this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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In a "true free market" the instructions would be hoarded by the company that came up with them and the insulin would be sold for as much as humanly possible. The only countries that don't suffer from this issue are the ones where the government is handling Healthcare and dictates what it's willing to pay for medicine.
You anti government regulation types sure as fuck don't seem to understand how we got to having all these regulations. Hint it was companies abusing their customers and employees to the point where tens of thousands of people were dying, for each regulation.
Yes, people confuse "free" (unregulated) with "competetive market" all the time.
If "free" means "no barriers to market entry or exit and even distribution of market power" then they're similar.
But if free means "no regulation" then it'll just be a race to accumulate the most market power (and political and military force) and use that to suppress competition. Features like slavey and indentured debtors has commonly occurred in 'free' (unregulated) markets, but it is just about the complete opposite of 'no barriers and even market power'.
'Free' is a not a great word in this context.
Is how to manufacture insulin a trade secret? Is that why there’s no black market for it?
There literally is a black market for it. My city, Las Vegas is littered with handmade signs and flyers of saying they buy and sell insulin and diabetic supplies.
Insulin is a bad example because its manufacturing methods are relatively old, but the entire point of patents is to avoid trade secrets. The idea is that inventors share how they do something exactly, and their invention gets legally protected for a certain amount of time before it becomes available for everyone. The problem is capitalism is capitalism, and so it incentivizes abuse, so corporations will flood the system with patents that have as little detail as legally allowed and try to apply them in the broadest way possible. The pharmaceutical industry in particular also seems to have a problem with companies patenting minor tweaks on their products when the previous patent is about to expire to keep a monopoly, and then dialing up the propaganda against their previous product up to 11.