One of the current foci of political agitation is flu. Political activists, after having exploited hurricanes for a few weeks, have switched focus now to a possible flu epidemic as the vehicle for advancing their same old agenda. Consider this artillery barrage:

Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested patent rules might be suspended in an outbreak to allow other companies to make generic forms of Tamiflu, produced by Swiss-based Roche Holding AG. In recent days, a company in India announced plans to do that.

However, [U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike] Leavitt said the United States supports intellectual property laws that bar such action.

Tamiflu has a shelf life of five years. The threat of a flu epidemic is older than that yet there has been no effort by governments to do the most sensible thing and stockpile it before the threat became immanent. Their purchases all along would have been all the stimulus needed to assure a continuing and increasing supply, making it ever easier to acquire. A well run government, one that actually spent efforts to govern, would have done this openly while encouraging individuals and groups to do the same. It's no different than having jugs of water and rolls of duct tape on hand. Be prepared etc.

Instead we find no efforts by governments until there is an opportunity to exploit the threat for gain, and authoritarian activists are quick to seize the opportunity to advance their inimical agendas.

The activist arguments can seem compelling when the scope of inquiry is limited. Even fence sitters can be fooled. [via Notional Slurry].

I understand the argument that intellectual property laws incent companies to invest in drug research, and that circumventing those laws could inhibit development of drugs that would ultimately save many lives. It seems absurd, though, not to have a discussion about ways to preserve Roche's interests while providing against the possibility of a pandemic. I'm disappointed to see Leavitt's simplistic response. More people died from influenza during the 1918-19 pandemic than died in all of World War I; I'd hope that it would not be patents that would prevent the government from protecting against a future pandemic.

No, it's not patents that are the problem, it's politics. No thoughts are wasted on good governance so long as there are juicy political scandals and gaffes to exploit. This is only getting attention now because there are opportunities to stoke political fires, and will be forgotten as soon as the next big hoo-haa comes along.

This isn't a problem that can be fixed. Governments do not, cannot and will never do good governance. That's up to society, the citizens of a nation, the real government of the people by the people. This isn't just an empty slogan iconic for an ideology, it's simple good sense and effective practice. If you expect some remote, all powerful and all knowing authority to inform you and direct you in your life you will stagger from crisis to crisis. It's a dumb and ineffective way to live. The argument against authoritarian government isn't just that it is wrong, it's that it doesn't work even in theory when feedback and dynamics are considered.

There are two valid criticisms since we are in fact in a precarious position right now. Why haven't governments done the stockpiling and why haven't we the people done it either? It seems that none of us are paying attention and doing our work. Government should be nagging us to do our work, and we should be nagging government to do its work. Instead we are all squandering our energies in empty political battles trying to seize control of the non-functional government. The issue isn't patents, it's governance failure. If the existing system had been operated with some minimal skill and attention to circumstances there would be no crisis, there would be an even more robust defense. It would have cost less than the political activities that consumed resources, and enriched drug companies rather than activists, lawyers, politicians and the whole political complex. Instead, governments blundered about and activists looked for opportunities to exploit failures for political gain.

Some might argue that the resources weren't squandered, that political conflict is worthwhile and at any rate entertaining for millions if not billions. We choose to spend our resources in this way. It's no worse than any of our other non-productive activities we do for the simple pleasure of doing them. We like conflict and squabbling among ourselves, it's a deep primate need, a way to resolve status and in any event not optional since we are hard wired to act this way and our social system would collapse without it. We cannot be reasonable.

Yes we can. We will always find things to squabble about and satisfy our social need for conflict, sort ourselves out and find ways to sex one another. We don't need to govern ourselves in that way. We can reason, defer gratification, channel impulses and in limited ways rise above our animal natures. It isn't that our natures need to be suppressed, it's that there are more and less effective ways and places to express them. We can indulge them to our satisfaction in more harmless arenas such as academic noogie wars, football matches and everyday style wars.

It might be useful to reflect on the ideas expressed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his essay The Opiates of the Middle Classes, recently discussed in Narrative Fallacy.

. . . it was in these columns that Richard Dawkins, echoing the great Peter Medawar, recommended bright students to find something worthwhile "to be smart about". Likewise, I suggest exerting our skepticism "where it matters". Why? Because, alas, cognitively, our resource to doubt is rather limited.

I suggest that we be smart about governance, that we focus our limited abilities to be reasonable on something worthwhile. Dawkins has a small point about his conflict with religion, and Taleb has a better one with his focus on sensible risk assessment, one that bears on the flu issue. His perfect fool of randomness has this defect among others.

He believes in the news media providing an accurate representation of the risks in the world. They don't. By what I call the narrative fallacy, the media distorts our mental map of the world by feeding us what can be made into a story that can be squeezed into our minds. For instance (preventable) cancer, not terrorism remains the greatest danger. The number of persons killed by hurricanes, while consequential, is dwarfed by that of the thousands of isolated daily victims dying in hospital beds. These are not story-worthy, implying; the absence of attention on the part of the press maps into disproportionately reduced resources allocated to their welfare. The difference between actual, actuarially defined risks and the perception of dangers is enormous — and, sadly, growing with the globalization and the media, and our increased vulnerability to visual stimuli.

Flu seems to be as big or bigger a preventable risk than most others yet we fail to take the simple precaution of having an effective medicine with a long shelf life in stock. Each of us is responsible for not being perfect fools, and we have the additional responsibility to chivy our delinquent governments as well as other groups and institutions to do their bit. It is not government's responsibility to do our thinking for us, to be reasonable for us. That is a perfectly foolish expectation.

Update, only moments later:

I had intended to include insights from this Bryan Caplan essay on The Idea Trap but I'm out of time. I'll just drop a link and a quote here. Integration into the above is left as an exercise for those few who care.

Your country is falling apart. Unemployment and inflation are sky high. World war is on the horizon, and there are riots in the streets. But never fear: An election is coming up! The incumbent will be thrown out for his failed policies. And the challengers will surely have the bright new ideas the country needs to turn itself around.

Or will they? Perhaps amidst all this the confusion, the people will hand the reins of power over to irresponsible demagogues, and conditions will go from bad to worse. This worry is hardly far-fetched. When do the "crazies" start to get a serious political hearing? Only after a country is already going down the drain. . .

A society can get stuck in an "idea trap," where bad ideas lead to bad policy, bad policy leads to bad growth, and bad growth cements bad ideas.

Once you fall into this trap, all it often takes is common sense to get out. But when people are desperate, common sense gets even less common than usual. The recent flu vaccine shortage is a fine example. Common sense says that to alleviate a shortage of the vaccine, you should make it more lucrative to supply. But the reaction of much of the public is, instead, to lash out at greedy suppliers for failing to do their job.