• ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      And that’s why we have barriers to entry stifling competition lobbied for by the big players in said industry? Insulin is only the price it is because the government enforces the patent that says pfizer is allowed to have a monopoly on it, if other people were able to produce and sell affordable generics pfizer would have to drop their price or go out of business, but if you try the government comes, kidnaps you, and if you resist kidnapping, kills you.

      Try to sell a product that the government decides you owe them money for: Weed? Jail. Moonshine? Jail. Weed in a legal state but didn’t break off the 50% protection money to the government? Jail. Unlicensed insulin? Jail. Drawing of a mouse too close to a famous one? Jail.

      The US has what is called crony capitalism, not free market capitalism. Free market capitalism economy is what the Agorists like SEKIII want (but they refuse to call capitalism arguing that “real capitalism” is crony capitalism and “free market economies” are not “capitalist” at all and is actually leftist in nature.)

      • bloodfart
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        1 year ago

        Crony capitalism is just capitalism. The agorist free market capitalism is just starting the whole thing over under the mistaken belief that it’ll end up different.

          • bloodfart
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            1 year ago

            I know you’re trying to use sarcasm, but communist countries don’t generally repeat the mistakes of other communist countries. They famously at least try to share knowledge openly with each other.

              • bloodfart
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                1 year ago

                what are you talking about? I can’t read cyrillic, what’s that last word?

                • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  If “they don’t repeat old mistakes” (like communist china not starving Ukranians, for instance), millions of people still die (like communist china killing all the sparrows, for instance), but at least the despots killed all those people in a different way! The last bit is the usual refutation from lemmygradniks, that all of that never happened, as it was just western propaganda, and then I threw in the russian word for commrade for extra sarcasm.

                  You really gotta get out more if you haven’t had those arguments with those crazy bastards, though they are on “your team” (at least the one you’re defending, communism) so I’d imagine you don’t argue with them often as it were.

                  • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
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                    1 year ago

                    The Ukranian Holodomor was the direct result of Stalin’s (and/or his people) actions. When your country has dictatorship, the economic system is kind of doesn’t matter, everything happens not because of the economic system but because of the will of the dictator.
                    The main pillar of both socialism and communism is workers collectively owning the means of production, this is directly contradicts to the autocracy that was USSR.
                    If you think that China had famine because of communism, you should think that North Korea has famines because of democracy, because they call themselves Democratic Republic.

                  • bloodfart
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                    1 year ago

                    The prc and ussr both had famines, yeah. One of the greatest tragedies of the sino soviet split is the lack of cooperation during the chinese one.

                    I don’t know what people told you, but there absolutely was a ton of misinformation about the soviet famine that got revealed once 1992 rolled around and the archives opened up. Turned out they had some terrible fuckups and bad luck but there wasn’t any deliberate starvation.

                    Communists argue about this stuff all the time, we just recognize people trying to understand conflicting information versus people trying to have a big fight or a debate. Part of the reason you get so much flak is because someone interested in learning how to understand conflicting information will gladly read a two hundred page analysis of a four hundred page historical text and discuss it openly while a person looking for a fight will call names and act like bringing up the famines is some gotcha that unmasks the internet communist for the scooby doo villian they are.

      • yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Lol, what utter bullshit.

        Pfizer doesn’t have a monopoly on insulin, it’s primarily produced by Eli Lilly (who were the first), Novo Nordisk and Sanofi.

        „The government“ also doesn’t „enforce“ patents, companies have found a way to make small changes to drugs to keep them perpetually patented. The recent price drops of insulin in the US are the *result of government intervention *.

        Please do get lost with you Alex Jones r/conspiracy drivel, thx.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          You mean the cheap kind you can get at walmart, or the fast acting stuff everyone complains about being expensive? I mean, I don’t think anyone is claiming that the cheap atuff is too expensive, they’re always talking about the fast acting kind or so they say, so that’s what I’m talking about too, since I was directly referencing people complaining about expensive insulin, you see.

          Nonetheless, though I may not be super up on which megacorporation holds patents for which drug, and in essence they’re all exactly the same to me since they operate the same way in terms of patents, the fact that corporation “A” holds the patent instead of corporation “B” is a nonfactor, just replace the name in your head. Hit f12 and edit it if you really lack the imagination to just insert the correct corporation and keep reading.

          The government doesn’t enforce patents, eh? Ok, so what specifically happens if you start selling shit patented by “a corporation of your choosing?” Pinkertons? Well maybe if we’re talking about 1800s Wells Fargo, or current WOTC, but that is rare. No unless I’m mistaken it’s usually “court” which unless I’m mistaken is part of “the judicial branch” of “our government.”

          Face it, the government and corporations being in bed is not only “a bad thing” but is just as much a fault of “the government” as “the corporations.” Hating one is only hating half the problem.

      • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        And that’s why we have barriers to entry stifling competition lobbied for by the big players in said industry?

        Yes. That’s how capitalism operates. There is nothing in capitalist system that prevents monopolies from happening, in fact they kind of encouraged. And patent system is as capitalist as it gets. It was born as an answer to a question “how do we collectively insure that companies can own everything they want to own”, and the government exists to enforce the rules that rich people and companies want to have (getting back to lobbying). If you get rid of the government, you will get cyberpunk corporate wars, and then when people will get tired of that, they will come up with the same government-like structure.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          That’s how crony capitalism works, free market capitalism is free from such bounds by definition. Monopolies could also form without the government but they clearly form with the help of those government regulations allowing them to do so as well, see: basically the entire medical industry. We have the worst of both worlds, tbh either socialized healthcare or an end to the racketeering scheme we call the medical industry by freeing the market (things like removing drug patents to make the market competitive and lowering price, etc) would he better than this crony capitalist bullshit we have now. Patents are again antithetical to free market capitalism, that is literally part of what is referenced by “free” in the term. Proponents of free market capitalism ignore patent and IP laws entirely or think they should be limited to a short period (typically 15-20y with no renewal depends on who you talk to).

      • Tvkan@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        According to https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking for instance, there are 24 countries in the world with freer economy than USA.

        The right wing, climate change denying, Heritage Foundation is not a reliable source. That’s nowhere near an unbiased analysis, but an opinion piece. No one can seriously believe the US to be less “free market” than like half of western Europe.

        That’s like asking the North Korean government to create an index of democracy.