Category Archives: Regulation

EpiPen Protest Should Be Directed @ FDA & Patent Protectionism

Business, Capitalism, Free Markets, Government, Intellectual Property Rights, Regulation

And it’s the people’s fault, too.

Most Americans have zero understanding of free-market capitalism, and are interested only in government “protections,” namely the regulation of production, in the belief that government interference can reduce costs and get Big Bad Business to behave.

If only Americans, brainwashed in the nation’s government-controlled schools, understood the less intuitive truth and aimed the arrows in their quiver at Big Bad Government, the real bad actors.

In the case of the “EpiPen sticker shock,” bureaucrats at the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration)—beholden to keeping the bureaucracy alive, not getting innovation to market—practically gum-up the process whereby other makers of the product can enter the allergy antidote market and trigger competitive forces.

Then there are the patent grants of government privilege. By granting EpiPen makers patents for posterity—yes, this is government’s fault—these lengthy grants of patent privileges prohibit manufactures of generic drugs from entering the market to make comparable products.

Via Slate Star Codex:

… when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?

The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.

If a chair company decided to charge $300 for their chairs, somebody else would set up a woodshop, sell their chairs for $250, and make a killing – and so on until chairs cost normal-chair-prices again. When Mylan decided to sell EpiPens for $300, in any normal system somebody would have made their own EpiPens and sold them for less. It wouldn’t have been hard. Its active ingredient, epinephrine, is off-patent, was being synthesized as early as 1906, and costs about ten cents per EpiPen-load. …

Golden oldies:

* “Should Policymakers Trust The Free Market To Meet Urgent Demand For Prescription Drugs?”
* “Patent Wrongs”

To further explore the topic from a libertarian propertarian perspective, click the “Intellectual Property Rights” search category.

UPDATED (6/9): What Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore Are Hiding About Bush & Housing Bubble

Bush, Hillary Clinton, Private Property, Regulation, Republicans

George W. Bush did his share to bring about the housing bubble, and Stephen Moore, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, knows it. Moore wrote a book he’d like us to forget: “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer” (2004). “Bullish” got one and a half stars on Amazon and it had almost no takers. Moore and Larry Kudlow have no business obfuscating about Number 43’s enthusiasm for giving credit to those who were not creditworthy.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals. “No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

The two’s article, “Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?”, offers only a veiled allusion to the shared Clinton-Bush blame for the housing bubble:

There was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story. And the Fannie/Freddie chapter is still not solved. It now includes profit-sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.

But not a word about Bush II. And no mea culpa from Moore for his zeal for Bush’s phony “ownership society.”

UPDATE (6/9/016):

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TRUMP @ 1238 Says ‘Market Forces Are Beautiful’ & Other Lovely Things

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Economy, Elections, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Republicans

Twenty eight minutes and 27 seconds into this YouTube of his press conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, Donald Trump emerged to take questions: He has reached and surpassed the 1237 delegate threshold. Behind him stand “the folks, delegates, who got him over the top.”

Trump sounded masterful—and mirthful. If only he put on this hat all the time:

* About Obama badmouthing Trump at the G-7 summit: “It’s good, although Obama used a business term, rattled, and he known nothing about business. It’s good that world leaders are “rattled” by him, Trump. As for Obama’s assessment of his, Trump’s, ignorance, basically who’s he to talk? “Obama has done a horrible job. He’s got to say something. Every time he has a news conference he talks about Trump. Obama has not done a good job; we’re divided, we have tremendous difficulties.”
* VP: We are not going to pander and get a woman or minority just for show. We’ll have women involved, as we do now, but “we’re looking for absolute competence.”
* Hillary: No I don’t want her out of the race.


I want to have her in the race. The report is devastating. She’s skirting on the edge. This is her history of bad judgement. I love watching Hillary fight. She can’t close the deal.
* Message to Suzanna Martinez. Nothing much.
* The HuffingtonPost; I don’t read it. Do they cover politics?
* Muslim ban: We’ll look at the solutions. (As of this moment, the ban, it would seem, stands.)
* I’d love to debate Bernie Sanders … for charity. The problem with debating Sanders is that he is going to lose the nomination, as the system is rigged.
* Debating process: We’re not debaters, we businessmen; we put people to work. We businessmen don’t talk, we do.
* Regulating energy: The Federal government should get out of the way. They’ve put the coalmines out of business—which is what Hillary has promised. Energy independence and exporting energy is what Trump promises. Coal can be restored, if regulations are reduced. All I can, says Trump, is free-up coal and let the market work. Market forces are a beautiful thing.
* Give the people of the US a piece of the profits from the Keystone Pipeline and other such projects.
* Lower taxes are key to economic vitality. America is over-regulated. Regulation is even more of a problem than taxes, which will go down.
* About Elizabeth Warren aka …


* On first-day duties: Trump will be “unwinding various executive orders,” not least the ones affecting the porous border on the country’s Southwest.
* Intends to make use of the Republican campaign-infrastructure machine.
* “I won’t forget Indiana.”
* Fracking and our feathered friends: Bernie will ban it; Hillary will ban it. We’re going to open it up. Solar is expensive. It has a 30-year payback. And it’s killing all the eagles in California, one of the most beautiful and treasured of our birds.
* Blessed be the Farmers.
* Accursed is the New York Times, which doesn’t need Donald’s help in discrediting itself.

So what if Trump forgot to bless the cheese-makers:

If RNC Rules Are So True To Voters, Why Keep Tweaking Them Against Popular Will?

Natural Law, Politics, Regulation, Republicans

Fox Business has just reported that the Republican National Committee has decided against “tweaking” their arbitrary rules, as is their wont when they don’t get their candidate. The atmosphere is too politically combustive. In other words, The Party knows The People are hip to the kind of thing the RNC did with the Romney initiated Rule 40(b), in 2012, to make Ron Paul vanish.

Incredibly, the yarn the lyin’ media has spun is that the complaints against the Party bureaucracy are a figment of Donald Trump’s imagination. Unlike The People, these shysters can’t tell the difference between man-made rules and natural law. They seldom question The Rules.

If RNC Rules are so immutably fair, so small-r-republican, so true to the voters—why do they need constant tweaking in a direction away from popular will? And why, when a decision not to tweak them comes down, does Chairman Reince Priebus advertise the hell out of his decision not to rock the boat and usurp the voters?