In a recent post, I quoted Capital Matters regular Vladimir Lenin describing the way that the Bolsheviks’ surprisingly successful (under the circumstances) New Economic Policy, a desperate turn to a “mixed” economy to bail out the flailing communist experiment, had worked:

The state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in this past year? No. But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both. Be that as it may, the car is not going quite in the direction the man at the wheel imagines, and often it goes in an altogether different direction.

The mysterious hand strikes again.

And so to semaglutide, a medication first approved to combat the effects of type 2 diabetes…