Made life dangerous for manchild Bill on several occasions.

Conscientiously working my way through a Chi Trib editorial about the cost of a new “wonder” drug, I found myself working too hard.

There’s a new breakthrough hepatitis C drug treatment that cures — yes, cures — almost everyone who takes it. Unlike previous, far less effective treatments, patients suffer few if any side effects. The entire regimen takes only 12 weeks, much shorter than previous regimens.

The drug, Sovaldi, could save the lives of many of the estimated 80,000 people a year who die from the blood-borne liver disease. Eventually, Sovaldi could save the nation’s health system billions of dollars by preventing liver failure and liver cancer, not to mention curbing the huge costs of liver transplants.

And which blood-born liver disease is that? Oh sure, I can figure it out, hepatitis C, backtracking to solve the little puzzle the writer puts in my way. What do you think I am, stupid?

No, but I would rather move right along, In this wise:

“The drug could save the lives of many who die from hepatitis C, which is a blood-born liver disease.”

Better yet, I could have been informed at the start:

“There’s a breakthrough [not new: breakthroughs are never old] drug treatment for the blood-borne liver disease hepatitis-C,” etc.

Breakthrough is the point. A lot of us don’t know hepatitis-C from A or B, and of course we don’t like puzzles in editorials.

“Though” when you mean “because”:

The company also cites data collected by a state air pollution monitor at Washington High School, about two-thirds of a mile southeast of the Burley Avenue terminal.

The monitor has recorded no violations of the federal standard for particulate matter since at least 1993, though prevailing winds typically don’t blow toward the monitor from the KCBX site.

This is common journalese. Writer wants to question something, tosses in oppositional clause, making it an argument against something. But there’s no opposition. Both things can happen. There’s nothing in one to prevent the other.

Both do happen, of course. So what? So the one may mean little, in view of the other. “Because” says more than the writer wants; he wants to hint at it, not say it outright.

Which leads to the question whether he should say it at all — unless he can fine-tune the refutational nature of the second, so that (a) it’s clear and (b) it does not ask or require the reader to supply more than he’d care to come up with on a nice July morning.

Keep the momentum?

(From Illinois Policy Institute)

Nice point made by free-market-oriented Mises Institute blogger, on his way to disapproving Right to Work legislation:

Right-to-work laws are attractive to some because they help undercut the monopoly powers granted to labor unions by government.

They also appeal to the more pragmatic minded because of the distinct improvements in economic growth.

A recent study by the National Institute of Labor Relations Research found that, over a ten year period, states with right-to-work laws experience significant growth in manufacturing output and GDP compared to non-right-to-work states.

This is, of course, the result we would expect from diminishing the power of government-created monopolies such as those granted to labor unions.

But it’s using government to thwart government, and therefore objectionable:

As Murray Rothbard writes in The Case for Radical Idealism, “the libertarian must never allow himself to be trapped into any sort of proposal for ‘positive’ governmental action; in his perspective, the role of government should only be to remove itself from all spheres of society just as rapidly as it can be pressured to do so.

Stubborn lot, those libertarians.