There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "#evergreening" - coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

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Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when #JohnGreen rained down righteous fire upon #JohnsonAndJohnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable #TB meds, prompting this *excellent* explainer from the #ArmAndALeg podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: #PayForDelay, where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers *not* to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired.

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Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least *some* of the money goes into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely *that* warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the *public* paid to develop, test and refine?

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Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal - until Congress passed the #BayhDoleAct in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions *are* given away - to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make.

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The basis for this is a racist hoax called #TheTragedyOfTheCommons, by the eugenicist white supremacist #GarrettHardin, published by *Science* in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "#commons" - things owned and shared by a community - are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, which prompts nice people to *also* overrun the commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

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Hardin asserted this as historic fact, but cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning #ElinorOstrom actually looked at how commons are managed, she found they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify #enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership.

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Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern #economics: introspection.

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As #ElyDevons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom.

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