Antibiotics show free market failure

[Clinton Huxley]

Basically, don't get scratched, don't get cut. Wash your hands. Good luck ....

[Hermit]

The antibiotics that are really highly overused, such as the ones put in animal feed, are long off patent. If anything, the drug companies have an incentive to extract the maximum price while the drug remains on patent, which limits usage.

That would constitute two more free market failures. The high prices cause less well off people who are not insured or not covered by tax-payer funded health schemes to not go the full course of antibiotic treatment. That encourages slightly mutated bacteria to survive and develop. The routine feeding of livestock with cheap antibiotics creates a massive pool of opportunity for bacterial mutation.

[Jason]

Maybe it's the patent laws that work against antibiotics.

You get a limited patent time to exploit a drug, before other manufacturers can make it licence-free.
So all the incentives are to make the maximum money, while you can, and sell it to anyone and everyone, with no regard to how they use it, or future resistance building up.

The antibiotics that are really highly overused, such as the ones put in animal feed, are long off patent. If anything, the drug companies have an incentive to extract the maximum price while the drug remains on patent, which limits usage.

They also have incentive to ensure effectiveness falls off on off-patent antibiotics so they can make a mint on newly patented ones. Overuse is in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies.

[Warren Dew]

The antibiotics that are really highly overused, such as the ones put in animal feed, are long off patent. If anything, the drug companies have an incentive to extract the maximum price while the drug remains on patent, which limits usage.

That would constitute two more free market failures. The high prices cause less well off people who are not insured or not covered by tax-payer funded health schemes to not go the full course of antibiotic treatment. That encourages slightly mutated bacteria to survive and develop. The routine feeding of livestock with cheap antibiotics creates a massive pool of opportunity for bacterial mutation.

Maybe. Or maybe they are failures of the regulatory system - the distortions to the free market caused by patent law and the drug approval system, both of which act to decrease competition and thus increase price.

[Hermit]

The antibiotics that are really highly overused, such as the ones put in animal feed, are long off patent. If anything, the drug companies have an incentive to extract the maximum price while the drug remains on patent, which limits usage.

That would constitute two more free market failures. The high prices cause less well off people who are not insured or not covered by tax-payer funded health schemes to not go the full course of antibiotic treatment. That encourages slightly mutated bacteria to survive and develop. The routine feeding of livestock with cheap antibiotics creates a massive pool of opportunity for bacterial mutation.

Maybe. Or maybe they are failures of the regulatory system - the distortions to the free market caused by patent law and the drug approval system, both of which act to decrease competition and thus increase price.

You think patents have no place in an ideology based on private property?

As for regulations, I am pretty sure they could be better than they are, but the free markets have brought them upon themselves. After the Thalidomide disaster in particular, they cannot be trusted to practice due diligence, so they have it thrust upon them.

[Warren Dew]

The antibiotics that are really highly overused, such as the ones put in animal feed, are long off patent. If anything, the drug companies have an incentive to extract the maximum price while the drug remains on patent, which limits usage.

That would constitute two more free market failures. The high prices cause less well off people who are not insured or not covered by tax-payer funded health schemes to not go the full course of antibiotic treatment. That encourages slightly mutated bacteria to survive and develop. The routine feeding of livestock with cheap antibiotics creates a massive pool of opportunity for bacterial mutation.

Maybe. Or maybe they are failures of the regulatory system - the distortions to the free market caused by patent law and the drug approval system, both of which act to decrease competition and thus increase price.

You think patents have no place in an ideology based on private property?

As for regulations, I am pretty sure they could be better than they are, but the free markets have brought them upon themselves. After the Thalidomide disaster in particular, they cannot be trusted to practice due diligence, so they have it thrust upon them.

I'm not thrilled with current patent law - in areas outside of drug research, the system often acts to inhibit innovation rather than facilitate it - but some form of protection of innovation is likely good. Whether good or bad, though, you can't argue that it's part of the free market - it's still a form of regulatory constraint, not part of market freedom.

The same is true for the FDA drug approval process. It had the beneficial effect of preventing the European thalidomide problems from occurring in the U.S., but at the cost of things like higher drug prices due to suppression of competition. The higher prices are ultimately the cost of having the drugs be safer, a tradeoff that's presently determined by regulation, not the free market.

[MrJonno]

I'm not thrilled with current patent law - in areas outside of drug research

Problem in the 21st century the only thing worth a damn these days at least in the 1st world are ideas, no patents means little private property and no economy

[Warren Dew]

Copyright law may cover many of the important cases. Patent law makes sense for inventions that cost a billion dollars to get to market, like some drugs, but for software "inventions" that any half decent programmer can come up with in two seconds, not so much.

[MrJonno]

I would presume to get a decent business application to market cost 10s of millions, a computer game a 100 million +, not quite up to drugs levels but hardly insignificant

I have found it a bit strange that some libertarians I've spoken to are all up on property laws until it involves anything they can steal easily ie software/music

[Seth]

Seth wrote:

Depends on which humans you're talking about...those with weak immune systems who succumb to such infections or the genetically superior who do not.

The mask slips, and we see the horrible creature underneath...

What what? You're saying that evolution is morally incorrect?

Hm. How is that Atheistically rational?

[Seth]

Stontium Dog wrote:

And once the effectiveness of the old antibiotics reaches a sufficiently low level, there will surely be a ready market for new, more effective ones.

Trouble is, we need them right now. The current level of corporate research indicates new ones will not be coming on stream any time soon, so, it is a market failure.

Are you working on the principle that there is some magic feature of free markets which means they are always the optimum method to solve any problem?

Nobody has ever claimed that free markets are "always" the optimum method "to solve any problem." Even suggesting that is idiocy.

Free markets are merely the optimal economic model for society.

I'm the first to concede that there are many situations where a free market leads to optimum situations. Currently, producing new antibiotics is not such a situation.

This falsely presumes that producing new antibiotics is a market necessity. If it were a necessity, government would not place so many regulatory obstacles in the way of marketing new antibiotics. So clearly there is insufficient market demand for the product at the price at which it can be profitably produced, and the free market is working just fine.

Free markets aren't social welfare organizations, you see.

[MrJonno]

Free markets aren't social welfare organizations, you see.

Which is their fundamental flaw, the only reason free markets are tolerated is due to tax revenues to pay for social welfare. If they fail to provide then goodbye free market

[Seth]

Free markets aren't social welfare organizations, you see.

Which is their fundamental flaw, the only reason free markets are tolerated is due to tax revenues to pay for social welfare. If they fail to provide then goodbye free market

It's not a flaw, it's a feature. Free markets fail when Marxist dimwits try to manipulate them as tools of social policy. As you note, only free markets can generate wealth sufficient to fund necessary social welfare programs. Kill the goose that lays the golden egg so you can feed one Marxist useful idiot and all the other useful idiots starve to death.

Since I know you cannot comprehend the logic inherent in that statement of truth, I'll simplify it for the useful idiots reading this.

Think of American corporations as the goose, without which there is no golden egg produced, and which once slaughtered to feed the indolent and useless for one day out of a misguided sense of solidarity and Matrxist equality of misery cannot then generate ongoing taxable wealth which might feed the seething proletarian dependent class in perpetuity.

[MrJonno]

Think of American corporations as the goose, without which there is no golden egg produced, and which once slaughtered to feed the indolent and useless for one day out of a misguided sense of solidarity and Matrxist equality of misery cannot then generate ongoing taxable wealth which might feed the seething proletarian dependent class in perpetuity.

But again its the golden egg that is important not the corporation, if the corporations employ people at a wage level that is acceptable to society, if they pay taxes, if they generally don't piss off society too much society permits them and if they make a profit well good for them.

Running a business is a privilege that society grants not a right

[JimC]

Free markets aren't social welfare organizations, you see.

Which is their fundamental flaw, the only reason free markets are tolerated is due to tax revenues to pay for social welfare. If they fail to provide then goodbye free market

The current structure of global corporations has many flaws, including the ability to minimise the tax they pay to an unacceptable degree and to have undue influence on governments. However, that doesn't change the fact that the operations of a free market produce both efficiency and innovation far in excess of any centrally planned economy. The point of the OP wasn't to denigrate the concept of a free market, but simply to assert that current antibiotic development is a case where a free market is not doing the required job.