Sectors like pharma require enormous R&D budgets. If you have a free market with many companies, each company will have only a tiny marketshare, and therefore only a tiny budget. So you can’t do without the megacorps. The solution is for the megacorps to be run by the government / non-profits / trusts, or, if that is not possible, for prices to be fixed by an independent regulatory body.
Comment on Insulin
Iceblade02@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoA lot of the benefits people associate with capitalism require a free market. The US problem is that the megacorps have gotten sufficiently powerful to abolish that free market through regularory (and legal) capture, enabling entrenched monopolies.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Look, mate, Intellectual Property Laws are literally the government creating and giving somebody an artificial monopoly on something which would not naturally exist if it wasn’t for it to be forced on everybody thanks to legislation and the coercive powers of the Legal system, and this which was purposefully written in Law to do exactly that, so it’s not an unexpected side effect.
So anywhere were Intellectual Property legislation can apply the market is not free, on purpose and by policy.
Now, a good argument can be done about how IP law incentivises the creation of things with a high utility value which would otherwise not be created, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the whole thing is a giant legislative sledgehammer with massive destructive capability for both the Economy and people’s lives, which needs to be handled very carefully in order not to do more harm than good.
As it so happens IP has gone completelly out of control in the US because Corruption there is incredibly high, more some when it comes to the property of ideas since holding a piece of such property can yield billions of dollars in profits - the profits from owning ideas can be far vaster than of merelly owning land - and this shit has been copied around the world by almost as corrupt politicians (for example, the thoroughly corrupt crooks in the EU commission pretty much copy every single “this will make me personally lots of money from thankful corporations” pieces of legislation from the US).
So Copyrights now last an insanelly long period - about 1.5 times the average human lifetime - before things covered by it go into the Public Domain, whilst lots of Patent Offices (most notably the ones in the US and Japan) will just accept patents on everything no matter how obvious without even a proper search for prior art, hence things like the “round corner button” patent that Apple has as well as countless business patents for “solutions” which are obvious to any domain specialist (many such patents literaly the product of paying a domain expert for an hour of their time by a patent troll to just “think up a solution for this” as no actual implementation is needed to get a patent, just the idea of how it could be done).
All this to say that this fucked up situation of insane government-given monopolies all over the place was created ON PURPOSE by the very politicians who claim to want a Free Market.