Let's storm the Walgreens!

Because this nonsense. Not going to click? That's cool. I may complain that you never click on the links I put in these posts, but really I secretly enjoy recapping these things for you. Just don't tell anyone because I'll deny it.

I mean, I have to pad out the space around the pictures somehow.

Because curing a urinary tract
infection is a privilege, not a right.

So we're talking about Nirmal Mulye, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company called Nostrum Laboratories who told the Financial Times that his company's decision to increase the price of an antibiotic called nitrofurantoin (used to treat urinary tract infections) from the outrageously expensive $475 per bottle to the eye-watering $2,392 per bottle was not only totally justifiable, but also moral. Yeah, moral. According to Mulye, his company's price increase was in response to a competitor's move to increase the price to $2,800 per bottle.

Above: Beacon of morality Martin
Shkreli being led away by authorities.

Speaking of the everyone else is doing it defense, he's what Mulye told the Financial Times:

"I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can...I agree with Martin Shkreli that when he raised the price of his drug he within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders."

-Nirmal Mulye, CEO of Nostrum Laboratories

and walking talking symptom of everything

wrong with capitalism in America

Martin Shkreli you might remember is the former hedge fund manager, sociopath and drug company CEO who jacked up the prices on his company's life-saving drugs. He's in jail now. For securities fraud I think? So maybe he's not the person to hold up as a moral compass? Also, did Mulye not think that people might someday read what he said?

"Everything I say is between us, right? Sort of an
interviewer/interviewee confidentiality thing?"

-Nirmal Mulye, misunderstanding

the very nature of an interview

"Urinary tract infections? Outrageous 
price increases? Interesting..."

-Tim Cook, getting ideas

He goes on: "We have to make money when we can. The price of iPhones goes up, the price of cars goes up, hotel rooms are very expensive." Uh-huh. I'm pretty sure iPhones don't cure urinary tract infections and also, Apple didn't increase the price by 400%. Besides, if they did, and I wouldn't put it past them, we'd all just buy some other kind of phone. There's always Samsung or God forbid, Microsoft. Maybe the free market works ok when we're talking about phones, but then people don't generally die from switching to a Galaxy.

Being a shareholder is easy! First, be
wealthy. Then, use your money to make
 more money. See? Anyone can do it!

Anyway, you're probably wondering where this Mulye guy got the idea that making money for shareholders was somehow moral. I mean, shareholders just sit around while their money does all the work. On behalf of people with real jobs, I say fuck'em. But an economist called Milton Friedman wrote an article in the New York Times back in 1970 which popularized the idea that the moral obligation of companies is to make money for their investors. An idea that apparently justified the next five decades of unfettered capitalism.

Pictured: Milton Friedman, economist and
perhaps the single human most responsible
for the shitshow we find ourselves living in.

Ok, so I'm not actually an economist and don't know what I'm talking about so take my uninformed opinion of Friedman's point with all kinds of salt, but it seems a little, I don't know, shortsighted? Like, he's arguing that companies should be restrained only by the free market and that regulation undermines a free society and that's cool. I mean, so long as all the wealth doesn't get concentrated into the hands of an increasingly smaller group of multi-billionaires leading to the erosion and virtual elimination of the American middle class which...oh shit.

And I don't know, shouldn't this cut both ways? Like if a company is morally justified in raising prices on things like medications and, say food, then maybe we, that is the 327.5 million of us who aren't rich CEO's of corporations,are equally justified in grabbing our pitchforks and storming the Bastille? Or whatever the contemporary equivalent would be. Walgreens maybe? Admittedly, it's not the best analogy...

"Oh my God, soooo justified, right?"

-Some angry mob