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So, you would argue that directly profiting from raising the price of a necessary life-saving medication is equivalent to making charitable donations to foreign

• harryh 9y ago
  What makes it a stretch? In both scenarios there is a tradeoff between personal gain and someone else's wellbeing.
  • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    I think philosophically it has to do with being the agent that causes harm. If I never existed to give charitable donations, those people in Africa are not in a worse situation because I am not here. My existence, and my possible charity can only improve this situation. If Martin never existed, those poor people would possibly be much better off, getting a more fair price for their medication instead of paying the theoretical maximum. The difference is One Thing is pushing a ball up a hill, and the Second Thing is pushing a ball down a hill. You can say, they are the same... both have balls and hills... but you have simplified out the most important distinction. You are not obligated to make someone else's life better. But you ARE obligated not to make it worse.
    • harryh 9y ago
      If Martin never existed, those poor people would possibly be much better off Well maybe. One of the reasons that drugs get invented is because people are willing to buy the rights to manufacture and distribute them. If Shkreli, and other people like him, didn't exist the drug might not be there in the first place. But you ARE obligated not to make it worse. I can think of lots of places that people make my life worse[1] and that's fine. People raise prices on things I want to buy. I've been fired before. I've been dumped by romantic partners. I've been spurned in various personal or business dealings. I honestly think that people have a very unusual set of rules that they think should apply to medicine and health care services. They don't see these goods as typical products but as moral totems worthy of special rules. 1. This is not to say that my life is unusually bad. I think these things are pretty typical for most people.
      • jlmorton 9y ago
        > If Shkreli, and other people like him, didn't exist the drug might not be there in the first place. Right, and the law grants a limited term monopoly for novel pharmaceutical compounds to encourage innovation. In this case, the patent for Daraprim had long since expired. What Martin Shkreli did was acquire the marketing and distribution rights for Daraprim, raise the price to $75,000/month, and then withdraw all pharmacy distribution, instead relying on a direct distribution model specifically to prevent other generic drug manufacturers from obtaining the drug for comparison purposes in FDA-required bioequivalence studies. Is it legal? Sure. But he basically weaponized FDA regulations to reap a substantial profit.
        • harryh 9y ago
          It sounds to me like the FDA regulations for approving new drug manufacturers haven't been very carefully designed. Whatever ire we have should be focused on them for screwing up the regulatory environment in the first place.
        • rayiner 9y ago
          The part you’re missing is that nobody else bothered to release a competing generic for all these years because there was no money in the market. And, exactly as you’d expect the market to work, after the price hikes a company did release a generic alternative.
      • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
        Just because someone, business or person doesn't want to continue a relationship with you, doesn't mean they are doing you harm. Harm is not doing something you don't like. Harm is purposely spilling nails and glass on the public road so that you can sell people more tires. If you are trying to take the pure libertarian stance, that whatever the free market dictates is ok, I am actually fine with that. But you can't grant Patents to companies in that situation and give them special legal protection. When the public grants you a legal monopoly and special protection, whether it is through a patent, or your local power company, they are only required to act responsibly and not take advantage of that protection. I actually think the most just punishment for Shkreli's actions would have been to open source all the medications he abused. So any person or business with the tools to combine the chemicals would be allowed to do so, and sell them for whatever price they wanted.
  • ctrl-j 9y ago
    It's a question of personal responsibility: * I mug you, compared to being a bystander while you are mugged. * I hit you with my car, compared to being a passenger in the car ahead of the one that hit you. * I price-gouge you on a medication you need to live, compared to buying a laptop for my job instead of sending that money to buy food for someone half a world away. Do you really not see the difference?
    • harryh 9y ago
      So called price-gouging is more of an inaction (failing to sell you the product you want at your preferred price) than an action.
      • grzm 9y ago
        In many of the cases people think of when referring to price gouging in pharmaceuticals (such as Mylan with the EpiPen, Turing and Daraprim, or Valeant and a whole host of products) it was a positive action on behalf of the company, raising the prices by multiples. Regardless of one's feelings of whether this is legal, moral, or otherwise, calling price-gouging in these cases "more of an inaction" is a misrepresentation.
        • rayiner 9y ago
          > positive action The relevant inquiry isn't "positive action" versus "inaction" but causation. The bystander doesn't cause you to get mugged; he simply declines to prevent it. Likewise, raising the price on Daraprim doesn't cause you to get toxoplasmosis, it simply changes the terms on which the third party is willing to prevent the harm. So the proper analogy is standing by while someone gets mugged, charging him $10 to stop the mugging, and charging him $1,000 to stop the mugging. The guy who does nothing is still the worst.
          • grzm 9y ago
            Agreed. I can see that my comment was a off-point. I tend to think of price gouging as the act of raising the prices, as opposed to selling at a price others may feel is unfair, and the latter rather than the former is what's being discussed here. Cheers.