jonny5
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2012
- Messages
- 27,581
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- Location
- Republic of Florida
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Libertarian
Did you ever hear of Turing Pharmaceutical, which bought back rights on existing life-critical drugs and then increased one's price by 5000% ("almost all profit"), therefore throwing many patients who depended on it in life-threatening situations? Life-critical drugs are not a product like any other (nor are food and energy in poor countries).
Even if you are indifferent to the human costs and consider fair to kill people throughout speculative operations, at least approach it from an economic perspective: pharma companies enjoy monopolies as a result of their intellectual properties. While property (IP or not) is good, we have to acknowledge that exclusive rights distort the market, usually in a benign or balanced way, but sometimes very detrimentally. The latter must be curbed.
I have absolutely nothing against profit, capitalism or pharma companies. Even the very expensive drugs are usually priced that way to offset R&D costs, and profits are overall reasonable (and I would not mind them being higher). But count me out when it comes to deliberately kill people for profit, which a few companies and traders do regularly. Famines deliberately created a few years ago by purely financial agents in cereal markets are another example.
Then you do have something against profit, capitalism and pharma companies. You cant say you dont and then criticize it. No one is deliberately killing anyone except natural causes. Pharma is a product that is sold to try and thwart nature.