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Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

    Sick person: please moderately profitable pharma company, help me.
    moderately profitable pharma company: Sure, for $50

    Sick person: please insanely profitable pharma company post shrekli, help me.
    insanely profitable pharma company post shrekli: Sure, for $5000

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Exactly. Same thing. Both voluntary business transactions subject to the same rules as any other voluntarily exchange. No one is obligated to sell any particular good or service for any particular price.

I know a lot of people see this differently but I don't think they have an ethical leg to stand on. When it gets down to it they have no particular rule for fair pricing other than "that feels too high to me."

There are multiple cases where someone can be obligated to sell for a particular price. Eminent domain is the most obvious example but Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Licensing [1] is more applicable. Patent laws creates a temporary monopoly. This monopoly needs to be regulated to prevent abuse. Avoiding extortionist pricing of patented medications seems like a reasonable area for regulation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...

But the patent on daraprim expired decades ago. It was a single source drug because there wasn’t enough money in the market for another manufacturer to make a competing alternative. There are something like 8,000 prescriptions a year.

In which case that sounds like market failure to me, which is another excellent time for regulation. We do this all the time with other "natural monopolies".

> No one is obligated to sell any particular good or service for any particular price.

Well, nobody was forcing him to sell goods or services for any particular price. He set the price and now he has to face the consequences.

"Nobody will force you to sell your goods for a particular price, but if you pick the wrong price, there will be consequences."

Do you have some special definition of "force" that you are using which doesn't involve you deciding for someone else which course of action they will take and then making them take it at risk of "consequences"?

And yet, Harry, if you had bothered to read the link in my comment, you'd discover that there are laws against price gouging.

Fair pricing can be tricky to determine. However, in Shkreli's case, his entire strategy was to take drugs where a fair price had already been determined by the market and then take advantage of supply constraints to raise the price drastically, by 20-50x.

If you really can't tell the ethical difference between his behavior and normal business, I think you aren't trying hard enough.

And yet, William, if you had bothered to read the link in your comment, you'd discover in the "Opposition to laws against price gouging" section that there are numerous people who think these laws are bad and that they make some pretty good points.

In the case of Shkreli and Daraprim the price change induced Imprimis to bring a new drug online which added strength and diversity to the marketplace which is what we expect to happen in a well functioning marketplace when parties work to maximize their own self interest.

There's a big difference between "some pretty good points" and "don't have an ethical leg to stand on". If you're now acknowledging that there is in fact a reasonable case for anti-gouging, that's a step forward. Thanks.

Sure, one of Shkreli's attempts to gouge was partially thwarted by a competitor. Were all of them? Is there any guarantee that all future gouging attempts would be equally pointless? Of course not. Because, your free-market fundamentalism aside, markets fail all the time. That's why to get well-functioning marketplaces we outlaw a great variety of market-harming behaviors. Including things like price gouging for things people need to survive.

Markets are not ends in themselves. They exist, with extensive societal support, because they're a useful mechanism to provide a reasonable distribution of goods and services to humans in those societies. When parasitic actors use those mechanisms to cause societal harm, it's entirely reasonable to tinker with the mechanism.

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