Isegoria

Route 36, an underground club in Bolivia, is (supposedly) the world’s first cocaine bar:

Down in Route 36′s main room, the scene is chilled. A half-hearted disco ball sporadically bathes the room in red and green light. Each table has candles and a stash of bottled water, plus whatever mixers one cares to add to your drink. In the corner, a pile of board games includes chess, backgammon, and Jenga, the game in which a steady hand pulls out bricks from a tower of blocks until the whole pile collapses. If it weren’t for the heads bobbing down like birds scouring the seashore for food, you would never know that huge amounts of cocaine were being casually ingested. There’s a lot of mingling from table to table. Everyone here has stories — the latest adventures from Ecuador, the best bus to Peru — and even the most wired “why-won’t-he-shut-up?” traveller is given a generous welcome before being sent back to his table, where he can repeat those stories another 10 times.

“Everyone knows about this place,” says Jonas, a backpacker who arrived two days earlier. “My mate came to Bolivia last year and he said, ‘Route 36 is the best lounge in all of South America.’” It is certainly the most bizarre and brazen. Though cocaine is illegal in Bolivia, Route 36 is fast becoming an essential stop for thousands of tourists who come here every year and happily sample the country’s cocaine, which is famous for both its availability, price (around €15 a gram) and purity.

The scene here is peaceful; there seems no fear that anyone will be caught. (“The owner has paid off all the right people,” one waiter says with a smile.) A female backpacker from Newcastle slips on to one of the four couches arranged around the table. “We’ve brought some [cocaine] virgins here. This will be their first time, so we are just rubbing it on their lips. But they are lucky – you could never get such pure coke back home. In London you pay 50 quid for a gram that’s been cut so much, all it does it make your lips numb and sends you to the bathroom.”

Travellers’ blogs also give the place a good writeup. “I travelled the world for nine months, and for sure La Paz was the craziest city and Route 36 the best bar of my entire trip,” writes one, while another says, “Like to burn the candle at both ends? Well, here you can bloody well torch the whole candle.”

John Stossel explains why big business goes big for health care reform:

“What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand,” Frank Rich wrote in Sunday’s New York Times.

That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of “corporatists” who have sprung up to attack progressive reforms proposed by Obama and the Democratic majority. Manipulation is what we got many years ago when we traded a more or less free market for the “progressive” interventionist state. When government is big, the well-connected always have an advantage over the rest of us in influencing public policy.

Observe: Although President Obama and big-government activists demonize health-insurance companies, the companies “are still mostly on board with the president’s effort to overhaul the U.S. health-care system,” the Wall Street Journal reports; and …

Although the activists criticize Big Pharma, “The drug industry has already contributed millions of dollars to advertising campaigns for the health care overhaul through the advocacy groups like Healthy Economies Now and Families USA. It has spent about $1 million on similar advertisements under its own name,” the Times reports.

Big Pharma and Big Insurance want Obama-style health-care reform?

It’s not so hard to understand. “The drug makers stand to gain millions of new customers,” the Times said.

And from the Journal: “If health legislation succeeds, the [insurance] industry would likely get a fresh batch of new customers. In particular, many young and healthy people who currently forgo coverage would be forced to sign up.” No wonder insurers are willing to stop “discriminating” against sick people. (Forget that the essence of insurance is discrimination according to risk.)

Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don’t want Medicare negotiating drug prices — for good reason. If it forces drug prices down, research and development will be discouraged. (Depending whom you believe, Obama may or may not have agreed with the drug companies on this point.)

As for the insurance companies, they worry — legitimately — that a government insurance company — the so-called public option” — would drive them out of business. This isn’t alarmism. It’s economics. The public option would have no bottom line to worry about and therefore could engage in “predatory pricing” against the private insurers.

But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with “reform.”

It illustrates economist Steven Horwitz’s First Law of Political Economy: “No one hates capitalism more than capitalists.” In this case, big business wants to shape — and profit from — what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform. Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything?