[davidgow77]

The point I am trying to make about money, and I do agree that SinJin's views are accurate in terms of the current state of society, is that you must consider also the suffering involved where people have terminal illness, where cures/treatments are available but where money is a barrier to treatment. If you have, like we do in western society, a gross disparity of wealth distribution, then money propagates and procrastinates suffering simply by being unavailable to the people who often need it most. I am not an anti-capitalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe that true capitalism is a system of working where society as a whole capitalises on the gains made by society as a collective. In the modern capitalist state, the gains are often the sole preserve of those who already have the most money, who control access to funding, who control access to the networks that allow business to take place, and who are not concerned with much else other that measurable economic success. This type of capitalism is counter-productive to the general wellbeing of society, and essentially means that we are all at the behest of an economy which rewards those who are willing to take advantage of others for economic gain. In this respect, money is a highly corruptive element in modern society, and those who don't have it, who may work exremely hard at their jobs but are not recompensed because the market dictates that their skills are not to be rewarded, are perceived as less important and less valuable members of society. This is wrong.... their is no point in having advances in medicene, treatment therapies, social advances and standards of living unless society can find better ways of making these advances available to wider communities quicker than it currently happens. AIDS in Africa could have been tackled 10 years ago if the treatments had been made more widely available by drug companies, and could be brought under control in the large western drug companies allowed their medicines to be manufactured generically by the countries that need them. The reality at the moment is that, because the large drug companies are trying to see at a premium rate to bolster their R&D budgets, thousands die everyday from preventable/treatable conditions. The ONLY reason for this is money. Corporations, in this respect have become unacceptabley self-serving... they use basic scientific advances from university laboratories in order to develop drugs with massive potential markets, and then the over-price the durgs which creates a niche-market open to only those who can afford it. This gives them a product with a long shelf life, and allows them to plan for market expansions by maintaining an over inflated price. Effectively, this is known as controliing demand and sychronising supply, when they actually have the capacity to supply the entire market.

If you take money out of the equation, companies like GlaxoSmithkline and Lilly by making more of their drugs available to a mass market could easily stop alot of inhumane suffering in Africa, Asia, and even in America and Europe. However, because these companies are not concerned with corporate social responsibility issues to the extent that they could really make a differance, they are just money-making entities, no better that tobacco companies or beer brewers. If you're just in it for the money, it doesn't matter what you do....you're a whore for the coin.


DG