A new drug costs $1,125 per pill and is about to break sales records

The only way I could see it working would be to have states guarantee a return to investors at some fixed rate of the cost to discover a new drug, and then buy the rights from them and release them public domain so anyone can manufacture it. But any kind of system like that, involving money taken through violent taxation and put through a bureaucratic blender of national politics, is bound for exploitation.

I doubt that in an IP free world all drug research would stop. Those with a vested interest and the charitable could and would fund their own research. One thing to consider is that modern drug research is not directed towards that which is hard or needed, but that which is profitable and wanted. That is why we see a half dozen erection drugs each year yet there has to be viral marketing campaigns for ALS research.

Drug development being guided by market forces works, government bodies tend to have a very poor record when it comes to picking winners, even worse at an international level. Global medical coordination's problems can be seen in the WHO's current problems.

Drug companies want to maximise their profit. They understand the basics of economics, the supply / demand curve, and that selling lots in poorer countries is better than selling much less at a higher price. The problem is what the earlier poster posited - that those drugs don't stay in India, or patients travel to there, at which point the economics become much riskier.

Given this site is full of people aware of how the VC process works they seem remarkably unable to apply the same logic to to drug development. Vast amounts of money are invested across many possible drugs, at each stage vicious winnowing occurs in order to receive later tranches of funding. In order to drive that winnowing there needs to be a payoff at the other end, and the payoff needs to be massive in order to justify the many other drugs looked into that don't pan out.

Whose idea is that? Who profits from its promotion?

Let's not forget that rights to ideas are inventions, not natural rights.

>It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.

>It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.

>It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the actions of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

>Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

>Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

>Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1813 http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....

Objectivism in a nutshell: It is more moral to let an innocent child die in pain than to require someone to help them.

And just like Rand, you'll fight like a demon to suppress public assistance until it's your neck on the line, and then suddenly it's Social Security and Medicare on the sly, like a homophobic preacher hooking up blowjobs in men's rooms.