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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

HN Monday: "It's an atrocity when Walmart/Amazon use their monopoly/sony power to force down supplier prices. That's unsustainable, destroys market signals, and hugely disincentivizes the production process for goods."

HN Tuesday: "It's awesome when governments use their monopsony power to force down pharmaceutical prices, that has no downsides except for lower profits for someone who didn't deserve them anyway."

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Lets note that we can see what people are paying in other countries for medicine and its less that we in the US pay.

Not to mention there has been some egregious mark ups. Drug companies are highly regulated anyway, and the "free market" is failing, which is why the market price for some generics is increasing.

Amazon: "We can see what other markets charge for these goods and it's more than we charge. And the free market's failing. So, there's nothing to worry about regarding what we're doing."

Be fair, the 'victims' in those two scenarios are vastly dissimilar. Just noticing "force down prices' is a common phrase, is disingenuous.

That's the point: the sympatheticness of the victim is completely irrelevant to the dynamic, yet seems to be enough to treat the cases as different.

Do you think that the current pharmaceutical prices in the US are the result of fair market valuation?

Not irrelevant. One is a monopolist trying to force down free market prices by fiat. The other is a free market yearning to force down prices by monopolists.

The common dynamic is that all suppliers are faced with a situation, now and going forward, that they must accept an arbitrarily low profit to continue making the good. Do you think that's only happening in one of those cases?

If not, you agree that the the identities of the victims don't break the similarity.

Yes. But in one case its anti-competitive and trying to stifle a free market. In the other its trying to foster a freer market. Thus the different views on each on HN, every day and for good reason.

That's not a difference, that's a reframing. In both cases, in practice, the sellers cannot expect to get more than some really low profit rate, and therefore don't invest in supplying any high-demand good, because the risk is higher and the profits are the same. That's bad.

Hey, it wasn't me trying to frame this as some unreasonable bias by HN.

And its laughable, reframing big pharma as some poor unprofitable wretches.

>Hey, it wasn't me trying to frame this as some unreasonable bias by HN.

I wasn't saying HNers are biased, I'm saying they're inconsistent in reasoning about these cases. (They're biased too, but that wasn't the criticism I was making here.)

>And its laughable, reframing big pharma as some poor unprofitable wretches.

It's even more laughable thinking that "whether pharmas are unprofitable wretches" is relevant to the economic effects of pseudo-price controls after the fallacy and inconsistency are explained.

Come on, pharmaceutical prices are controlled already, by the tiny number of companies in that market. Which is the opposite of a 'free market'.

Its obvious to me we're not discussing this in good faith any more. Pendantry will get us nowhere.

I’m arguing in good faith.

Difference is, one is about the populations health. Given that the US is backwards when it comes to healthcare.

Given the sea of corruption inside the US since it is an oligarchically run state where the citizens basically have no rights (if in doubt look at IP law).

That's the point: the dangers of these pseudo-price controls are irrelevant to whether the goods are health related. Do you believe that it's great when Walmart does this for aspirin, but horrible when they do it for lawnmowers?

I don't believe in the ideologies of the time, call me a doubting thomas that the human race is actually intelligent. I know too much about how human beings and corporations actually function to believe in free market mythology.

See here for if you want more acedemic take:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

There are all sorts of things wrong in reality with how capitalism actually functions. The reality is most people are too irrational and too stupid for any market to function as a "market". The videogame "market" is a perfect example. For the first 20-30 years of PC game history, we were getting good software for a fair price. Then the masses got internet and shit went sideways.

AKA people started buying software they didn't own, nor control, giving super powers to corporations to extort them and engage in all sorts of abusive practices and raise prices astronically because the internet now gave them access to people with addictive tendencies and impulse control problems 24/7 and in order to gather the worlds evolutionary unlucky regarding gambling addiction all games now have microtransactions.

I watched my hobby be destroyed, my software robbed and my os infested with dishonest code because stupid got internet. Before the internet Microsoft and game companies had no incentive undermine software ownership because it was impossible to do so.

The market for videogames today is a market for lemons, a total shit show of broken games, stolen games, etc. Because a rational game buyer would never buy a piece of software that a corporation controlled.

If you think you don’t have any rights in America, you need to get out more. I live in Africa and if you want to see the real meaning of corruption and governments that can do anything they want, move over here.

America has robbed it's own population blind for the last 200 years, all cultural works have been sucked up into an international criminal oligarchy.

Software is being stolen en mass and coded fraudulently to remove your basic rights and freedoms to own what you buy because the masses are technology illiterate.

All apps on mobile spy on you and are controlled centrally, and stupid gacha games are defrauding a tiny minority and they don't even get acopy of the game they are spending hundreds of dollars gambling for virtual characters in.

We live in a lawless world, that's reality.

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