Laws Of Physics Don't Apply To Ethics

One cubic foot of water weighs 62.31 pounds.

A boat and its contents will float if the total weight is less than the total weight of the water scooted out of the way to make room for it.  Displaced water pushes upward with a pressure equal to the weight of that water, no more, no less.

If you, your canoe, your tackle box and cooler weigh a total of 300 pounds, and the canoe is displacing 350 pounds of water, you’re fine.  Drop your favorite beverage overboard, though, and it will sink, because the bit of water it pushes out of the way doesn’t have enough upward force to support it.

With this in mind, I'm wondering about the weight of corruption, the upward force of ethics, and the current balance across the country.

How many principled individuals does it take in business or industry to keep things afloat against the bulk of crookedness?  And how close to the waterline are we?

A federal judge ruled recently that three drug makers had been selling drugs to physicians at drastic discounts, and urging them to claim a much higher amount from insurers.  The insurers reimbursed at the higher price – because they’d been told by the pharmaceutical companies that this was the wholesale cost.

“The different pharmaceutical companies unfairly took advantage of the system by setting sky-high prices with no relation to the marketplace,” said the judge.

According to the New York Times, AstraZeneca inflated the cost of Zoladex, a prostate cancer drug, “by as much as 169 percent.”  Bristol-Myers “caused the publication of false and inflated average wholesale prices for five drugs, including Taxol, which had spreads as high as 500 percent.”  The price of the generic drug albuterol sulfate was inflated “in a range of 100 percent to 800 percent” by “Warrick, a subsidiary of Schering-Plough.”

At least this shows that once the real numbers are revealed, things get straightened out, right? 

Not always. 

Since the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency has used a testing procedure for calculating fuel economy that is, as National Public Radio puts it, “based on outdated assumptions: that motorists drive slower than they really do, that they never use air-conditioning, never go up a hill, never start their cars in the cold, never get stuck in traffic jams, etc.” 

The EPA has a moderately revised procedure for 2008 models, which “will force carmakers to post lower mileage numbers on window stickers,” but the more realistic numbers will not be used by the Department of Transportation to judge whether auto manufacturers are adhering to Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, because “automakers won a lawsuit barring the agency from using the new numbers.” 

This leaves the DOT in the ridiculous position of using “the overly optimistic numbers produced by the earlier mpg tests.”

But this is an aberration, surely.  When we discover a problem with vast consequences, don't we fix it? 

Not always. 

Sometimes, as in the case of harmful ingredients used in foods and supplements, the sheer numbers of items make it difficult, if not impossible, to regulate. 

The Food and Drug Administration “inspects only 1 percent of overall imports,” says the Washington Post; therefore, “it falls to manufacturers to conduct quality control tests” on the ingredients they use.  If they don’t do the quality tests, then the company and consumers are at the mercy of suppliers who are willing to do such things as put a glycerin label on deadly diethylene glycol.

This puts us, average Americans, in the position of hoping there are enough individuals with high ethical standards to prevent crises caused by even the momentary water-logging of industries that make our country function.

The calculation isn’t tidy, like each square foot of water giving 62.31 pounds of upward pressure.

How much underhandedness does one Good Guy have the upward force to counter?  And what if the upward force is at the Nevada office and the underhandedness is at the branch in Michigan?

We do have Congress on our side, and they don’t want greed and crime to destroy capitalism’s entrepreneurial spark, or the presumption of safety that keeps consumers consuming.  But Congress’ own boat is keeling precariously.

They said the extensive Jack Abramoff crimes had taught them a lesson, and new rules would be put in place.  But even after William Jefferson was indicted for a freezer full of bribery and racketeering money, there is still no independent ethics overseer.

The Washington Post quoted an unnamed Democratic lawmaker as saying there was a delay in establishing the independent ethics body because “The legitimate danger people raise is that this becomes used for political purposes rather than what it’s intended for.”

When the accepted definition for the phrase “political purposes” is selfish gain rather than communal progress, we’d all better be bailing as fast as we can.

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