Comments Elsewhere

Constant,

Partial deregulation can be economically disastrous.

Sure. For example, dumping existing healthcare subsidies for poor people and old people while keeping government-enforced monopoly pricing on drugs would be pretty crappy for the poor people and old people. (Generally speaking almost every government intervention has some countervailing intervention that’s intended to mop up after the mess it leaves. And we’ve got to repeal something or another at some point if we hope to repeal everything some day.) But anyway, like you I favor freedom regardless of economic consequences; I reject the idea that an injustice against anyone can be justified or excused by the fact that somebody else gets good results from it.

But while we’re on the subject of the economic consequences, we should keep in mind that the “disaster” being contemplated in the case of pharmaceutical R&D amounts to us being no worse off than we are now (not having new drugs on the market doesn’t mean that the old drugs will disappear). In fact we’d be better off, since all the drugs that are held at artificially high prices today through patent restrictions would eventually become available as generics. The putative harm consists in supposedly not being as much better off as we would have been if the inflated prices had been kept in place.

Even if that’s true it’s pretty weak for a “disaster,” and anyway I can’t see how anyone would even know whether it’s true or not without first managing to do socialist calculation of the most efficient levels of new drugs to have available 20 or 40 years from now (bearing in mind the necessary opportunity cost in other fields of research or production). Since socialist calculation is impossible, I don’t take the argument very seriously.