DO the poor deserve life support?" asks the economist Steven E. Landsburg in an article published under that title in Slate this month (www.slate.com/id/2133518/?nav=fo). The subtitle says: "A woman who couldn't pay her bills is unplugged from her ventilator and dies. Is this wrong?" Mr. Landsburg invokes "economic considerations" to suggest that the answer is "no."

Many commentators have attacked his argument as morally preposterous. Well, yes. But it is also economically preposterous. The two judgments are related. But before an attempt at explaining why, here are some details of the case, from the Slate article and the Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA:

The patient was Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old legal immigrant being kept alive by a ventilator as she lay dying of cancer last month in the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Tex. Physicians offered no prospect for her recovery. She was hoping, however, to hang on until her East African mother could reach her bedside.

Ms. Habtegiris had little money and no health insurance. On Dec. 1, hospital authorities notified her brother that unless another hospital could be found to treat his sister, Baylor would be forced to discontinue care after 10 days. But even with Baylor's assistance, the family was unable to find a willing hospital. True to its word, Baylor disconnected her ventilator on Dec. 12, invoking a law signed in 1999 by George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. The law relieved doctors of an obligation to provide life-sustaining treatment 10 days after having provided formal notice that such treatment was found to be medically "inappropriate."

Unlike the comatose Terri Schiavo, Ms. Habtegiris was fully conscious and responsive when she was disconnected, according to her brother. She wanted to continue breathing. Her brother and several other family members have described the agonizing spectacle of her death by suffocation over the next 16 minutes. Her mother never got there. (Baylor officials have said their decision had nothing to do with financial considerations.)

In Baylor's defense, Mr. Landsburg argues that Ms. Habtegiris's treatment would have failed the economist's basic cost-benefit test, which says that an action should be taken only if its benefit exceeds its cost. The cost of care is relatively easy to calculate, but measuring its benefit is more difficult, and it is here that Mr. Landsburg stumbles.

In general, economists measure the benefit of an action as what its beneficiaries would be willing to pay to see it taken. To place a rough upper bound on the benefit of supporting Ms. Habtegiris, Mr. Landsburg asks us to imagine that before her illness, she had been given a choice between free ventilator insurance and $75 in cash (his illustrative estimate of the cost of providing a healthy young person with such insurance). He assumes, plausibly, that she would have chosen the cash. The implication, he believes, is that the benefit of extending Ms. Habtegiris's care must be less than its cost.

He is mistaken for multiple reasons. For one thing, he ignores the economically compelling reasons for having social safety nets in the first place. Even those who are not poor recognize that catastrophe is only one unlucky break away. One might lose one's job and be unable to afford health insurance, for example, or be stranded by a mountain blizzard and unable to afford a helicopter rescue. With such prospects in mind, most people favor collectively financed rescue efforts. That a poor person would not, or could not, buy private insurance against such contingencies is entirely beside the point.

Even more troubling, Mr. Landsburg completely ignores moral emotions like sympathy and empathy. As economists since Adam Smith have recognized, economic judgments are often tempered by these emotions. The upshot is that large numbers of people benefit when a patient in imminent mortal danger receives treatment. Had the opportunity presented itself, many would have eagerly contributed to Ms. Habtegiris's care. But organizing an endless series of individual private fund-raisers for such cases is impractical. So, we empower government to step in when the need arises.

Mr. Landsburg's argument finesses the important distinction between a "statistical life" and an "identified life." The concepts were introduced by the economist Thomas C. Schelling, who observed the apparent paradox that communities often spend millions of dollars to save the life of a known victim - someone trapped in a mine, for example - yet are often unwilling to spend even $200,000 on a highway guardrail that would save an average of one life each year.

This disparity is not economically irrational, Mr. Schelling insisted, because the community values what it is buying so differently in the two cases. It is one thing to risk one's own life in an unlikely automobile accident, but quite another to abandon a known victim in distress.

By offering a transparently unsound economic argument in defense of the Habtegiris decision, Mr. Landsburg unwittingly empowers those who wrongly insist that costs and benefits have no legitimate role in policy decisions about health and safety. Reducing the small risks we face every day is expensive. The same money could be spent instead on other pressing needs. We cannot think intelligently about these decisions without weighing the relevant costs and benefits.

But using cost-benefit analysis does not make one a moral monster. In the wealthiest nation on earth, a genuine cost-benefit test would never dictate unplugging a fully conscious, responsive patient from life support against her objections. Mr. Landsburg's argument to the contrary is wrongheaded, not just morally, but also economically.

BRUSSELS -- China's long-awaited antimonopoly law probably will create more obstacles to foreign companies' access to its booming economy, people familiar with the law's evolution say.

Western companies' most pressing concern is that the law could allow trumped-up antitrust charges to chip away at their profitable patents. That fear is based on the latest known draft of the law, which prohibits the abuse of intellectual-property rights but doesn't describe how regulators should interpret such offenses. After a decade of discussions, China is expected to put the law into force this year.

More broadly, as the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week focuses on China's emergence, U.S. and European officials and legal experts worry China's tentative moves to open its economy might be rolled back by antitrust policies that protect state-owned monopolies. Since the draft was published in September, a chapter of the law forbidding the abuse of government power to restrict competition has been dropped, according to Wang Xiaoye, a professor at China's Institute of Law and one of the law's drafters.

"There is a lot of uncertainty in this law. I see room to interpret the law in a way that benefits the Chinese in the immediate future," says George Metaxas, a Brussels lawyer who is co-chairman of an International Bar Association group studying the law and advising Beijing.

The fears contrast with earlier hopes that China's antimonopoly law would incorporate Western models and lead to further opening of its economy. Over the past two years, U.S. and European Union officials, lawyers and executives have traveled to China for dozens of meetings and seminars and have sent China comments on multiple drafts of the law.

Some of their advice has made its way into the law, including the section on merger controls, which now outlines clearer requirements and a shorter review process.

Chinese officials say the law has incorporated an unprecedented degree of international advice, but they insist China ultimately must pass a law that is in its own best interests. "China sees a lot of intellectual-property abuses. The Western side might be afraid of its interests being hurt, but there are such provisions in the EU and the U.S., so there is no reason not to allow China to put such a provision in its law," says Yang Wang, an official at the Chinese mission to the EU in Brussels.

"The Chinese feel all the good [intellectual-property] rights have been taken," says Mathew Heim, an antitrust expert at the Centre, a Brussels think tank. "They might use this law to bring down Western companies a notch or two."

That possibility has pushed some of the world's largest patent-holding companies to lobby the Chinese government as the law is being developed. At a meeting last June in Beijing, representatives from Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., General Electric Co., Cisco Systems Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Dow Chemical Co. discussed the law with Chinese officials and academics. According to minutes from the meeting, Microsoft lawyer Yu Weidong described the company as "a major target of this law." A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the matter.

In one scenario suggested by Mr. Metaxas, a Chinese company using Microsoft's software could appeal to regulators, claiming licensing fees are hurting its business. The regulator then could rule that Microsoft is abusing its market dominance and force the company to cut its fees or license its technology free. Microsoft and EU regulators are grappling over similar intellectual-property issues, though the EU insists it doesn't want to deprive the company of its property, only to make its systems more compatible with rivals' programs.

Ms. Wang, the China Institute of Law professor, says the country might not be able to deal with such shades of gray. The finer points of antitrust law and intellectual-property rights -- a patent is essentially a legal monopoly -- aren't dealt with in the planned law, and China has almost no expertise in this area, according to Ms. Wang, who is in Chicago on a Fulbright scholarship to study comparative aspects of U.S., EU and German antitrust law.

Political infighting among Chinese agencies is complicating the situation, Ms. Wang says. The chapter forbidding the abuse of government power to restrict competition was dropped during a review of the law by China's State Council, the government's executive arm, before being sent to the National People's Congress for final approval, she says. The chapter would have given Beijing a way to ensure that local governments don't use their powers to favor local businesses at the expense of the next town or province, according to Yee Wah Chin, a lawyer in Washington. Shanghai, for example, might place a tariff on cars made in another city, and the other city will reciprocate.

The government also is divided at the national level on how and whether to overhaul the economy. According to a U.S. official familiar with China's economic reforms, the draft antitrust law has led to a turf war between the Ministry of Commerce and the more conservative State Administration for Industry and Commerce.

Western officials say one overarching challenge is the law's stated aim: "ensuring the healthy development of the socialist market economy." Says Ms. Wang, "Antitrust law is rooted in the market economy. There is a big difference in China where the biggest competitor for [private business] comes from the government itself."