely have a different opinion.

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#48

Post by ataggart »

breischl wrote: post #44
dnautics wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, generally speaking the point of a taxes is NOT to cover externalities, it is to control the populace and to fill the coffers of the state. Exactly what externalities do cigarette taxes cover? International trade duties? Taxes generally fail in the pursuit of correcting externalities because taxes are set by policy and committees are notoriously bad at pricing. The generally better way to cover externalities is…

I agree with your overall point. However, the implicit claim that there are no externalities to cigarette smoking is silly. There are clearly effects on everyone who might be nearby when you're smoking. In the event that you're covered by any sort of public health insurance, which is nearly certain in old age with Medicare and increasingly probable at younger ages, then the effects on your own health become a problem…

>In the event that you're covered by any sort of public health insurance ... then the effects on your own health become a problem for everyone else.

A vile argument. The idea that the state is empowered to curtail people's personal activities simply because the state chose to subsidize the personal health care costs of those activities should be anathema in a free and civilized society.

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#49

Post by ericd »

maxerickson wrote: post #29
maerF0x0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or ban feeding an animal something that is not part of its "natural" diet. Then we have the fun of debating if cows naturally eat corn and soy. Chickens will be particularly fun because they historically ate the scraps from the humans (what we now call "compost" :P), they were the old form of food recycling.

Grain finishing was done before the discovery of antibiotics.

Does grain finishing get grass-fed-tasting compounds out of the meat?

Re: The case for an antibiotics tax

#50

Post by scotty79 »

diego_moita wrote: post #21

But how do you fix antibiotics abuse in other countries? Antibiotic resistant bacteria are spreading a lot faster in Russia, Pakistan, India, South East Asia and Latin America. And with international tourism growing it is just a matter of time before it reaches everywhere in the world.

There is not so much problem of antibiotics overuse in poorer countries as there is a problem of antibiotics misuse. Where antibiotics are expensive people tend not to take them long enough so they fail to kill bacteria that were sligtly resistant to the antbiotic and this also contibutes toward increasing antibiotics resistance.

You could probably do a lot of good by requiring from the pharmaceutical companies that want to sell antibiotics on american market to ship half of their production to Russia and such for free. That would increase price of antibiotics for americans to prevent overuse and make them available in poor countries to prevent misuse.

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