Lew Rockwell has a fantastic article on Mises.org today, The Google Pharm Case. Rockwell observes that the pharmaceutical industry is a cartel, not a free market:
The only way to maintain a cartel is through government regulations, and this is what the pharmacy industry has long relied upon, much to the detriment of consumer well-being. The attempt to crack down on free-market advertising of prescription drugs is all about protecting an industry from competition, and has nothing at all to do with protecting the consumer.
He also makes the extremely insightful point that patents, and the FDA process, in inflating the price of prescription drugs and restricting access to them, are a major cause of much email spam, such as the barrage of ads for V**gra and so on (the name of which I make to avoid spam filters!):
It is not a coincidence that so much Internet spam comes from companies that purport to be selling drugs that people do not necessarily want to get from their doctor. There are privacy concerns. There’s also a perfectly normal desire to avoid embarrassment. But the government will have none of it: you must confess to a doctor; you must look the drugstore clerk in the eye.
People commonly blame the markets for all this spam, but they really should have been fingering the government for having created the black and grey markets for these drugs in the first place! This is what creates the incentives to dump trillions of unsolicited emails on the world. The spammers knew that their product was valued, but without normal markets they resorted to globalized promotions.
In fact, this is why Congress made spam illegal. The antispam law had absolutely nothing to do with keeping your inbox clean. It was all about protecting the medical monopoly against competition.
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