Munger on shortages and prices

I had this very discussion on facebook several weeks ago. The marginal cost of each additional year of life expectancy is greater than the last, so we inevitably reach the point of diminishing returns. We can’t entitle everyone to every possible year of life, because the price is impossibly high, so death panels aren’t simply a political foil. They’re an unavoidable reality.I prefer decentralized death panels composed of family members and other community members who might contribute care to a sick person, but we’ll have death panels regardless. Someone will decide who gets the scarcest life extension. My counterparts in this discussion accused me of terrible heartlessness, though I wasn’t advocating any particular policy, only describing inescapable realities.The Dorian Gray pill is unrealistic, but we could approach something like it, and this development will affect forcible propriety. It’s not that “the rich” will get the pills. That’s the wrong way of looking at it. Whoever gets the pills, by lottery or beauty contest or whatever, will be the rich, so the question is not: “Do the rich get the pills?”. The question is: “When these pills exist, who becomes rich?”Roberts’ four men in a boat with water for only one is a good analogy. If one of the four men has pockets full of gold, does he simply buy the water? Hardly. The gold weighs him down enough for one of the others to gain the water, and once the man with pockets full gold dies of thirst, this survivor has the gold as well.If we’re literally discussing mortality vs. immortality, the guys closest to the nuclear weapons will get the pills. Productivity, inheritance and fortunate stock picks have nothing to do with it.