Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (183391)	2/2/2006 11:12:06 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Respond to of 186894

The thing is, we increasingly don't have a real free market. We have a market that grants intellectual monopoly rights (as opposed to intellectual property rights) that have reached the point of stifling innovation rather than protecting a person's right to profit from innovation. This (so far unreleased) book was shown to me in the past week: dklevine.com It's written well enough that you don't need to read the whole thing. The intro and the chapter on pharma alone were quite illuminating. What I find interesting is that it is written not by a bunch of socialists who are seeking to make everything free, but rather by a couple of conservative economists. I was surprised that I found myself agreeing with most of it, including the chapter on pharmaceuticals, which makes the point that the current IP regime is such that it not only guarantees unnecessary and unreasonable levels of profit, but that it in fact causes a huge misallocation of capital away from developing drugs and into all sorts of other things. (Incidentally, they assert -- and I believe -- that drug companies are currently spending more on IP wrangling than on actual R&D, though this, along with marketing and all sorts of other costs, is wrapped up in what the drug companies consider "the cost of introducing a drug.") [As an Off Topic consideration to this Off Topic discussion, reading through this made me think, how much better off might we all be -- the country, the economy, INTC, AMD and all their customers) if the money thrown into decades of IP wrangling between INTC and AMD had instead been put into developing better products?] Anyway, the drug companies are part of the whole package. Completely corrupt, politicized and counterproductive. But they're only part of the overall system.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (183391)	2/3/2006 11:12:34 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

OT in a free market system, why are foreign governments not allowed to pay whatever they choose? They are "the market" for the socialized medicine countries. Interesting argument. I would say that the fact that the countries do control the market reduces the amount that the market is really free. The problem as I see it is not other countries but the US. We are the ones without a free market. Can you explain what you mean by this. Even if the foreign governments are considered the customers in an international free market, their internal drug markets are much less free than ours. Of course our market is heavily regulated, but it is a lot freer than Canada's internal market in drugs. Canada controls the price. Here we have something that is closer to a market price. Tim