>> mobbing, shaming and regulating away outrageous prices.
Mobbing and shaming are absolutely part of a free market economy, as they manage information flow and create downward pressure on demand, and they punish bad actors. Regulation is essential because lo and behold, empirical evidence shows there are a number of situations where the magic free market completely fails at providing good outcomes. Good outcomes in the sense of, you know, achieving human-level fairness and progress, not shuffling money efficiently. There's a lot about power imbalance and access that would be a whole other topic that make these stupid dollar computations meaningless in any effective sense.
> If pharma companies can't charge you in the ballpark of a lifetime's earnings
You're being downvoted because this just shows how completely fucked this worldview is when reducing everything to dollars and cents. Not only is it a completely anti-human worldview, it's only consistently applied by corporations when they want to get their profits out of the poor souls they help with their magnanimous, oh-so-arduous drug development processes. Because you can bet when the shoe is on the other foot, and corporations fuck the environment and poor people en masse, nobody wants to do those calculations, because it would bankrupt whole industries (like coal and plastic manufacturers).
Mobbing and shaming are absolutely part of a free market economy, as they manage information flow and create downward pressure on demand, and they punish bad actors. Regulation is essential because lo and behold, empirical evidence shows there are a number of situations where the magic free market completely fails at providing good outcomes. Good outcomes in the sense of, you know, achieving human-level fairness and progress, not shuffling money efficiently. There's a lot about power imbalance and access that would be a whole other topic that make these stupid dollar computations meaningless in any effective sense.
> If pharma companies can't charge you in the ballpark of a lifetime's earnings
You're being downvoted because this just shows how completely fucked this worldview is when reducing everything to dollars and cents. Not only is it a completely anti-human worldview, it's only consistently applied by corporations when they want to get their profits out of the poor souls they help with their magnanimous, oh-so-arduous drug development processes. Because you can bet when the shoe is on the other foot, and corporations fuck the environment and poor people en masse, nobody wants to do those calculations, because it would bankrupt whole industries (like coal and plastic manufacturers).