but…it helps?
lol. there is no alternative to the magical federal fairies who sprinkle truth and wisdom from their monopolist towers.
what part about them being arbitrary and not subject to the discipline of competative forces do you not get?
do you think if the government gave Reebok the monopoly over the shoe market, or even just the monopoly right to ‘regulate’ the wider shoe industry, for ‘feet safety’ that this would not give the consumers of shoes cause for concern…?
Well, this is true under certain institutional arrangements. The price would obviously be different in different settings as others have pointed out.
I would like to elaborate on how innovation in R&D typically occurs without patents. The idea typically goes like this: if it costs you a billion to make a new drug, and then another company just copies it from you to sell it more cheaply (because it has not incurred R&D costs), the incentives to develop new drugs are shot to nil.
There are two solutions to this free rider problem: The developing company could be given rights over it for a period of time, or development could be spread across companies likely to benefit from such new technology.
Considering the latter, there is nothing disadvantageous about collaboration. There are also numerous benefits to this approach since the sharing of research and perspectives could enhance the development process. Note that there is no longer the prospect of giant payoffs for discovering the newest drug, so price gouging no longer occurs. The pooling of resources is often undertaken by smaller firms and/or solutions to problems that may not be obviously patentable.
It’s not necessary for us to “agree” on goalposts. I presented an argument, and rather than respond to it, you altered my argument, essentially creating a straw man which you were better-equipped to counter.
I never said they can’t exist. We can certainly come up with counterexamples, most (all?) of which will be more-or-less geographical/territorial “monopolies”.
But the sort of comical monopoly that you keep describing simply doesn’t exist without State intervention. I would go so far to suggest that these can’t exist without a State, and one further, that in the entire recorded history of humanity, nothing even remotely resembling these caricatures has ever existed without a State intervening in its favor.
(Also, did you ever stop to think that maybe the world just didn’t need a Large Hadron Collider? Maybe we do need one, I don’t really know. But isn’t it possible that we didn’t need it? Got along fine for 500,000 years without one. )
There’s at least one more mode that could be used to offset the “free-rider” problem, I’ve talked about it in context of DRM/copyright, but I think the same idea would be applicable to Pharma.
I think dominant assurance contracts maybe could be used to overcome the FRP for pharma, too, although I think they’re better-suited for less speculative investments.
Predictably, gottfried is just a troll that lured people in by pretending to just have some innocent questions only to whip out the standard revleft trick bag once it got going. As if we need the billionth wikipedia scholar to drop the “AS is unproven” line.
your example was ok but imo wasn’t general enough to axiomatically disprove the possibilbity of a monopoly pushing newcomers out of the market.
LOL … yes quite possible … after all we also got along fine without controlling fire for millions of years.
with scientific projects its never clear whether they will pay off … but lets say the findings allow to get nuclear fusion to work …i guess then it was worth it.
You never explained how the monopoly happened in the first place. But then: people like you never do.
Look: the nonsense you’re spewing has been done to death here. Why not try the search feature so you can spare us your trolling.
4 Gottfried
sure, if the industry doesn’t has to pay taxes, doesn’t need to worry about multi billion dollar lawsuits etc. the prices would be lower.
hmmm…let me see if i get the concept … we have companies X, Y and Z. They all agree (or are forced by the absence of patents) to share the results of their research. So X and Y both invest lets say 1 billion/year into research and every other year come up with a new drug that shows beneficial effects in clinical trials. As a results companies X, Y and Z all produce the drugs and sell them. What would stop company Z from not investing into research but cashing in on the discoveries of X ynd Y?
as i did say before … how about the company did produce the best and cheapest products at one point?
so why do you bother responding?
That is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. Try again.
To tell you that your nonsense has been done to death here. So that you’ll use the search function.
thank you for the links!
A monopoly cannot occur simply by producing the best at the lowest cost. Nor can it sustain itself. You need to watch the video I provided. Also you seem to forget that a business that produces the highest quality good at the lowest cost is a benefit to consumers, not a burden.
All market monopolies, that is ones that cannot practice coercion, must compete dollar for dollar for every other good and service on the market. Fundamentally it cannot be a monopoly. Not to mention that if it does establish itself as a true market monopoly it will likely become bloated, loose its quality and raise its costs. A true market monopoly is easily undermined by a new competitor. There are no such things as barriers to entry on the market. A barrier to entry can only be a legal phenomena provided by the state.
Not for long.
Consumer awareness would be higher without reliance on the state (don’t worry, it’s FDA approved!). Consumer reaction to a company marketing deadly ‘medicine’ would be dramatic and likely force the purveyors of poison out of business. Companies that performed proper safety tests and openly disclosed risks vs benefits of their products would be rewarded.
Many of the best medicines exist in nature or are discovered by accident, who really needs a billion dollar wonder drug of the month except those whose salaries rely on their sales?
Perhaps we should meet for lunch and have a burger at Jack in the Box with extra tomatoes or a peanut butter sandwich if you’d prefer to discuss this further? Excuse me while I take a Tylenol, my liver is hurting..
Gottfried, how many people have suffered needlessly because the FDA kept a company from bringing a product to market? Also, how many products have not been improved upon because a pharmaceutical has a monopoly on the product, resulting in many more people suffering needlessly? Why is 20 years a good time for patents? Why not 1 year or 100 years or infinity?
If Company Z isn’t contributing to any of the R&D, I’d wager that Companies X & Y would quickly stop sharing information with them.
I’m not trying to “disprove the possibility of a monopoly pushing newcomers out of the market,” only I’m suggesting that it is very unlikely. The burden which you have yet to overcome is how a monopoly arises in a free & competitive environment.
Worth it compared to what? You’re essentially saying that the results are worth the cost, no matter what that cost eventually happens to be, but this is plainly false, there is without a doubt, some cost which exceeds the value of fantastic discoveries like fusion or zero-point energy. We can’t justify the outcome when A) we’re unsure of the costs and B) we’re not bearing the costs on our own.
If you want to take your hard-earned money and create a large hadron collider, then go right ahead. But you can’t say “It will be worth it… eventually!” and use that to legitimately justify taking my money to contribute toward its production - exactly because you don’t know whether it will be worth it to me or not.
isn’t that exactly the purpose of the patent? what would stop company Z from simply copying whatever X and Y produce?
sorry didn’t have time to check out the links yet.
To the extent you can get people to voluntarily respect it, fine. To the extent you can’t, you can’t.
They were created by the state, simple enough.
I don’t see any evidence that the FDA is really required. The record of the FDA in protecting people from harm is dubious. The agency is created more to provide a monopoly for certain pharms than test the efficiacy and safety of drugs. Their entire stance on declaring anything with healing benefits as a drug is laughable. Their extravagant fees and testing prodedures actually prevents the benefits of many of the simplest drugs or treatments. It’s for these reasons that Pharms are required to obtain a patent on their drugs, research and production methods. All this drives up the cost by a considerable amount, and there’s really no proof that this is even necessary or sufficient.
A Pharm company in an Anarcho-Capitalist society would be free to produce drugs, but would also be bound by PDAs, including their own, to adhere to certain standards as determined by the market - not some beauracrat/politician. Some portions of the current FDA process may in fact be reasonable. A lot of it isn’t. In addition, the free market approach reduces the political interference on drug development, use and removal. In fact, science would win out over politics. So in reality, we Austrian Economist types aren’t talking about no testing. We’re talking about testing without state interference, which is the single greatest cause of a significant amount of human suffering and death.