There’s been some debate recently over whether recent studies show that the lack of pharmaceutical patent laws didn’t stifle, and perhaps even accelerated, the development…
]]>See, companies front the money to produce the album, and promote it, then they get about 90% of the profit from sales. The band’s share is the remaining 10% (sometimes more or less depending on the deal), and they don’t see any of it until the production cost of the album is payed out of their share, so the Record company can turn a huge profit even if an album doesn’t sell enough for the band to make anything.
I don’t know what “libertarians” (by which I mean the neo-lib capitalists that have appropriated the term) want to call Record companies, but I think “parasitic middleman” is a pretty good term.
Also, I highly reccomend the Zine “The CIA makes science fiction uninteresting #2”, available from Microcosm publishing. It explains exactly how “life-saving” the toxic drug cocktails delivered to AIDS patients are. In a patented system, the incentive is for Pharmaceuticals to sell drugs, not to make them effective and safe.
]]>Or maybe they won’t be developed at all. Or maybe there would just be a huge drop in drug research. Do you have a model as to how this would be done? Why do you believe it would be?
Well, I don’t know. Under capitalism, who will be in charge of making the shoes?
I mean, there are actually lots of ways to get foundational and applied research done even without being able to lock the results down using patents (the fact that you can’t patent laws of physics or mathematical theorems doesn’t seem to have halted the aerospace industry), and people have had lots of ideas about how you might be able to make a living at the research without marketing patented results (like, creating Universities), but I don’t think I’m under any particular obligation to spell out just how people will make drugs on the free market; the burden of proof is certainly on those who want to forcibly stop market transactions, not those who want to allow them. (The thing, of course, is that patent protectionists don’t know any better than I do where the money will go in a free market for medicine, socialist calculation being impossible. It might mean a lot more drug R&D and it might mean a lot less. But I don’t need to know that to justify my prescriptions; they do. So much the worse for them.)
And, of course, the major point here is just that the argument is textbook protectionism: point to what is seen (costly drug development); studiously ignore what is unseen (all the entrepreneurship, innovation, enjoyment, leisure, food, shelter, technology, etc. that that money could have been spent on); and act as though the obvious value of the former justifies any means necessary to keep the money flowing to it.
Of course, Weisenthal can be a protectionist if he wants to, but if you’re going to spout textbook protectionist arguments you should probably give up on pretending to be a libertarian.
As far as the music industry goes, I thought the point that was made was that people should recognize the service that is provided for the money that is exchanged.
Well, sure they perform a service; so do the hard-working American family farmer and the domestic steel industry. But Brandon wasn’t just arguing that they perform a service; he was arguing that they perform a service and therefore (apparently) we’ll be better off if the government grants them special privileges to a captive market. But that’s just textbook protectionism again. And the same thing goes as before; only doubly so, because the idea that the obvious value of pervasive pop music needs government protection is (as you note) even more silly.
]]>Or maybe they won’t be developed at all. Or maybe there would just be a huge drop in drug research. Do you have a model as to how this would be done? Why do you believe it would be?
As much as I find problems with intelectual property, I’m not sure that I could accept any kind of dramatic drop in the new development of life saving drugs.
As far as the music industry goes, I thought the point that was made was that people should recognize the service that is provided for the money that is exchanged. Of course, I think it is much more clear that intellectual property in music is a bad thing.
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