Posted on 04/07/2016 7:00:57 AM PDT by Kaslin
Well what would happen if you went to a giant drug company and tried to negotiate the price of the drug down? Please tell us and don’t raise another issue. It is a regular epidemic today; i.e nobody directly answers a question or deals with an issue in a forthright manner.
Number two; the argument 'I can do what I want with my property' is simply unreal as no legal system allows an owner to harm others with his property. I build a dam on my property that bursts and floods your land destroying your house, crops and animals, am I therefore free of any responsibility by interposing the idiot argument; 'it's my land and I can do what I please.'
That's an obvious case of causing harm, and a p!ss poor straw man argument. Those downstream would suffer harm to life, liberty, property, and the fruits of their labors, which are theirs by right...through the ACTIONS of others. That's the purpose and justification for government. No reasonable person would dispute that.
Taking away property rights, however, to a drug patent...your economic "discourse" is lacking. If one wishes to have drugs which, by definition, do not exist today...the price of resultant, successful drugs must include:
---Actual cost to develop the drug
---Actual cost to produce, market and distribute the drug
---A proportional share of overhead
---Unrecovered costs of unsuccessful drugs
---A realistic rate of return
---A risk premium to cover uncertainty...including risk of well meaning, entitled ignorami who presume to decide for others their 'appropriate' reward...those who would eat the seed corn today, then blame others when there's no corn tomorrow.
Yours is the morality of gangsters and should be shunned. Those who object to paying the true costs of innovation suffer no harm...unless one holds that health care is a "right." Is that your position?
Is it your position someone who shares or sells their property on their terms causes harm to others? If someone 'needs' my chain saw, and I decline to offer it, I'm causing harm? If I don't help?
Fascinating.
Lyin’ Rain man - catchy.
Anyone can google free market and discover what an atrocious liar you are. You sound like a Clinton. If you are not free to fix the market how can you call it agree market? What a first class blow hard.
The problem is that because of Obama care there are numerous examples of drug companies running up their prices because they can. They are the gangsters here.
Do you think that pharmaceutical companies have unlimited R&D budgets? Do they charge full speed ahead and develop every single idea that they come up with?
I'll answer it for you:
NO
Pharmaceutical companies are like most other companies. They have these things called budgets. There are meetings and discussions where various new drugs are discussed and funding decisions are made. They balance development cost against the potential market, and other factors. Some drugs are then developed, and others are not. Even through all of this, many paths taken are dead ends and they don't recoup anything from it. Oh, BTW, government regulations have a direct effect on what it costs to do this development, and our high corporate tax rate has a direct effect on how much money is available for development budgets.
No issues from me if someone uses their purchasing power to negotiate a better prices on drugs or any product. Entities freely negotiating deals between each other is perfectly in line with our Constitutional underpinnings. If however, one of the entities is the government, and they use this power to FORCE someone to lower their price, I have a problem with it, as do all people who believe in property rights. That is effectively no different than a mugger negotiating a zero price for your wallet by clubbing you over the head.
People that respect property rights don't have any problems with people freely negotiating prices between one and another. It happens every day.
What YOU are proposing though is much, much different. I wish I could get you to grasp this, but ignorance is a regular epidemic these days, or so I've heard.
Having the government set a price by force is wrong. If the company on the other side of the bargaining table is not free to take the deal or walk away, but is forced to agree, we don't have a free market anymore and I am against that with all of my being. All people who love the Constitution feel the same way.
Well said
Now, in this context we are talking about the "health care" "market."
Nothing could be further from what you call an "ideal" free market or what most of us just call a free market. Long gone does a doctor charge what the local market will bear for his house calls (e.g. payment with a side of ham or some such).
Further health care is not really a "consumer" "product" anyway. Public health is a public good. Everyone has an interest in the eradication of deadly communicable disease, hence only the most rabid libertine (not even libertarian) eshews the power of government to impose quarantine. The efficacy of innoculations depends not upon me getting one or you getting one, but so many people getting them that the infectious "network" is broken and there is no path of communication through a broad community or the country as a whole.
We have health care insurance, which is regulated because we all have an interest in insurance actually being effective for all its purchasers (not just health care, but auto insurance, product liability insurance, etc.) and not just the one's who were fortunate enough to purchase from a sound company.
And no the stock market is not an "ideal" free market. The Fed is in, and wall street brokers and hedge funds are in, and companies are in buying back their own shares, etc. , and so prices get pushed way out of line for very long periods of time from a level that those who do fundamental calculations of value consider fair value, and in the correction we get 2008 or 1929-193??, or tulips, or whatever.
So yeah, you can hypothesize a "free market" defined as free of any government regulation or interference. I have no idea to what end, but certainly not the end under discussion here, health care.
In order to argue free markets you have to get rid of all government regulation regarding public health, health inspections of restaurants, agricultural inspections, NIH research and all government funded university research.
I don't think it a useful thing to think about, actually. But apparently you do.
People have been governing contractual terms between parties for centuries. Contractual terms have been set for centuries. Price is a contractual term and has been set by third parties for centuries. Where have you been? There is a whole rich literature regarding societies management of negotiations, property, offer and acceptance, promissory language. Go read the literature before you speak.
Setting a price does not equal doing harm. Your rhetoric requires that the owner of the drug patent be the government.
Essentially, you are arguing that government should be able to force farmers to sell prime acreage for $10.00 per acre, because it benefits the buyers.
Different principles appears to be government ownership. If a product is scarce, prices rise. If a product is valuable, prices rise.
But if the product is needed by someone, you say let the government steal it and license it, or at least let government set the price. How Venezuelan.
You just conflated selling a defective or injurious product with setting a price on a non defective product. Cognitive dissonance on that scale should hurt.
There is nothing quite like a Libertarian fanatic; reason flees, questions are not answered, reality is avoided etc.
Prices have been set for centuries. Have you ever heard of a "Contract of Adhesion?"
Was the drug purchased for $13 under a contract of adhesion? Or is that simply another strawman?
You assume I am a libertarian. That is incorrect.
I cannot see any rational basis for your insistence that the owner of an item cannot set the price for that item. The contract of adhesion you allude to in this instance is nothing more than socialist price controls to be set by the federal government. Government control is not the answer here.
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