Merck and Schering Plough: Why Should They Be Allowed to Merge?

See the previous entry. Realize that such entry was written BEFORE I heard that two more large, financially healthy drug companies were supposedly merging. I say "supposedly" because we SHOULD STOP THE MERGER.


This is exactly how we created AIG, and all of these other corporate empires. Pfizer did not create the cholesterol drug that is now its biggest seller (although soon to go off patent). Pfizer bought that drug on the New York Stock Exchange, by buying another large drug compnay (I think Warner Lambert, but I could be remembering that wrong).


These drug giants are NOT "growing" by developing great new drugs, which would help society as a whole Instead, they are growing by MERGER, which really REDUCES the number of separate research approaches to new drugs. That is the problem with central planning, and these big mergers just create central planning, corporate empires.


As a matter of public policy, we should not allow these destructive (of competition and so many other things--what part of "too big to fail" do you not understand?) big mergers to occur. They violate free market theory (which assumes that free market units are not so big as to individually affect the free market). They cost jobs. They have no redeeming social value, except Wall Street likes them. And law firms like them (coporate legal work--my older daughter being laid off in Boston because such work is drying up). There is no public policy reason to allow these mergers.


But I expect this blog to be proven right again. See the previous entry. Despite all of this talk of how "bad" it is that taxpayer money has to help big businesses, because they are "too big to fail", no one is doing anything to stop these big mergers. Talk about not learning anything from our mistakes!!!!


Listen carefully. I am betting you will hear little about stopping the Merck/Schering Plough merger. Oh, you may hear a few people talkihng about the evil of Big Corporations who are not acting in the public interest. But those people will not be interested, mainly, in STOPPING this merger, or similar mergers. Those people will be advocating that these Big Drug companies are too powerful, and that we need more government control.


In other words, today's "answer" to the problem of corporate empires having too much control over our lives is MORE CENTRAL PLANNING from an entity that is even more big and remote than the corporate empires: the Federal Government.


I would laugh, if I were not crying. Is the Federal Government "too big to fail"? Actually, it is not, because there is no one left to bail it out. We are reaching the point where we are creating a massive central planning failure, just like AIG--except on a larger scale. That is the present Federal Government. But there is no bigger entity to "save" the Federal Government.


When the Federal Government goes under, we all go under. But this creation of ever bigger central planning entities is the modern way. You see why I am proud of not "keeping up with the times"?