Comments Elsewhere

Donny,

I’m familiar with the economics behind patents and products like pharmaceuticals.

Saying “Oh, well, if it weren’t for patent laws there wouldn’t be enough investment in new drugs” has its own problems as an argument (enough for what? enough for whom?). But even if it were uncontroversially true that you get better results with patent laws than without them, I don’t see how that answers the question.

You didn’t say that healthcare should be provided through “mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange” except when you can get better results from using coercion (e.g. by threatening legal force against firms that would be willing to provide generic medicines to willing customers). If that’s the principle you intend to endorse, then go ahead and endorse it, but you’ll need to drop the universal pronouncements about “mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange” (since you’re willing to discard that principle in the name of expediency) and you shouldn’t be surprised when every busybody and medical welfare statist comes along with a new scheme for forced care, or forced denial of care, or forced prices for care, which would get better results for somebody or another.

If, on the other hand, you think that healthcare should always be provided through free, mutually beneficial exchanges, whatever benefits you might be able to extract through coercion, then you’ll have to explain how that could possibly be compatible with fining or jailing people for peacefully producing generic medicines and providing them to willing customers, in a “mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange,” if they did so before an arbitrarily-declared, government-controlled time limit had expired.