Reactions to AC

[Richard Tanner]

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Of course, but what I was talking about was skewing incentives. Making X patentable and Y not will skew funds towards X even if Y is more efficient/effective as a solution.

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I agree, with your primise, and it needs some tweaking.

Here's a fun story about a situation where the government did a good thing with a drug. Specifically, insulin, a product marketed as Humulin by Eli Lilly and Co. is not a huge money maker, in fact it's largely break even (as pharm profits go). Still, there are alot of diabetics out there and they all need Insulin to live. Sadly there is only one company with the facilities to produce enough insulin to "feed" the people (really about 85% of the total, but still). You guessed it, Eli Lilly and Co. The reason is that the machinery (both mechanical and biological) requred to produce the worlds supply of insulin is so expensive that it's not likely, or profitable, for anyone else to create. Of course Eli Lilly, in true free market fashion, said "hey why don't we stop making this and delegate it to smaller companies and use these resources for other drugs" and lo and behold, no other companies could handle the load. The US government steped in and said "Uhhh sorry but if you don't keep making this, millions of people will die, tough [censored], now get back to work" and Lilly (to this day) is still making that large percentage of Insulin and keeping those people alive.

The issue here is that in AC, it's likely one of two things would happen. Lilly would stop making it ([censored] 'em it's not making a profit) and they would die because barrier to entry exist to keep people from taking over. Or, Lilly would jack the price up super high (no market price here, Lilly has the monopoly baby) and a bunch of people die.

In short (or long) this is why I'm a Libertarian. I dislike the government and its interfearence, but some things are so large as to require it.

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One of the reasons is that the FDA controls what gets accepted and what doesn't. Long trial periods coupled with specific and rigid guidelines increase costs to get drugs approved. Generic market efficiency should lower the costs of getting drugs to market quite a bit.

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Honestly, the generic market is basically Kinko's. They do very little research and mostly just produce things that have lost their patent. There are some exceptions but you as a consumer should never depend on Generic labs for research. Prices won't go down (due, again, to barriers to entry in an industry this big/expensive)

You are correct however, about the long trial periods. Although, I don't know about you, but I'm a big fan of my drugs not causing serious side effects to me. And, if there is a risk associated with said drugs, they are required to test for it, and warn me explicitly about it ("Taking X may cause: Nausea, headache, etc" we've all heard it).
Some things can get cut out of the trial process, others kinda need to be there.

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You don't have to find people to do it for free, just get the people who are doing it to have their incentives push for the same results as your incentives. Personally I believe that under a market economy the group of entrepreneurs whose interests most closely mimic my interest in my health is the life/health insurance industry. Having cheap, available and effective treatments on hand providing their customers with great quality of life would have an enormous advantage in the industry.

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Again, there are alot of barriers to entry, but it's not impossible. The situation you describe may happen. Some guys might get together and say "Hey I'm willing to put down some money to help cure the X we all have" and that's cool except it would take a large amount of money, and at the end of this, drugs are usually easy to reverse engeneer, which means all that money they spent just went up in smoke assuming they can't get a patent.


Believe it or not, I like alot about AC, but to me, AC is a house of cards. In statist philosophy, some things may be wrong, but there's a give and take. In AC, there's no government at all, which means that if there's anythng that could give rise to warlords/depotism/etc. then it's a dangerous road to hoe.

Cody