I'll grant you this for cars and VCRs, but I don't think it's all that applicable to pharmacueticals.
Why would a government bureaucracy, with relatively limiltless resources and no bottom-line pressures, be less likely than private business at making "risky long term bets"? Would private business have funded the space program?
Aren't most drugs "one size fits all" solutions, anyway? I don't go into the drugstore and pick a drug based on it's pretty colors - I get it if my doctor decides, based on the latest research, that it's the best treatment. It's not a consumer product. Seems to me a much more efficient system would keep development in the public domain, with private manufacturers and distributors given the (unexclusive) rights to make and distribute the actual drugs. The generic manufacturers seem to do all right without the megaprofits of big pharma. Even "marketing" - in the form of government-sponsered doctor education about new drugs, without the incentive to push the latest and greatest patented cash cow - could be much more efficiantly done by government.
Seems to me this is one case where total socialization with the possible exception, as I said, of the manufacturing/dictribution role, which could really benefit from the competative model) is pretty much a no-brainer.
Jim Baird
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