$84,000 Hepatitis C Drug For $1500 by Buying It From India

I'm saying that the oligopoly imposes their will via the state. What if we as a society didn't accept the idea that a state was legitimate but was rather a criminal organization and refused to acquiesce to its authority?

 

Basically, the idea is that a claim to property is made legitimate by continuous occupancy and use, and that ownership claims on things one has no intention to occupy or use are invalid.

 

Sorry, let my midwestern ass go and buy some swedish healthcare, that makes some real ****in sense

 

I have a particular saw that I bought years ago and used for a project. I know that I haven't used it in many years since. Why would someone have a better claim to own that saw than me, even though I haven't continuously used it?

 

Well, they haven't been using it, but you have used it once, and you intend to use it again should you need it. If you bought it for the sole purpose of renting out, that would be illegitimate

 

We agree on this

I agree that Gov't "The State" has stepped way outside of its legitimate authority and is essentially a corrupt and criminal organization.

How though, does one refuse to acquiesce to its authority ? This sounds like a suicide mission.

Is there not another way ?

 

Why would it be illegitimate if I want to use it to rent out?

 

I don't know either.

But I think that if 95% of people considered the state an illegitimate, criminal organization, it would fairly quickly cease to exist.

 

Because the consequences of rent seeking are undesirable

 

Rent seeking?

 

You're arguing with people that don't believe in property ownership. At least that's what they rationalize. It's not how they exist in the world, but socialists and communists are not often accused of being logically consistent. It's one of the reasons post modernism attempts to deconstruct logic itself.

 

They do believe in property ownership. They simply think the legitimate owner is the state.

 

What is the value of the drug in Sweden? Is it differently valued than here?

 

No they actually oppose the concept of ownership. Socialism is state ownership in practise, but they rationalize it as a system to manage access to resources that everyone has equal right to.

You and I see theft and arbitrary redistribution with a good dose of unchecked greed and corruption. They see everyone getting everything they want and need. It's a straight up ostrich head in the sand strategy to deny the realities of supply and demand.

If no one owns anything, no one has incentive to improve property in ways that involve risk of pain or suffering. For every drug that costs 80k there are 20 80k drugs that failed and caused the ruin of the people attempting to produce them. Without reward there is no reason to risk. Socialism always falls apart because of this decay.

 

What I've never got from a communist is a good explanation of the disconnect between the labor theory of value and the denial of the ownership rights to the product of that labor value.

 

The price is lower. The exact exchange value and use value would be a pain in the ass to figure out and benefit nobody to know.

Communists don't have a problem with you owning **** you make with your own two hands. It's just, you know, inheriting a company some other people physically built because your dad paid them is not building ****.

 

The value of the thing is intrinsic. Price is just an attempt to measure it. The price doesn't have to be right though. So it's important to know. Does the price reflect the value of the drug in Sweden? If it doesn't, that will certainly effect access to the drug.

You just contradicted yourself. If I own a thing I have the right to give it to someone else, do I not?

 

I think it would take much less than that. 25% would be enough.

Folks need to stop voting Red and Blue... or at minimum not voting for those that do not state directly that they have respect for individual liberty and actually understand the founding principle (Individual liberty above the legitimate authority of Gov't) that they will work to get rid of SCOTUS .... who does not.

 

Value is a social function and not an intrinsic quality of goods. You're just doing commodity fetishism.

Furthermore, the last part of my post was supposed to illustrate implicitly the difference between the most reasonable form of ownership (making something with your own two hands for yourself) and the most illegitimate abuse of private property rights I could imagine (inheriting something someone else didn't even make, but rather used wage labor to extract the surplus value of the working class in order to purchase the creation of). Inheritance was just another detail I threw in to emphasize how removed one can be from something they legally own under capitalism.

 

Ahh the old value is a social construct trope. It’s absolutely false to believe that society controls value. Society does not have control of all of the properties of a commodity that contribute to its value. Society doesn’t control the electrical conductivity of gold, for example. It doesn’t control gold’s mass in relation to other elements. It doesn’t control how difficult it is to mine, or how much effort is required to refine it into a useful material. It doesn’t control how hard it is to transport. All of these intrinsic aspects of gold contribute to the way society measures its value, and they are completely out of society’s control. All society can control is the scale it uses to measure that value, but the intrinsic hierarchy of value with simply sort itself back out over the course of trade.

The idea that you can control value by controlling society is as stupid as the belief that you can tell a vegan to value the taste of prime rib more than asparagus.

Again, if I make something with my own two hands, and you believe I own that thing, I should have the right to give that thing to whomever I want. This will naturally place it in the hands of someone who did not make it, making it illegitimate ownership in your mind’s eye. That means you seek to control the thing I made with my own two hands, stealing my agency over my surplus labor value for your own purposes... And that principle is true whether I’m the owner of a major corporation, or a factor worker who works in the factory. If the factory worker owns his labor, he has the right to sell it to someone else.

 

Twist-
I don't think you see the problem correctly, but you do see the problem. This is not just that one drug, but virtually all- everyday things. Most of the time they can be bought overseas for perhaps 25% of US cost more or less. The reason for the disparity however is, in my opinion different. While there are some greed issues (like the jerk who is now in jail) one of the prime reasons is that we sue everybody that has money- and pharmaceuticals offer a rich hunting ground for tort lawyers. This in turn requires massive product liability insurance coverage, with massive costs. That cost goes right into the price of the drug, and as a cost, it gets marked up just as other costs do in establishing a retail cost.

If you buy overseas, you will not have the ability to file a lawsuit as you would here. It's a bit like buying a product without a warranty built in.

Now if you doubt this- ask yourself about two things.

You see prescription drug ads on TV in large quantity, but every one includes a long list of side effects. Those are disclaimers, inserted so that if you ever saw the ad they can say you were advised that you might have major complications from taking it, therefore you were an informed buyer accepting risk, not entitled to compensation.....
They are not just advertising the drug, they are preemptively defending against the lawsuits the fully anticipate will come.

Then, you see an equal volume of ads on TV by lawyers, telling you that if you took Dr. Good's Miracle Elixer and developed gas, you may be entitled to compensation.
When you compare the number of legal ads for prescriptions and medical issues with the total number of legal ads, you see that they dominate the legal advertising, more than all others combined.

The ads cost both sides a huge amount of money- expense for both the laywers and the pharma companies, all of which goes into the cost of pharmaceutical products along with the costs of defense, settlements and judgments. Those costs have bankrupted companies that were in fact innocent of the claims.

This flies because America believes that litigation is like a lottery with big prizes, and we hold others responsible for what happens to us before we look to ourselves. Read the warning labels on most any product, and you can see they are written with the assumption you are an idiot that won't think for yourself- and there is a reason they find that necessary.

Japan has 7 lawyers per 100,000 population.
England is strongly into litigation, with 83. They are number two in the world.
America is number one- with close to 300 lawyers per 100,000 population.

 

Society is like an explosion or a virus, controlling it is an absurd idea. But Value is a social function. You talk about the use value of commodities, but in a capitalist market economy, the existence of universal exchangability causes all goods to be valued relative to one another in terms of exchange value. Marx explains this all in fairly plain terms in the first few chapters of Capital. The capitalist market economy subjugates use value to exchange value.

If I said that you have no right to transfer ownership, I was wrong, but I don't believe I did. However, if you don't legitimize your ownership of something by actually using it, you have no right to complain if someone starts squatting on it and eventually takes it.

 

Why is it an abuse for me to give something I own to another person? I own it. I should be able to transfer it to anyone I please.

 

Value isn't a thing that exists in the real world. You can't extract something that doesn't exist.

 

No, I didn't talk about the use of value. I talked about the intrinsic properties of value. The examples I gave you were some of the intrinsic values of gold. Society did not arbitrarily decide that gold is a better conductor than glass. That is not a property that society has control over. Gold is naturally better at conducting regardless of what society thinks. This property gives gold a natural value in a hierarchy of materials that conduct.

The problem is that societies who believe as you do can and do think that they can come to the conclusion that glass is a better conductor than gold and that doing so makes that belief true. A prime example is right here in this thread. Does the medication being discussed here have a natural value in its ability to heal hep c, or is that property simply conjured by society? If so, then the problem itself could not exist. Society would simply hand someone an aspirin and agree that the aspirin will be better at curing hep c. Does that remind you at all of a certain liberal president's blue pill speech?

So you think you have the right to decide how someone uses their own property?

Value exists in the real world because life exists in the real world. Value is the prime mover in the system we call evolution. High value is promoted, low value is eliminated. Everything alive on the planet makes value judgements in an effort to compete in the marketplace we call life. What you're thinking about is the system we use to measure value. That is quite subjective. But even subjective things exist. The future, for example. Do you believe you have the potential to do great good or great harm in the world? Do you act as if that potential exists?