The appearance within days of two very different articles got some of my brain cells firing.
One was about a rare disease and the other about the Harris presidential campaign’s record-breaking $200-million haul in the first week since President Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.
Progeria is a dire genetic illness that accelerates aging in children and dramatically shortens their lives. It occurs in just one in 18 to 20 million people. According to the Progeria Research Foundation, there are only 18 known living patients in the United States, but those young people live with the faces and bodies of elderly people, and with the knowledge that they are likely to die in, at best, young adulthood. Until recently, there was no hope for a treatment.
But a small group of academics and government scientists, the report explained, is working “with no expectation of financial gain” to halt progression of the disease through complex gene editing.
Progeria is only one of some 7,000 genetic diseases where the mutations responsible have been identified, and that thus might be curable by manipulating their sufferers’ genetic material.
But addressing those diseases, and, likewise, so many other currently untreatable illnesses, is expensive. The cost of bringing a new drug to market from drug development through clinical trials to approval is staggering.
A 2020 study estimated that the average cost of getting a new drug into the market was $1.3 billion—yes, billion.
My apologies upfront for abruptly switching tracks.
The US Supreme Court has held (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976) that the First Amendment protects candidates’ right to raise money or use their own funds to vie for political office.
But there is something odd—well, let’s be blunt, absurd—in the fact that offering a citizen a dollar for his vote can land you in prison for up to two years, but a candidate promising a group of citizens that their votes for him will yield them money is perfectly acceptable. As Stanford Law School Professor Pamela Karlan described it, candidates are allowed to buy votes wholesale but not retail.
There is little doubt that the oxygen of political campaigns is money. In the 2020 election, political spending reportedly topped $14 billion, double what was spent in the 2016 election. There is every reason to expect the current campaign season to have squandered even greater sums. Campaigns’ likelihoods for success are routinely linked, though not always accurately, to the rate of their war chests’ swellings.
The vast amount of money raised for political campaigns goes mainly to advertising. But funds are also used for paying pollsters, hiring staff and producing signs and posters. And qualification for participation in debates is usually tied to meeting a fundraising threshold of one or another sort.
The 2010 Supreme Court “Citizens United” decision allowed political action committees to take unlimited contributions from corporations and nonprofits, greatly speeding up the donation treadmill. (And then there are the “Super PACs.” Don’t even ask.)
With all due respect to the right to free speech, I have to wonder if the Constitutional ideal really would be injured by—brace yourself here—removing money from elections. Entirely.
Imagine political contests that didn’t rely on advertising but only on information. To be sure, they’d be considerably less entertaining. But there would still be plenty of opportunity for memorable insults, gaffes, scandals and the like. Just not funded.
Each candidate would simply offer, on a stark website and on government-funded printed materials, his or her positions on all relevant issues. Televised interviews and debates could help fill in any gaps, but campaign war chests would be relegated to relic-hood. The content of minds, not wallets, would be what matters.
That would not only level the playing field, but it would also shield overly impressionable voters from the special speciousness that makes these advertisements…well, advertising.
And, perhaps most importantly, it would free up the billions of dollars currently thrown by vested interests at covetous contenders.
It would be a steep uphill trudge to get major donors to see merit in directing their millions to medical research aimed at treatments for rare—or any—diseases.
But one can fantasize, no?
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