And I'll correct you, there are thousands of ladies who wish they were more like he.
This is Walter Williams sitting in for Rush, and you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
And Rush will be back on Monday.
And you can visit RushLimball.com and you'll see my dashing, handsome photo there.
And you can make a lot of copies of it to send to your friends.
And there's a link to my website, which is very rich with stuff.
And if you join Rush, you will get your very own Rush Baby on Board.
How does that sound, the Rush Baby on Board?
Oh, okay.
Yeah, bring me a Rush Baby on Board.
Yeah, that was James Golden.
And I was asking Mike Mamone, my engineer for the day.
Didn't they have a sound on that?
Well, we'll try to get a sound.
We don't have a sound for it.
Okay, okay, okay.
Okay, it's a little plaque that says Rush Baby on Board.
And you can put it in your aha, Rush Baby on Board, a little yellow sign like you see where it says women working or things like that, a little yellow sign.
It's a wonderful sign.
And you can put it on your SUV or your tank.
That would be more appropriate.
Ah, aha, yeah, I got, oh, who?
That's a young lady she brought in.
What's your name?
What's her name?
Susan Moran.
She just brought in the little Rush Baby on Board sign.
So I have two of them that I'm looking at.
Anyway, the last time we talked about that we were going to talk about the next day pill and body parts.
And okay, so here's what got me thinking about the next day pill.
In New York Times today, it says next day pill, which is James, okay, the morning after pill.
If you want to say the morning, well, the next day is the morning after.
Oh, okay.
Anyway, the story in the New York Times says the FDA approves the morning after pill.
And many people are in a tizzy.
But I think those who are in a tizzy over it are wasting their tizziness.
I'll tell you something to really be tizzy over.
You should worry about the FDA's systematic incentives.
FDA means Food and Drug Administration.
They approve all the drugs for safety and effectiveness in our country.
But we should be worried about the FDA's systematic incentives that unnecessarily lead to hundreds, perhaps, over, let's say, the last couple of decades of unnecessary deaths.
Now, let's talk about the FDA incentives for a moment.
Now, an FDA official can make essentially two kinds of errors.
And what are those errors?
Well, it's called the Type 1 error and the Type 2 error.
Okay, these are statistical errors.
And let me just give you a technical definition first, and then I'll give you an ordinary definition after that.
The Type 1 error is accepting a false hypothesis when you should reject it.
And the Type 2 error is rejecting a true hypothesis when you should accept it.
Okay, so what that means is that the Type 1 error is to err on the side of overcaution.
That is, the FDA official, he's just overcautious and he doesn't approve a drug that is, in fact, safe and effective.
And the type 2 error is the error of undercaution, where he approves a drug that has dangerous unanticipated side effects.
A type 2 era, an example of that would be, it didn't happen in the United States, but the thalidomide that caused a lot of birth defects in Germany and England and some other European countries.
Now, so now what are the incentives?
Now, the FDA does not have equal incentives to make these errors.
Now, if the FDA official errors on the side of undercaution, that is, approve a drug that has dangerous side effects, he'll be in Congress, he might get fired, the agency will get embarrassed, and there'll be all kinds of problems.
But if he errs on side of overcaution, that is plays it too safe and keeps a drug off the market for more tests and delays the drug coming in on the market, well, there's no cost to the FDA official.
That is, he won't be in Congress.
The people who died because the medicine was not available, they don't know why they died and their loved ones don't know why they died, and surely they would not attribute it to the FDA.
Now, let me just give you some numbers on some research that's been done on this.
Let's see, there's the, according to Dr. Lewis LaSogna, and he's with the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development, he said, because the FDA delays in beta blockers, the beta blockers deal with hypertension, and some of them deal with the secondary effects of myocardial infarction.
He says because of the delays in approval, 119,000 people died who might have been helped by that medication.
Now, this was during the 70s, where the beta blockers were approved in Europe, but the FDA did not approve them for use in the United States.
And then there's a whole bunch of other drugs that were approved in Europe, but not approved in the United States until much later.
One is Mevacor.
It's a cholesterol-lowering drug.
And it could have saved, if it had been introduced, when it was also introduced in Europe, it would save thousands of lives.
Haverix and interleukin-2 and some others.
And one of the big problems is that these FDA officials are playing oversafe.
But the cost of being oversafe to them is essentially zero.
Nothing happens to them.
The only thing happens is that many patients who would have lived, they die instead.
Now, there's another issue that's impacting that Americans should not be worried about the approval of the morning after pill.
They need to put far more resources in paying attention to what the FDA does.
For example, to get a drug to the market, it costs a pharmaceutical company $800 million to get one drug to the market.
That's the average cost of getting a drug to the market because of all the FDA requirements.
And it takes anywhere from 8 to 12 years.
Now, what does this do?
Well, first of all, when a pharmaceutical starts developing a drug, they don't know whether the drug is going to be, you know, whether they're going to recoup their expense.
So they have some reluctance in development of some drugs.
And some drugs they decide not to develop at all that can help people.
Now, let me give you an example of this.
Now, put yourself in the place of a manager of a pharmaceutical.
And your biochemist comes to you and says, I have an effective treatment for such and such illness.
And you're the manager.
You say, well, it's going to cost me $800 million to get this drug to the market.
How many people are affected with this drug?
Well, your chemist tells you, well, it's a rare disease.
And only about 3,000 or 4,000 or 50,000 people are affected by this disease.
Well, what do you tell the chemist?
Well, you say, look, it's going to take me $800 million to get this drug to the market.
And it's not enough people with this disease for us to make any money.
So we're going to put it on the shelf.
And they call those drugs orphan drugs.
But thankfully, during the Reagan administration, there was the Orphan Drug Act that was written in 1983, and it provided some incentives and other things and some other incentives for the drug companies to produce these drugs.
And fortunately, many rare disease are being treated today that otherwise would not be treated.
And here, you people out there, you're worrying about the morning after pill, and the FDA's policy is leading to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of American people.
And nobody cares about it.
Okay, so that's the morning after part of the tease I gave you last hour.
I won't be able to get into all of it, but I want to talk about body parts.
You can't sell your organs.
Now, I think that that's an abomination that I cannot sell my liver or my kidneys or my heart, because after all, who do they belong to?
They belong to Walter Williams.
They don't belong to the Congress of the United States.
They belong to me.
And if I own something, I should have the right to sell it.
But there's this law, and it's called the National Organ Transplant Act.
And it imposes a $50,000 fine and five years for taking anything of value in exchange for your organs.
Now, I think that we ought to be selling organs because there's a major problem with organ transplants.
There's a shortage of organs.
That is, almost 65,000 people are waiting for kidneys.
And according to some estimates, 15 or 20,000 of them are going to die before there's a transplant.
Now, if we were to sell organs, I'm going to get back to this when we come back from the break, but if we were to sell organs, it would increase the supply of organs.
I mean, I can just imagine, here I am, Walter Williams.
I'm almost dead, or dead.
And the doctor asks my daughter, a lovely, beautiful daughter.
Of course, she's beautiful.
She looks just like I do.
But the doctor asked my daughter, well, can we harvest your father's heart?
Can we harvest his liver?
Can we harvest his kidneys?
And she'll say, no, because I want my daddy to be buried just like he came in the world.
But if the doctor said to her, we will give you $20,000 for his liver, $40,000 for the heart.
What do you think my daughter say?
I know what she'd say.
She'd say, do you want the eyes too?
It would, of course, it would increase the supply of organs.
But we're going to talk more about this when we come back from the break.
We'll be back.
We're back.
Walter Williams pushing back the frontiers of ignorance.
And we're talking about drugs, FDA approval, and we're talking about body parts.
Now, I know a lot of people, and particularly those in the medical profession, they are against the sale of organs.
And here's one of the questions I might raise to them is that everybody in the transplant business is making money.
That is, the doctors are making money.
The nurses are making money.
The people who find the organs or in charge of harvesting the organs.
The people are in charge of allocating the organs.
They are making money.
And everybody's making money except the person whose organ it is.
And so why not allow the person to make money?
That is, it seems kind of cruel.
Now, here I am.
I have two nice kidneys, fully functioning kidneys.
According to the medical profession, as healthy as I am, I can make do with one.
I have an extra kidney.
Now, if you say to me, well, Walter, how about giving your kidney to Joe Blow, somebody I don't know, how about giving it to you?
I'll say, hey, why should I go through the stress?
Why should I go through an operation?
But if you say, Joe Blow wants to buy my kidney, well, that's another issue.
I mean, that's, yeah, so it seems like that many people in the transplant business, they expect altruism to take care of this very, very important problem.
That is, somebody's sick and they're dying and they need a body part.
Now, ask yourself the question.
Suppose we apply altruism to the supply of cars.
You say, well, we don't expect people to sell cars and we want them to volunteer a car or volunteer a house or volunteer food or volunteer computers.
Do you think we'd have any supply problems?
We'd have a supply problem.
Now, so here's what people are saying.
It seems cruel to me.
A person says, well, I mean, here's the most important thing that can happen in your life, perhaps.
Let's say you're on your deathbed and you need a liver.
And they're saying, you can't get a liver the same way you got your house or the same way you got your car.
We're going to make you depend on the goodness of somebody else.
Now, that is preposterous.
I mean, you would say it as, oh, you can't have a house unless it's going to, if you get a house, it's going to depend on the goodness of somebody else.
You tell a person, go play in the traffic.
Why don't you tell the transplant people the same thing?
They are willing to see people die instead of taking those actions that will increase supply.
Now they have one devious plot that I find despicable.
Now in some countries, they have what they call an opt-out system.
That is, if you die and you don't say that your kidneys or your body parts can be harvested, they'll take them.
Whether you mean to have them taken or not.
Well, fortunately, so far, In the United States, we have to opt in.
That is, you have to do something affirmative to say that you want your kidneys harvested or your eyes harvested when you die.
So I think that there ought to be a market.
And I think that, and a lot of people say another criticism, they'll say, well, if there's a market for kidneys, well, maybe somebody will get, you know, somebody will murder somebody in order for them to get their body parts.
Well, that's possible, but that's a crime.
And that should be punishable by law.
Put people in jail or execute them if they did that.
But just because some people will engage in a criminal activity subject involved in a particular activity is no reason to ban the activity.
So anyway, I know you people are not going to be impressed by this because most people think, you know, even though I can sell my hair, which is a body part, there's no law against my selling my hair.
There's a I think Mike, you know, Mike Mamone, he's my engineer.
He said, who would want to buy my hair?
Now, here's this guy bald.
I mean, he's bald.
He would buy, maybe buy my hair, get a hair transplant.
But the point is, again, the point is, is that I'm trying to make, and I've forgotten my train of thought here, but the point I'm trying to make is that I belong to Walter Williams.
I am my private property.
I do not belong to the government.
Now, matter of fact, if I belong to the government, then I would not have the right to sell myself because that's somebody else's property.
But I belong to Walter Williams.
And if I belong to Walter Williams, I have the right to sell my body parts.
I don't have the right to sell somebody else's body parts because they're not my property.
But if I belong to Walter Williams, I shall have a right to sell my body parts.
Matter of fact, my doctor one day, he was telling me, Williams, you ought to stop smoking.
And so I said, well, does it make sense to send pink lungs into the ground?
If I could sell my lungs, I would take better care of them.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
Walter Williams sitting in for Rush, and Rush will be back on Monday.
By the way, folks, there's a little tidbit, and I just wanted to mention it.
It's in my stack of stuff.
It's about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagen.
Anyway, the guy has a kind of colorful past, but anyway, he had a nice comeback.
I think during a 60-minute interview, a correspondent pointed out that flood-damaged cars are still in the street of New Orleans in the devastated 9th Ward.
And guess what Ray Neagan said to the reporter?
He said, you guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed.
And it's five years later.
So let's be fair.
Well, that's one and for Ray Neagh.
By the way, all this money people, I'm sorry.
All this money that people are sending down to New Orleans, and that's how you say New Orleans.
Is there any constitutional authority for it?
There is none whatsoever.
Matter of fact, those of you who want to see what James Madison, the founder of the father of the Constitution, said, just read his veto of Public Works Act, and I believe it was 1816.
He said there's no constitutional authority for it.
And by the way, people say, oh, well, with that kind of devastation, we need government involved.
I say nonsense because whenever somebody tells me that you need government to do something, I ask, what did they do before it?
And there's the Chicago fire that damn near destroyed the city.
Chicago came back without government money.
There was the Galveston, I think category four or five hurricane that destroyed Galveston, I think it's 1900.
Galveston came back without federal money.
Then there was a San Francisco earthquake in 1906.
And they rebuilt San Francisco without this great big government largesse.
So when anybody tells you we just need a certain government program, I always ask the question, what did we do before we had the government program?
Anyway, I just wanted to run that little Ray Nagan tidbit by you.
And I don't know whether shown on it during this.
It might not have been shown.
It's going to air Sunday night.
Anyway, he's taking a lot of heat, but a fact is a fact.
I think the hole is still in the ground in the big apple.
But let's go to the phones.
And let's go to Brian and Hammond, Louisiana.
Hello, Mr. Williams.
Thanks for taking my call.
Hi.
Can you hear me?
Okay.
I can hear you.
Okay, great.
And millions and millions of other people can hear you.
Okay, great.
The reason why I call, I'm a healthcare professional, and while I do agree with you about the fact that there needs to be a larger supply of organs for donation, I think you may be missing some unintended consequences of having lay people, and when I say lay people, I mean people that are not medically trained, deciding to sell their organ.
It's a more complicated process than that.
There are health problems that can come into pictures.
Okay, okay, okay.
Help me out because I'm not a medical practitioner.
Okay.
Now, here's the issue.
Okay, I'm Walter Williams, and let's say I want to sell one of my kidneys.
And I'm imagining that I go to a doctor and I get all kinds of tests.
The doctor tests me and he says, well, you can make it.
Your kidneys are working at 96%, and you can live your geezer.
You only have 10 or 20 more years live anyway.
And so you might as well fork over one of your kidneys.
Now, what's wrong with that?
One of the unintended consequences that you're not foreseeing is that, yes, right now, Mr. Walter Williams, your kidneys are functioning at 96%, and you can make it on one kidney.
But who's to say that five years from now you don't, and I don't know if you have high blood pressure or not, let's say you develop high blood pressure, okay?
Then your other kidney starts to peter out.
Now you only have one bad kidney.
Now you're looking at possibly having to go on to renal dialysis and passing on costs of unintended and unnecessary medical care that you could have avoided had you kept both your kidneys.
Now, if it's your family.
Well, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute.
Okay, so you you would agree that I can voluntarily give my kidney to a family member to whoever?
Yes, sir.
Well, what's the difference?
I'm going to still, you know, five years from now, I can still go to high blood pressure and go renal failure.
The difference is when you start to apply a monetary incentive to people, they're probably going to make some decisions based on situations that they might be in that they're not thinking very clearly and they just need the money and they're not thinking.
I know, but you're getting back to me as a hypothetical.
Yes, sir.
Okay, so there's two cases.
I can either volunteer my kidney to somebody who needs a kidney or I can sell it.
Yes, sir.
And but either case, and let's say in this hypothetical, five years hence, I can have renal failure.
Now, okay, so you would support putting me in jail if I sell the kidney as opposed to volunteering, giving the kidney.
Well, I definitely wouldn't say that I'm supporting putting anyone in jail, but they're just proper channels.
And I would just like to offer a suggestion or a solution to the problem that you obviously realize that we have, and that is a lack of organ donors and a long time that these people are having to stay on organ donor lists.
And I think that the solution to the situation is to have a drive for increased organ owners, which most people probably do not intend to do, nor would they ever attempt to consider to do.
And I think that's the answer to your issue.
Well, I don't think a drive is going to help.
I think that the thing that will help is monetary incentives.
That is, monetary incentives.
You say, if I want to increase supply of anything, it's a no-brainer to say, well, raise the price.
Well, right now, the price is zero.
And so how much is supplied?
You don't expect a large supply of anything when the price is zero, when you just depend on people voluntarily doing nice things for their fellow man.
Of course, many people will do that, and I applaud them for it, but it's just plain not enough.
Let's go to Craig in Richmond, Virginia, one of my favorite cities.
Well, I'm glad it's one of your favorite cities, Dr. Williams.
You're one of my favorite columnists.
Oh, thank you.
My children will be thrilled because I have clipped so many of your articles and given them to them.
And my daughter's almost ready for college, and she's looking at Hillsdale, by the way.
Oh, very good.
Very good.
Yeah, sometimes I guess.
Let me interrupt you a moment because I'll tell you something about Hillsdale that is very good.
It is just no fun up there.
Oh, okay.
That means a father should be happy about that because all you can do is study.
Good.
How far is it from Detroit?
No, it's not that far.
It's about an hour and a half drive.
I guess that's far enough.
It's an hour and a half.
I see your concern.
Yes, very concerned.
With Dearborn, also, very concerned.
Yeah, right.
It's a wonderful college.
Oh, great, great.
And maybe later on, you mentioned two colleges, Hillsdale and I think Rose City.
Yeah, Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Yeah.
And matter of fact, there's some others.
There's some others that I just can't think of.
But if you check because Hillsdale is so selective, what, they have 1,200 students?
I'm not sure.
But check out, for all you people out there, check out the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's ISI.org, ISI.org, and it has a college guide, and I think it's a very reliable college guide.
Good, good.
Where earlier Juan was on, and I'm thinking, is this a Winston Churchill moment for him, or has he been a closet conservative all along?
I applaud him, though.
Well, people, as he said, and I asked him that question, that there's just some facts that become undeniable after a while.
And I think that he's making, I think that his work in his book is just really, really good.
Yeah.
Well, you guys hit on one of my pet peas when he talked about Dubois and the talented 10th.
And it seems that back around the turn of the century, they had the Red State, Blue State thing going on in the black community with the big fight between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois.
And it seems like this talented 10th, rather than reach down and pick their fellow black men and women up in 2006 and for recent history, say the last 25 years or so, it seems like they've just decided that I don't want the white man's foot on my people.
I want my foot on my people.
That's the way to put it.
But thanks a lot for calling in, Craig.
Let's take a break, and we'll be back with more of your calls after this.
We're back, and we're going to go back to the phones.
We only have a few more minutes left than Open Line Friday, the last hour, of course.
And we're going to talk to James in Atlanta, Georgia.
Welcome to the show, James.
Good morning, Professor.
Good afternoon.
How are you today?
Okay.
Well, actually, I'm not okay.
I'm not okay because the world's wrong and I'm right.
Oh, there you go.
Hey, I've got a question for you.
You're world renowned for your ability to identify gifts for your wife, whether it be a holiday, Christmas, anniversary, or birthday.
I've got a 15-year anniversary coming up for my wife, and I need some advice.
Oh, my God.
You know what?
I get a lot of mail from you guys.
I can't.
How come you guys don't get your own ideas?
Now, okay, let's get a little history of this.
A number of years, I was subbing for Rush.
And I was telling, somebody called and asked what kind of Christmas gift I get for my wife.
And so I said, I got a pair of golf shoes.
And she doesn't play golf, but the shoes have spikes on it so that she doesn't slide around while she's cleaning my car in the winter because the water gets icy and stuff like this.
And I was talking about the other gifts that I get from my wife.
And so some of you guys think I'm a gift guru.
Now, let me make a suggestion to you, James.
Now, here's what you do.
It's 15 anniversary?
Yes, sir.
Okay, so here's the, well, this is a general guide for getting gifts anyway for your wife.
Is that you look around the house and see what needs to be replaced that you're going to have to buy anyway.
And, you know, like an ironing board or like potholders and stuff like this.
So here's my recommendation to you, James, is look around your house, find 15 things that you're going to have to buy anyway.
Yeah, 15 different things.
You know, like it might be a potholder.
It could be a muffin tin that's rusting out or some slippers and things like that.
And buy that.
But the key to it is wrap it nicely.
Right.
So several boxes wrap nicely with things I'm going to have to buy anyway.
Yeah, 15 things.
And just, you know, and have a nice little bow tie.
And do you think your wife will hurt you about this?
I doubt she would.
She probably expects little of this.
Okay, well, anyway, I made sure that my wife couldn't hurt me because I chose properly when I married because I'm 6'6 ⁇ , and my wife is 5'6 ⁇ .
So you don't marry a woman that looks like she can beat you.
Well, unlike you, Walter, I married way over my head.
The woman is beautiful, and I've got to treat her like a queen.
Okay.
But good luck on the gifts.
Well, thank you very much.
You know, a lot of guys, well, see, a lot of guys, they're afraid to buy these kind of gifts because they don't have control over their household.
They've lost control of the household.
But not Mr. Williams.
I control my household.
So I'm free to be very imaginative in terms of gift giving.
But let's get serious, ladies and gentlemen.
Let's go to Oscar and welcome Oscar from Omaha, Nebraska.
Walter Williams, it's a pleasure and an honor to speak with you.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
There's a point back with you and the other Williams, Juan Williams, in that conversation, and I have heard it, I don't think enough, but several times in the last year or so that I don't think is raised enough, and that is there is a perspective from.
Let me give you kind of a case in point, if I could.
Okay.
I'm a 48-year-old white male.
I grew up in Northern California.
I remember when Martin Luther King was shot, my parents crying.
They raised me to respect all races and all people.
You know, the whole white guilt thing, my best friends were black, which is true, even though through high school and junior high and high school, it was the black, the Filipinos, and the Mexicans that probably gave me the most grief.
And I've sustained that through my life and taught my children that.
But at this point in time in my life, it's people like you, Condoleezza Rice, other black people in my life who have risen up and have a realistic or are taking advantage of America that maintains my faith.
But I, and again, this is a case, and I'd like you to get away from that.
And I know what you're going to say.
I'm tired of hearing about it.
Okay, well.
I'm tired of it.
Well, actually, a lot of it is by the so-called leaders, you know, like, you know, they show up on the 60 Minutes, or they show up on the various news.
And many people have the impression of black people.
They get it from what they see on TV, or they get it from excuse makers.
So I think that we should just treat each other like human beings and get on with it.
And by the way, for you people out there who feel guilt, you can go to my website and click on gift.
That's walterwilliams.com.
Click on GIF, and there's a gift for you.
And what it is, it's a certificate of amnesty and pardon.
And so I guarantee you, you won't feel guilty anymore.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
Okay, we're back, and let's welcome Katie from Florida Keys on board.
Welcome to the show.
Hello, Katie.
How are you?
Okay.
That's good.
I actually saw you at the National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, D.C.
Oh, okay.
Good.
You're awesome.
Oh, thank you.
And handsome, too.
Yes, you are.
My question is: what is your best suggestion as to how you can combat little liberal professors?
Well, I don't know.
I guess one of the things, if they get really outrageous, is just to take their lecture and make it widely available.
But I think that maybe one of your guides is to go to the Young Americas Foundation, and then there's accuracy in academia and they help students.
They might give you some guidelines.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
And folks, that was Katie worrying about how to deal with liberal professors.
Well, I think one of the things that one has to worry about as a college student is that you have to be ends-oriented.
You have to get out of college.
So sometimes you just have to shut up and just learn what you're there for and just ignore the leftist ideas.
But short of that, I just don't have any other recommendations because you want to get a college degree as opposed to correcting a liberal professor and you cannot correct them.