Any economist knows private property protection by government from anarchist competitors lies at the heart of capitalism.

Infantile industries must be protected lest their good brand names are snuffed out in the cradle before learning to duplicate themselves in vast quantities at low marginal cost sufficient to crowd out generic copycats.

Don't be a copycat commie. Be a capitalist commie. If you see an anarchist interfering with free trade call:

1-800-PATENTMONOPOLYTERRORIST.

Stupid liberals.

Interesting. Why not just let the universities do it as a part of regular research? I'm guessing the FDA approvement process is so slow in part because of the conflict of interest between profit making drug companies and the public on efficacy.

BTW, what are the most valuable drugs that have been created since penicillin? Valuable for health I mean.

Drug patents have diminishing value, generic equivalent drugs are required by insurance companies, as the most valuable patents have expired. Electronic patents have no doubt led to massive innovation. The search for profits tends to be a pretty decent motivator. Countries with low property rights, and low intellectual property rights, don't get to far. Agreed that some scientists are just in it for the discovery, not the money, but money focuses the research agenda in certain directions, generally where it is needed. Without that consumer driven direction, kind of hard to know what to invent. Same problem as in all of economics, lack of market information makes central planning pretty darned impossible.

In a mafia capitalist system (calling all George Orwell school writers), free trade can be nothing other than the joke it is. Look at how the first (trial balloon) fta agreement came about. American Express and Pfizer, two companies dominant in their fields, sought to keep out the competition (existing and potential) by pushing a free trade agreement onto Canada that would serve as a trojan horse for anti-competitive rules having to do, not with trade, but intellectual property and copyright etc.. Governments were well on their way to being redesigned (to protect corporations and keep the people - the rabble - in their place) by this time. Our leaders in North America were continentalists. Think tanks from the resource-rich Right were feeding their media allies propaganda about what capitalists were calling free trade (and even then, they still had to force the fta on the people when the people, thanks to Maude Barlow and Bob White), with 'leaders' supporting the effort. Brian Mulroney was totally on board the neoliberal train here. Enough capitalists appreciated the fact that the push to integrate Canada with the US, and the US with Mexico and Canada, was about harmonization - downward and more freedom (neo LIBERAL)/ rights for corporations that a fascist like Brian Mulroney (read On The Take by Stevie Cameron) could nothing other than enable American Express's and Pfizer's trojan horse gambit and here we are today.

This is covered, in very accessible language, by our Canadian Ralph Nader (we have more than one, Don't you know?), Linda McQuaig, in her book, "The Quick And The Dead."

Free trade (which did wonderful before there were free trade agreements of the modern sort), like democracy, only exists in tiny pockets and the breasts of individuals. The common sense idea of free trade, where sellers freely lay out all of their services and products (because none are barred by others through manipulation of rules) and buyers are free to examine them all and choose however they may, isn't on. Corporatocracy governments concern themselves with their constituents' needs and wants.

I take a drug for psoriatic arthritis that is priced at many times the amount it costs to produce. Much of the research that resulted in the drug was supported by government grants. The fact is that the drug company spends much more on marketing this drug than it ever invested in its creation and the irony of that is that the drug really is only appropriate for a fairly limited population.
There are reasonable and sensible ways to protect intellectual property that do not resort to granting excessive monopoly protections. Ingenuity ought to be rewarded not wielded as a weapon.