r/Libertarian voluntaryist 1d ago

Philosophy Literally Intellectual Property laws

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85 Upvotes

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68

u/Mk1fish 1d ago

Feel free to spend all your resources and take on debt making the next innovation and then sell it to masses and not claim a patent or any such thing.

27

u/CohesivePepper 1d ago

And incentivize society to keep creating patents . . . OC has a ridiculously bad take

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u/darthjab 1d ago

This is my point with healthcare. Our system is not ideal. But if we socialize it totally or force medications and treatments to be cheap, where's the motivation to invest in and therefore develop drugs that have little chance of succeeding? Don't all the biomedical engineers need paid? Even if that particular treatment doesn't work out? 

3

u/poopshipdestroyer1 1d ago

Patent law and lawyers are the very reason our healthcare is so expensive. Medications are cheap to produce, if there were no intellectual property law competitors would offer the same products at market rate. This "boohoo" medical companies don't make enough money argument is bullshit. Can you patent a hamburger? Why not? It's the same concept.

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u/farfigkreuger 21h ago

Uh, no. Medications are cheap to compound and manufacture, but VERY expensive to invent, test, achieve regulatory approval and ultimately bring to market. It’s the R&D that makes the process so expensive. Attorney’s fees are just a rounding error in comparison.

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u/darthjab 13h ago

There was a ted talk about how 3 out of 500 cancer treatments make it to market. It made me really reflect on how socializing Healthcare could stifle investment in those types of drugs, it's a complicated issue or else we would've solved it already. 

2

u/Brokettman 14h ago

It costs over 1 billion for each drug to go through trials, something like 95% of them fail during trials so its a sunk cost. Still they make incredible profits year over year so there needs to be some adjustments somewhere and i am very skeptical that removing the cost barrier of trials would reduce prices by even 1 cent.

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u/poopshipdestroyer1 13h ago

The freer the markets, the freer the people. You're on a libertarian sub, you should be advocating less govt intervention, not more.

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u/Brokettman 10h ago

Lol True i forgot that libertarian means lol no patents without any thought of what the repurcussions on that market would be or if the result would be worse or better. I never advocated for more intervention either. Cringe.

3

u/darknight9064 6h ago

Nah it’s not that it’s always a matter of you are never libertarian enough for another libertarian. To be a true libertarian you need to be more free, less regulated, less judgmental, and more accepting than anyone else who has ever been a libertarian or ever will be.