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Comment by AC__ | Hacker News Reader

The pharmaceutical industry is just as corrupt as the financial sector. It seems capitalists will be capitalists. A lot of well intentioned companies seem to go this way too. Share holders demand profitable growth, sociopathic execs are brought in and I think the results speak for themselves.

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Having worked in several large corporate environments for most of my lift, sociopaths are the highest achievers of the bunch when it comes to working their way up the corporate ladder.

It would be more accurate to say that people will be people. Greed is not limited to capitalists. Greed, lust for money, and the need for power are observable across all political, social, and governmental systems.

Speak for yourself.

Edit: Here's a nice link. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/journals/freed...

Abuse of power comes as no surprise.

No, but capitalists follow the incentives. The surprising thing is that, although nobody likes this, there isn't yet some tax or something to make selfish capitalists avoid doing it.

A change to intellectual property laws could also fix the problem. The government could allow others to sell the drug but give a percentage of their revenue to the rights holder.

And that is called... a royalty! What the patent system was supposed to be for, in fact.

The drug isn't patented anymore. Apparently the issue is that you need to conduct trials if you want to have permission to make a copy of the drug and to do so you need a supply to compare your new copy with and that was hard to purchase.

I'm surprised about the drug trial bit. I thought generics didn't need to have new trials .. they just need to have the exact same formulation. The oddness is that they need to "reverse engineer" the formulation themselves. The pill's color, shape and markings couldn't be copied though.

Can anyone knowledgeable on this critique what I wrote? I got my info during a tour of a generic drug manufacturer's plant a looooong time ago.

I believe the generic maker must show bioequivalency to make sure the thing they are making works the same as the thing the other manufacturer was making. There's probably numerous ways that making a complicated medicine can be screwed up.

But capital is also political power. The capitalists interact with the system that structures their markets, their property rights, their contract law, their regulations, their hierarchies etc. The system itself is a strange loop which ultimately leads to contradictions. A capitalist acting in their rational self interest modifies the system in order to improve it for their own ends. This inevitably means deviations from the neoclassical ideal.

If there's one useful idea from the marxists, it's that the dominant modes of economic activity of the day determine the structures of our institutions, not the other way around. It may not be completely true, but the way capital dominates all other forms of power in the world is fundamentally troublesome. Capitalism eats itself, and every crisis requires a lot of bloodshed and suffering from the unpropertied in order to keep the system going forward.

People and other animals follow incentives.

What does this have to do with capitalists? Anyone hungry for money/power/wealth/success will do what they do bounded usually by their morals/ethics and the law.

Since we can't just "fix" morals/ethics - what remains is the legal system and regulation.

What's unfortunate is that money can also change the legal system for the worse and remove these protections over time or keep them from ever being put in place. Not sure of solution for that.

Capitalists hiding behind patent laws enforced by the states, which isn't really the purest form of capitalism. And usually, there is no such thing as a well intentioned company, once they reach a certain size they become profit maximizers before anything else.

That is what a true business is always - regardless of size.

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