MTG celebrating release of Pharma Bro from prison. I guess she appoves of price gouging a life-saving medicine by raising its price 5,000%.

(https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-ta...elease-1707938)

She's fine with that if the Dems and RINOs have to pay that price. If she needed it, that would be a gun of a different calibre.

Well, I'm sure she's all for free enterprise, and that's it in spades. Of course in this case health insurance takes most of the hit, but that's all right because I'm betting she's against compulsory health insurance too. So in her ideal world, the poor would not get the drug, and they'd die, and then the law of supply and demand would bring the price back down to only a thousand percent of what it should be, and she could run around saying "the system works, the system works!" and the poor suckers left to vote for her will flock to the polls, thinking, "yeah, the system works, and when I win the lottery I'll be a Shkreli too."

e.t.a. writing this, I think that if "Shkreli" has not yet become an epithet for a certain kind of *******, it really ought to.

Profiteers nakedly gouging are worthy of the epithet, Shkreli shkum.

If you invent a wonder drug and charge a lot for it, there's a (somewhat) potential moral debate there because you could argue an expensive drug is at least better than no drug.

But Shkreli didn't invent Daraprim. Gertrude Elion did. In 1953. He's just a bloodsucker.

You misspelled capitalist hero. He saw a product that had a market that would bear massively higher prices so really isn't it his moral obligation to his shareholders to make the most he can from it? This is just capitalism 101.

Did he even have shareholders?

Why would his moral obligation to his shareholders change if he was the only shareholder? Maximizing value is the moral good and he was doing that by the price hikes people object to. In doing so they are questioning and undermining the very foundations of capitalism.

Not the question I asked.

It's OK to say "I don't know" if you don't know the answer to a question, you know.

I thought you were being tongue-in-cheek myself, I think he was answering flippantly.

Really, that's the point: whether they own 1% or 100% of the company, they can always say "I have a responsibility to the shareholders." **** social responsibility.

I guess nobody knows the answer.

He was responsible for hedge funds, so he had investors.

Shkreli was involved with various companies and hedge funds and Turing, the company that raised the price of Daraprim, was a privately held corporation created by Shkreli after his previous company, Retrophin, threw him out over his egregious financial hanky-panky. He also did some hefty price raising there, but not as outrageous as with daraprim. Turing changed its name, and is currently listed as privately held. Since the company still exists without Shkrely directly involved, one must assume other investors, but it's not clear who they are or how much they have in. But court rulings forbid him to have more than an 8 percent share in any pharmaceutical company, and Shkreli still, apparently, has 30-50 million bucks' worth of their stock.

The Wikipedia page on him is rather interesting if dense. He's apparently pretty smart in some ways, but manages to compensate for that by being ten times more nasty. He'd be a pretty poor specimen even without the Daraprim scandal. And, of course, being the sort of thing he is, he comes out of the whole thing still plenty rich enough. Right now, he could put all his money in a mattress, live on a million dollars a year for the rest of his life, and leave a nice estate. The American dream!

Not my question.

I don't think EmptyG thinks at all. She just reacts with her crocodile brain stem.

Since nobody seems to understand your question, it might be useful to repeat it with a bit of elaboration.

Hans

From a Newsweek article, Martin Shkreli operated a hedge fund. It doesn't mention "shareholders," but Shkreli did have "investors." They were the reason he was in prison; he fleeced them.
Politicians like emptyg, Bobo and, another one discussed here recently, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, seem to operate on another wavelength. They regularly make statements that any reasonable person would recognize as being untrue. Apparently they know their main appeal is to a certain subset of voters who want to believe the nonsense they spew whether it's true or not. Another feature of politicians like Greene is, they almost never respond to criticism. They maneuver around that by always being on the attack. They're the embodiment of an old National Football League saying: The best defense is a strong offense.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli being taken for perp walk by NYPD after his 2017 arrest.

I don't really understand the audience that Greene was trying to appeal to with this. Is there anyone - whether Republican or Democrat - who actually thinks Shkreli is someone to be admired? I thought it was pretty universal that he was a scumbag, who behaved abominably - and illegally. I know her main aim is to annoy liberals, but surely disdain for Shkreli crosses party lines?

Or doesn't it?

I think Shkreli is a remote enough figure that it doesn't really matter for most people. It's essentially celebrity gossip, not a material issue, in which case being a contrarian gets MTG's name back in the press.

I'd imagine there's a fair few free-market libertarians who saw nothing nothing wrong in hiking the price of drugs, thinking the owner and manufacutrer of a product has every right to name the price of the product he/she is selling.

Edit: See also the recent legislation on an insulin cost cap, in which 193 Republicans saw nothing wrong in diabetics facing extortion-like costs in obtaining medicin they need to live, in some case peddling horrific falsehoods in the process. Oh, and said legislation is doomed to die in the Senate.

I suspect the issue is that Shkreli had many things going on, and the fact that the hedge fund had investors does not mean the drug company did. It looks from what I've read that it did, but because all of Shkreli's drug companies were and are privately held, the details are sparse.

One of his other companies, Phoenixus, pretty definitely has other shareholders, as there was a bit of a flap when the remaining shareholders of the company tried, without success it seems, to stop him running it from prison. The NYT article is behind a paywall, but it states that he has or had 44 percent of Phoenixus shares.

It appears that Vyera Pharmaceuticals, the successor to Turing, may now be out of business, but things are very confusing, and it seems likely that it has been folded into its parent company Phoenixus. Who invested in Turing seems not to be available.

1. She's a troll and trolls fall back on "contrarian" when they don't have anything else to do.

2. For a person like her you can tweak the Republicans and the Libs as long as you tweak the Libs more. They are fine with collateral damage, they still win in the end.

It's like Scientology - "Always attack, never defend."

Thanks for that. After I asked the question I had a quick google, but I couldn't figure out if Turing Pharmaceuticals was just a one-man operation or if it had shareholders. I don't really know much about American company law or structure, and am not much inclined to find out, so I appreciate you doing your best to explain it.

Some right-wingers love him because he is almost a parody of an evil greedy businessman who triggers the libs.

The libertarian argument would be that being able to successfully sell at inflated price incentivizes more manufacturing and production, which brings the price down naturally and quickly, and it would work too, if the government stopped sticking their nose in. Of course, to that ideologically pure free market mindset any failure of the market to work in an ideal manner can only be the government's fault. Not because, you know, there's a path of hurricane devastation in the way of potential new suppliers, or something like that.

LIbertarians are always wrong. If you start with that assumption it will serve you well.

TV reporter Rick Folbaum is a news anchor at WGCL, the CBS affiliate in Atlanta. This past week he interviewed emptyg as she campaigned in Northwest Georgia. Folbaum tried to get Greene to talk about some of the controversial statements she's made about Jewish people. This followed a report from the Anti-Defamation League "documenting a 133% rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Georgia, including in Greene’s 14th District,” Folbaum said. He asked Greene if she ever worried that some of her past statements, considered offensive by many Jewish people, could inadvertently be contributing to the problem.
When she was shown a Facebook post from 2018, in which emptyg claimed the Rothschild investment firm was using space lasers to start wildfires in California, she dismissed it as being "before she entered politics."

The incentivization argument dies a-borning in the case of a drug that is patented.

Surely as a libertarian you can't be in favour of patents? Government interfering in business practices. BAH!

MTG showed up at her Democratic opponent’s headquarters with four dudes in tow.

https://twitter.com/ronfilipkowski/s...SUykuc30_OO3_Q

Her opponent, who is black, should now show up at her headquarters with four really big black supporters in two.....I fully support eye for an eye in this case.

She'll get distracted by calling the latest school shooting a false flag soon.

Or it was Antifa.

Why the four gazpacho goons?

Because she's a troll and everything she does is

A) For attention
B) Stupid

Can't argue with that. I noticed how they were recording the 'visit'. I'll bet they were trying to get some kind of reaction out of her opponent to use against him. She's a real piece of work.

Yes and she is the model for how the Right is going to operate from here on out. They will only refine their craft as long as they suffer no downsides for it.

She didn't really "visit" them. She just opened the door and stuck her nose in. Then she tried to be rude about them but it all fell flat. Turns out the only person there was nice and polite to her, and wished her a good day. So she had nothing to shout against, no controversy. It was all a total fizzer for her camera crew. No controversy at all. Summary: Professional Karen squibs badly.

Looks more like Goofus and Gallant, and maybe Chet from the Hardy Boys.

Hey 2A fans...tyranny is looking you in the eye. Your country needs you! Can I say that?

I’ve always loved that insult and I always will.