The War on Disease
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Every government “War on X” (Drugs, Poverty, Terror, Christmas) has been a spectacular failure.
This is not a coincidence. It’s economics.
When you build a permanent bureaucracy to fight something, that bureaucracy needs the enemy to exist. Otherwise, everyone loses their jobs.
The DEA needs drug dealers. The War on Terror needs terrorists. The War on Poverty needs poor people. It’s like hiring an exterminator who breeds rats on the side. Technically profitable, definitely unethical.
On How to Design a War That Actually Ends
The War on Disease is different in one critical way: it’s designed to win and then dissolve into nothingness, like a therapy session that actually works.
Here’s what makes it different from every other doomed war on abstract nouns:
On Not Having a Bureaucracy to Protect:
Your decentralized institutes of health (DIH) runs on code, not committees. There are no headquarters. No permanent staff. No pensions to protect. No one whose mortgage depends on disease continuing to exist.
If we cure all diseases, the system just… stops. Like a fire extinguisher that doesn’t need fires to justify its budget. Straightforward concept, oddly novel in government.
On Paying for Results Instead of Effort:
The NIH pays scientists to write grant proposals about maybe someday potentially thinking about doing research.
Your decentralized institutes of health pays them when sick people stop being sick.
If a researcher’s cure works, they get rich. If it fails, they get nothing. This is how every other functional industry works, except government and academia, which explains a lot.
On Competition Versus Monopoly
The FDA creates a single, 17-year-long pipeline to approval where only the richest companies can play.
Your decentralized framework for drug assessment (dFDA) creates a competitive marketplace where thousands of treatments are tested simultaneously and the ones that work survive. Like evolution, except faster and with less dying.
The best ideas win based on whether they actually cure people, not based on which company bought the most congressmen.
This isn’t a struggle of attrition. It’s a matter of aligning incentives. You’re not trying to make people better through moral persuasion or inspirational posters. You’re just making it more profitable to cure people than to let them die while extracting their savings.
It’s capitalism actually doing what it was supposed to do, which is pleasant if somewhat overdue.
On The Part Where Other Problems Accidentally Get Solved
The War on Disease isn’t just about curing cancer. It’s about systematically dismantling the biological roots of our other self-inflicted disasters.
Turns out, many “unsolvable” social problems are actually biology problems that seemed less urgent when military budgets were larger.
On the War on Drugs
Addiction is a neurological disorder. Your brain’s reward system got hijacked. It’s not a moral failing, it’s chemistry.
Cure the brain chemistry, and the drug trade collapses. Cartels can’t sell heroin if nobody’s brain wants heroin. Economics 101: no demand, no market.
We spent $1 trillion fighting drug dealers with guns. We could have spent $1 billion fixing the neurochemistry with medicine. The choice we made says something about how we think about problems.
On the War on Poverty
A huge portion of poverty is driven by catastrophic medical costs and lost productivity from chronic illness.
Healthy people can work. Sick people can’t. Dead people definitely can’t. This shouldn’t be controversial, yet here we are having to explain it.
Fix the diseases, slash the medical bills, and suddenly people can afford food and rent.
On the War on Terror
Radicalization is often a cocktail of mental illness, trauma, social isolation, and untreated PTSD.
It’s a public health problem, not a military one. You can’t bomb someone into being mentally stable. We checked - it doesn’t work. Cost $8 trillion though.
On the War on Crime
A vast amount of crime is linked to addiction, personality disorders, impulse control issues, and even environmental factors like lead poisoning.
If you fix the brain chemistry that makes people violent and impulsive, crime rates plummet. But that would put a lot of prisons out of business, and we can’t have that.
On The Obvious Truth Nobody Wants to Admit:
Fix the biology, and you fix the society.
It’s not a panacea. Difficult people will remain difficult. But you’ll have healthy, functional difficult people instead of sick, desperate ones, which is a measurable improvement.
And it’s definitely more effective than building more prisons and dropping more bombs, which is what we’ve been doing for the past century with mixed results at best.
On The Real Victory
The War on Disease is a demonstration with secondary benefits.
The obvious goal is curing disease. That’s what it says on the label.
The real goal is proving that there’s a better way to solve large-scale human problems than building a government bureaucracy, giving it a budget, and waiting for it to underperform over several decades.
On Why Every Previous War Failed
Every government “War on X” has been a disaster because it was built on:
- Central planning (people in suits guessing what might work)
- Perverse incentives (getting paid for not solving the problem)
- Monopoly on solutions (one approved way to fail)
This creates a system where success threatens everyone’s job, so failure becomes the mission.
On Why This War Will Win
The War on Disease will be the first government “War on X” to actually win because it’s built on:
- Competition (thousands of approaches tested simultaneously)
- Aligned incentives (you get rich by actually curing people)
- Ruthless focus on results (treatments that don’t work die immediately)
Success makes everyone richer, so success becomes the mission.
On What Winning Looks Like
Year 1 Targets
Year 10 Targets
- 50+ diseases cured (versus current 0)
- Aging reversed in human trials (death becomes optional, subject to terms and conditions)
- Life expectancy growth rate returns to pre-1962 levels (4 years per decade instead of 2)
On The Part Where Everything Else Gets Fixed:
When this model succeeds, and it will, because mathematics, the credibility of central planning will be notably diminished.
The public will look at the War on Disease and say “wait, why don’t we do this for education? And energy? And other things?”
And bureaucrats will say “because we need to study it first” and people will say “we’re doing it anyway.”
The War on Disease isn’t just the first war you’ll win.
It’s the last war you’ll need to fight, because it gives you a template for solving everything else.
Or to put it another way: You’re not just curing diseases. You’re demonstrating an alternative to government’s habitual approach to failure.
Which, ironically, might be the most durable problem to address. But if you can do it, everything else follows naturally.