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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the crime which was "serious" enough to motivate law enforcement was theft of capital, NOT drug price gouging. It had nothing to do with Daraprim. Of course, Mr. Shkreli's recent popularity in the headlines may have greased the wheels of this investigation a bit.

Update: As has been pointed out, this comes as no surprise since this kind of price gouging is perfectly legal.

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As it stands, there's no law against price gouging. As morally questionable as his pricing is, there's nothing illegal about it. "Being a dick" isn't a criminal offense. Yet.

Hopefully it never is. One person's dick may have another person's respect. umm... figuratively.

The galling thing about the whole drug price gouging story is that it was perfectly legal. That said, I'm not sure we can speak with confidence about law enforcement's motivations.

Price gouging might be bad but the alternative is worse. If you allow the market to set the price of a limited resource, that resource will be allocated to those who truly need it. If you set the price so that "everyone" can afford the resource, you create a shortage and those who truly need the resource might or might not get it depending on how lucky/early they got in line.

Really, you think that $13 per pill was a worse situation? That there was an epidemic of people out there paying $13 a pill for antiprotozoal medications who don't truly need them?

Isn't that obvious? The $13 price point set up the situation for a corporate raider to take over and drastically change the price. If the price point had been higher, the company would have been more valuable and less susceptible to a takeover.

Unintended consequences are a bitch.

Price gouging may be perfectly legal in the drug price context, but it gives cause to re-examine a whole range of implicit assumptions re: how capitalism is allowed (encouraged?) to operate vs how well it delivers benefits to society.

Agree with your point, though patent protection for drugs is a government provided benefit and has little to do with capitalism. The government (us) provides this benefit and we (the people) usually don't get enough in return.

Most of the drugs he was gouging for were already out of patent, but they were low volume and it takes a while to bring a generic to market. During this time, he makes a lot of money.

This is more of a market failure.

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