What a turnaround
A few months back I had a blog argument with Natalie Solent, a self-styled 'libertarian' blogger about whether this country's extensive racial affirmative action programmes really were, through their reducing incentives to hard work, a major cause of black 'underachievement' at school. She said they were, I disagreed. Case closed.Whilst perusing another 'libertarian' site I came across another post of hers. This one suggests that attempting to make drug companies sell their drugs more cheaply to the developing world is akin to keeping slaves.
I take back all my criticisms. This post is brilliant. I've never seen the debate on the extent to which patent protection should balance incentives to innovate with allowing the poorest and most ill people in the world to get life-saving drugs put in this way, and I doubt I ever will again. Unmissable.
There is one slightly jarring thing about the post, and where it posted, namely 'libertarian samizdata'. Now we all know 'libertarians' in a blog contest rarely means much more than holding virulently anti-EU views and wanting an unfettered right to spend 'your' money how you like But at least they used to be consistent on government market intevention. They didn't like it. But now it appears patent protection, which after all is massive government market intervention, is absolute fine and dandy. Surely libertarians should be in favour of a market solution?
posted by Matthew @ 12/02/2003 06:56:00 PM
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