If the federal government had locked down all IT development in the 1980s as you proposing they do for pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't have this forum to comment on, much less the industry it is built around.
I don't believe that anything as extreme as the parent suggests is necessary but I do believe that we should have enforceable transparency in the pharmaceuticals industry R&D costs and/or decoupling the drug trials system so that the trials have to be carried out by an independent third party.
Yes, the dumb pipes of internet are.
The applications, like this website, that actually make use of those dumb pipes are not.
The only thing that made it useful though was commercialization.
Computers are tools. Drugs are health. They are a public good and a natural human right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system.
Mixing them up like the USA system does is a category error.
Want to see real innovation? See for example the home made radio receivers people made in WWII, that fit in a small tin can, or visit an Amish settlement (http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/). Not to mention hacker/maker spaces and fablabs, which all work on open source principles and sustain themselves through donations or member fees.
That said, there's also application. Curiosity may lead to someone discovering a particular complex chemical, but curiosity won't turn it into a cheaply produced pill available at your corner pharmacy.
Hobbyists tinkering in a hanger did not create modern airlines - giant corporations like Boeing managed the capital required to make it happen.
Hobbyists tinkering in a garage are not going to be able to carry out years of dedicated research followed by years of study followed by years of clinical trials.
When they do get corrupt what do we do, since it's the same guys with the guns and court houses?
There are some very messed-up public works, but most of the time it works pretty well.
FWIW unlike 90% of this thread, this suggestion doesn't sound insane to me. We could look at the number of people with a disease, and the QALY swing caused by the treatment, and then pay the team which designed the drug for the patent for (expected number of treatments) * (expected gains in QALYs).
This would allow the drugs to be any price the government liked once created, but still convince financially motivated smart people to work in medicine. Bonus points if the solution included ever-rising-prices for long untreated diseases (kind of like an auction).
Pharma research does not have network effects
Imagine if in the early 90s we had stiffed cellular phone technology because "only the rich have access to it" or general internet/network technology because "only banks and giant corporations have access to it."
Thanks to capitalism, the technology is now so permeates all sectors of society that some have argued that access it that internet access and smart phones are a human right that should be socialized by the government.
Tax would pay their grants, tax would fund the trials, and tax would fund the production and packaging.
Do roads and public water sanitation materialize out of thin air?
Researching drugs or developing IT applications are not basic commodities.
Ahh, hmm, I'm wanting to ask if you know anyone working on drugs without sounding rude.
In my experience they are like doctors. Lilly researchers do enjoy the thought of helping people, but mostly in the abstract. In the concrete they like complaining about people and regulation :) they also very much like living the "good life".
I'm not saying we'd lose all drug researchers if it were nationalized, but I do think we'd lose a lot of them -- at the end of the day, most people do want money, and end up being motivated to pursue careers which are financially rewarded. A full time doctors without borders just wouldn't work IMO.
As to the claim that drugs come from universities... You can take an interesting research finding and turn it into a potential drug... but there's a tremendous amount of work remaining, which isn't particularly interesting / researchy, and still requires someone very smart to do it. Essentially the more financially motivated people in academia are the ones who volunteer for what is often a fool's errand (a failed drug). I think the "new drugs come from universities" position is also true in the sense that "biologists get degrees from university" -- but as others pointed out, that sense is true for all industries.
Only a sick (person/group/society/culture) would link them like this. Drugs are, in fact, dis-ease. They are the opposite of health.
Real food, real exercise, real work and real sleep. That's health. Drugs are at best dis-ease and at worst tools of predation and exploitation.
You're making my point for me.
No they aren't. Saying that is equivalent to saying that you would be justified in putting a gun to a chemist's head and forcing him to make a drug for you even if he didn't want to. But there's no reason to say that your "right" to a drug trumps his right to be free from threat of violence and denial of agency.
What you're talking about is more of an entitlement than a right.
Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system.
Why exactly should I feel like society owes me health care that I can't pay for? Especially when the model involves a scenario where my getting health-care possibly involves using violence, or threat of violence, to make somebody else provide that care? How is that ethical?
Even from a selfish perspective, public health is so crammed with positive externalities it pays for itself.
Nobody's going to force chemists to make drugs. Instead the way tax works is that you force everyone to pay a fraction of their productivity into a fund that gets spent paying the chemist to make drugs, the pharmacist to deliver them, etc. It's very similar to insurance except that it doesn't have the perverse motivation to deny you care, and it's compulsory because a civilized society values people not writhing in pain and dying from uncured curable disease more highly than losing a fraction of their time working for the state to prevent it.
For 20+ years, they've been moving more and more of their R&D and manufacturing overseas to save on labor costs. They then get Congress to approve of anti-competitive laws that disallow citizens from importing cheaper drugs from overseas for both use and resale. Big Pharma should have to compete on the same level as labor.