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Oxfam Clamours for Drug Scam

Libertarianz deputy leader Richard McGrath launched into one of the world's largest charities today, suggesting that Oxfam is now a front for the backward-looking anti-free-trade movement. He cites the 'tragedy' of Oxfam claiming to 'help' the needy in Africa and elsewhere by denouncing drug patents held by GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies.

"This is outrageous,"said McGrath. "To claim that drug companies are waging a war on the world's poorest nations, as Oxfam did yesterday, is quite simply out of this world. Drug companies have every right to patent the new medicines they have produced after lengthy research, and every right to gain financial reward for their pains. These medicines belong to those who produced them - the medicines would not exist without them!"

"However, Oxfam now appears to be little more than a front for the anti-globalisation vandals who think that smashing up fast food stores is the way to rid the world of poverty," he observes. "Frankly, I am becoming a little weary of these greedy, grasping Luddites who believe that the need of one person is a claim over the rightful property of someone else."

"Were Oxfam to investigate the situation more closely, they might realise that the common denominator in most of the world's poorest countries is the absence of free markets, combined with a failure to uphold objective laws protecting individuals in those countries from the abusive actions of governments and criminals - who are all too often one and the same."

McGrath points to Oxfam's stated goal of finding lasting solutions to poverty and suffering, and says: "Unfortunately, Oxfam wants to literally kill the goose laying the eggs that CAN relieve the suffering. Freedom," he notes, "is what these have-nots, have not. Oxfam would do better to think about that."

ENDS

Richard McGrath * Libertarianz Deputy Leader * Fax 06 377 3070 * mcgrath@no-income-tax.com http://www.libertarianz.org.nz http://www.freeradical.co.nz

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