Most people wouldn't let a store overcharge them for a pack of gum, yet most people live their entire lives without realizing how the government steals thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per year from them. In an earlier posting, I mentioned some of the taxes people pay but often don't consider in assessing their tax burden. That burden can easily exceed 50% of your income. Think of everything you purchase with your after-tax income: your mortgage or rent, food, auto payment, gasoline, medical insurance, house and personal property insurance, auto insurance, clothes, drugs, electricity, propane or natural gas, phone service, cell phone service, computers, Internet service, televisions, stereo systems, entertainment, and thousands of other things.

Now consider what the government provides to you in return for taking half or more of your money. Is it worth just as much to you as the dollars you spend? Probably not. In fact, it is probably not even close. The government does a good job of protecting our local and national security, so I won't complain too much about that money, even though much of the military expenditures are wasted. The government also plows the road in front of my house in wintertime, although not nearly as often as it should. The government also helped to educate me, but I paid for most of my education. Therefore, when I compare the value of what I buy with half my income and what the government provides for me with the half it takes as taxes, I don't think that the government is spending my money very efficiently. Every year, billions of dollars seem to vanish in Washington, with no bureaucrat or politician held accountable for it. Money doesn't vanish, of course. The excuse about “we don't know where that five billion dollars went” is just that: an excuse, and a rather shaky one, I might add. Someone knows where that money goes, but when it goes into someone's pocket illegally, the government seems to forget where it went. Ironically, the government would not tolerate this degree of sloppiness from us, the taxpayers. If you as a taxpayer made even 1% of the errors in recordkeeping that the government does, it could fine you and put you in prison. Isn't this a perversion of justice?

While watching TV yesterday, a public service commercial featuring a de rigueur Hollywood celebrity caused me to stop in my tracks:

“Provide your child with a healthy and safe home. Remember, this is your family we're talking about.”

Add in the obligatory tone of condescension, and you get the message.

What a monumental waste of airwave time! Most parents don't need such patronizing lectures, and anyone who does is either too dumb or too apathetic to be receptive to it.

A decade ago, a bevy of supercilious Hollywood celebrities in ubiquitous public service commercials somberly instructed us on the importance of condoms in reducing the risk of HIV transmission. This message is almost bound to fall on deaf ears for a multitude of reasons. What people need is a message like this:

“Prevent HIV transmission without decimating your pleasure. Find out more at www.not-another-useless-message.org.”

(Of course, too many people don't know what “decimating” means, so we'd need to substitute “markedly reducing.”)

The problem with condoms is, of course, that they do decimate pleasure (more for men than women, as I explain in The Science of Sex). The current epidemic of obesity is living proof that most people will let nothing stand in the way in their pursuit of pleasure (it's a pity that more people haven't read my weight loss book, in which I explain painless ways to lose weight). Cognizant that people are governed more by pleasure than logic, I invented a simple way for people to have "safe sex" without decimating pleasure. (Not that this is relevant to the current discussion, but I also developed various ways to amplify the pleasure of sex, which I explain in The Science of Sex.)

OK, you movers and shakers in Hollywood. I know you're listening, because several of you have written to me about other topics. Here's your chance to make a real difference instead of squandering your public service commercial time. Find out what I am talking about, and then spread the word.

To contact me, click the following link:

www.MySpamSponge.com/send.php?handle=doctor

MySpamSponge is a site I developed that anyone can use to block all of their spam, but never any legitimate messages. With MySpamSponge, you communicate using handles instead of e-mail addresses. A handle is essentially a contact code that gives people a way to contact you via e-mail without you having to reveal your e-mail address. Similarly, you can send a message by using the recipient's handle as the address (mine is doctor).

Update February 17, 2008: On August 1, 2007, I contacted Patty Stonesifer, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (read the letter here). My letter began, "I am a physician who devised two new methods to block HIV transmission. I would like the opportunity to present them to you because they dovetail with your efforts to curb HIV/AIDS."

One might think that the Gates Foundation would welcome an effective new way to block HIV transmission (and one that can be implemented now, not after years of research), yet I never heard from her. Why not? Although I know why, yesterday I read about a study which concluded that "when people feel powerful, they ignore new opinions." There's another way to say the same thing: When people feel powerful, their intellectual arrogance leads them to conclude that they have all the great ideas.

Ms. Stonesifer probably thought, "What could a doctor in Michigan know about preventing HIV transmission that we don't already know? Gee whiz, I'm a bright person, and Bill has exhaustively researched this. We've collaborated with the preeminent researchers in this field, so we've left no stone unturned."

Except, of course, for a couple of ones that are glaringly obvious to me (being an outside-the-box thinker), but something that would seem like hieroglyphics to people who think inside the box. Incidentally, studies have shown that most scientists tend to follow a pack "follow the leader" mentality. Those people do valuable work by conducting the nuts-and-bolts research that needs to be done, but they aren't the mavericks who generate new ideas.

According to a press release by UNAIDS (a joint venture of the United Nations and the World Health Organization), in 2007 2.5 million [range: 1.8 – 4.1 million] people became newly infected with HIV. Let's do the math: It's now been over six months since I wrote to the Gates Foundation. In that time, over a million people were infected with HIV. Thus, by blowing me off as she did, Ms. Stonesifer blew an opportunity to save many lives.

But let's be realistic: why should royalty like the Gates Foundation listen to me? Cognizant that they're too important to give five minutes to someone they view as a peon who couldn't possibly have anything worthwhile to say, I set my sites a bit lower and sent a message to a man who appeared as a guest on The Big Idea Show. He was the head of an AIDS organization that I'd never before heard of, and he seemed to be down-to-earth and genuinely interested in combating this problem — or so he seemed on TV. I asked for nothing in return; just the opportunity to present my ideas to him.

He never responded.

Update May 11, 2008: Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of California, Berkeley, released a new policy analysis (1) which concluded that the most common HIV prevention strategies are doing a poor job of controlling the primarily heterosexual epidemics in Africa. What isn't working?

• Condom promotion
• Encouraging sexual abstinence
• HIV testing
• Treatment of other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)
• Vaccine and microbicide research

According to Daniel Halperin, lecturer on international health in the HSPH Department of Population and International Health and one of the paper's lead authors, "We need a fairly dramatic shift in priorities, not just a minor tweaking."

I agree. However, the Gates Foundation and others are seemingly more content to burn money in an attempt to manifest their good intentions than to achieve good results.

Journal reference:

1. Reassessing HIV Prevention. Malcolm Potts, Daniel T. Halperin, Douglas Kirby, Ann Swidler, Elliot Marseille, Jeffrey Klausner, Norman Hearst, Richard G. Wamai, James G. Kahn, Julia Walsh, Science, May 9, 2008, vol. 320.