Thread by @ThatShockratees

Suffering from that Koch/Mercer pipe dream that “marketplace ingenuity and the invisible hand” will fix things all by itself? Well, that’s how the opiate epidemic came to WV and crushed it so flat. The Sacklers used their marketplace ingenuity, and the invisible hand took over.

https://twitter.com/thatshockratees/status/1114854259533676546

People with no hope for jobs invested in the only business opportunity available - getting opiate prescriptions and selling them to their neighbors’ kids. Opiate devastation is one of the purest examples of “invisible hand” thinking applied to the wrong article - public welfare.

No, really, Ayn Rand stans - clear the mud from your eyes. Even Adam Smith, original capitalist theorist, knew that price/demand interplay was not a magic panacea for every social ill. Yet here we are, centuries later, deifying saps who think so.

So what am I advocating here - expand the urban race-targeted police state into every white rural home? Of course not. But people with jobs and hope and income don’t go into the dope business. @AOC, @ewarren, other Dems focus on bringing jobs and money directly to those in need.

They didn’t have some kind of Appalachian moral failing. Don’t read that effing book. They simply used marketplace ingenuity and the invisible hand of supply/demand to remedy the giant void left when a government that’s supposed to serve its people stops serving them.