Richard Ebeling emails:
Dear Bob,
I participated in the November 10, 2015 “Libertarian Angle,” webinar sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation, with the Foundation’s president, Jacob G. Hornberger, on the topic: “Repeal Antitrust Laws.”
The discussion focused on the false rationales for government regulation of business under the heading of the Antitrust Laws, under which government decides what are the acceptable sizes of firms, when they may or may not be allowed to merge, and what are acceptable pricing policies to not be labeled and prosecuted as “anti-competitive” and “monopolistic.”
The history of the Antitrust Laws were also explained and how virtually all of the “evidence” of monopolistic behavior were in fact wrongly interpreted and judged when looked at from a wider and more dynamically competitive perspective.
It was also highlighted that most real monopoly problems have had their origin and basis in government favors, privileges, and restrictive regulations that have given chosen enterprises government protection from competition.
Finally, the issue of the ethics of Antitrust was looked at in terms of their violation of freedom of enterprise and right of free exchange among market participants.
The webinar runs for about 30 minutes.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-libertarian-angle-repeal-antitrust-laws/
Best,
Richard
Big-Pharma Seeks Monopoly Over Life-Changing Therapy
ReplyDeleteBy dangling life-changing cures over people's heads for cartoonish figures of "1 million dollars," pharmaceutical corporations prove when they see sick, desperate, dying people, all they see is dollar signs...
How can big-pharma continue on with its monopolies, wealth, and influence by curing everyone with one shot that costs almost nothing to make?
Their strategy is two-fold. First, they have intentionally dragged their feet for as long as possible until they can figure this problem out, letting people die of now curable diseases simply because they want to protect their existing business models and bottom lines.
Second, they have begun to mold public opinion through intense lobbying across the media and medical journals, ignoring the actual costs involved in producing the therapies, and instead cashing in on what they think it is worth to people, or in other words, dangling cures for crippling, deadly diseases over dying and/or desperate people's heads, and seeing how much they are willing to pay for them.
Church says he didn’t agree with dodging regulators and added that BioViva appears to be “a one-person show.” But he says he found Parrish’s claims plausible. A student in his lab, he says, could prepare a genetic treatment suitable for experiments in animals in a matter of days.
If that is so, Parrish is likely only the first of many soon to follow. Faced with either a lifetime in debt to big-pharma, or even the prospect of dying from a curable condition big-pharma simply refuses to provide the cure for because of financial considerations, a growing number of people will turn to "labs" that could prepare genetic treatments at drastically reduced costs and with minimum or nonexistent barriers to accessibility.
Dangerous? Yes. But if you are dying from cancer, and as big-pharma itself has pointed out, you're likely to do anything - whether it is putting yourself in debt to big-pharma for a million dollars, or rolling the dice with a treatment drummed up in an underground biopunk lab.
As the capabilities of DIYbio labs grow in general, it will become increasingly possible for dedicated teams of citizen scientists and activists to reverse engineer existing therapies, reproduce them, and put them online in a biological version of existing peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
http://localorg.blogspot.com/2015/11/big-pharma-seeks-monopoly-over-life.html