40 cents a day

Pretentious and sanctimonious Hollywood intellectuals strike again...and again, and again....

Just saw the "public service" announcement with the moral examplares of the entertainment industry telling us what they bought for 40 cents. All of the examples are uniformly trivial and frivolous, naturally. The point is that $0.4 is supposedly the cost of the drugs that can keep an AIDs patient alive for a day, the implication being that it is our duty to send money to some organization or advocate for more government funding for whatever program is supposedly supplying these drugs, or face the moral censure of our betters for putting our own trivial desires above a human life.

Where to begin?

Is it the cost? It is the cost in the same way that the cost of the electricity that is required to download the latest iTunes version of a U2 song or Selma Hayak's latest movie is the cost of their "art." The $0.4 is the marginal cost, the cost of the chemicals and the manufacturing. It excludes the years of research, the thousands of failures, the years of trials and bureaucratic hurdles that were the real necessary condition of producing the drug that can be manufactured for forty cents a day. All of these sanctimonious ignoramuses are "artists," and they owe their fortunes to a product that can be manufactured at near zero marginal cost. The same rules that they advocate being applied to the pharmaceutical industry would, if applied to them, would turn them into minimum wage workers at best.

Here is a lecture from a group of people that are known for massive consumerism, the consumption of ostentatiously trivial and wasteful goods on a grand scale, lecturing us on the sorts of things we are liable to spend 40 cents on, fabric softener, lipstick, a paper bag. The kicker is Bono, who ends the segment by telling us what we should really be spending our money on. This is a man that paid for a first class air ticket to have his favorite pair of sunglasses delivered to him in time for a concert.

The old celebrities approached the public as equals to whom they owed a debt of gratitude. whatever their private attitudes or behavior were, their public posture was that they are very lucky to get paid so much to have the privilege of entertaining you. Now we are treated to lectures from people who get paid exorbitant sums to do something that is intrinsically fun and frivolous and ostentatiously spend the proceeds of their occupation on their own well being on the importance of not putting our own petty concerns between those of the poor of Africa.

And of all the uses that money sent to Africa could be put to use to is the care of AIDs victims? People dying of poor water quality? lack of mosquito nets? Mal-nutrition? Sanitation? Basic literacy? This is the one disease that you can avoid by changing your personal behavior. Even in the case of women that are the victims, essentially, of philandering husbands, their is something within the individual's control that could be done to avoid the disease. Whatever the degree to which a person's choices play a role in their getting the disease, it is surely more than is the case in almost any other malady.

The priority here is not the needs of Africans, but the moral pretensions of our intellectual elites. In their world, the great moral conflict is between traditional morality and the sanctity of alternative lifestyles. The 'AIDs in Africa' cause allows them to pose as the champions of gays and the poor against cruel capitalists while pocketing the fruits of their own intellectual property rights. Moral superiority on the cheap. AIDs victims in Africa are only a prop.