Usual caveats, obviously not all pro Palestinian people are anti Semitic, there’s lots of people outraged for very good reasons, right wing equally bad or worse, etc.

But you’re delusional if you think there’s no meaningful anti semitism or safety risk in lefty spaces.

And I am firmly in the “anti-Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism” camp, for the record.

But also not cool with setting Jewish grandmothers on fire for wrongthink, or people telling me why they think actually that’s great. (Which yes, does happen.)

Yeah you’re very, very wrong on this one.

You are aware that there have been two separate terrorist attacks on American Jews* from pro-Palestinian individuals in the past two weeks? So we’re not talking just some overheated college rhetoric.

And plenty on the far left cheering or justifying them

We *can* negotiate and get a lower price, albeit trading off against some future innovation.

But insisting we pay the lowest price available to others will just lead pharma to raise prices elsewhere.

And that will mean we pay the same price, others get no medicine, and pharma loses money.

The key point is that other countries don’t receive a “discount” against the “real” US price.

There is no “real” or “fair market” price in monopoly.

Pharma is already profit-maximizing in every market—but other countries are willing to pay less and will walk away at the US price.

And if we lower prices, it will just lead to overall lower pharma profits (ok) and lower private R&D spending (debatable). There is no world where other countries pay more to make up their "share" of current R&D support -- because they do not value it as much as we do.

/end

Yes, we should absolutely regulate pharma prices. But there is no version of the world where other countries paying more leads to us paying less. That's not how any of this works.

What we do has nothing to do with other countries.

And in monopolist pricing, there is no “fair market price” to discount--there is just a price agreed between the seller and any given buyer. And there is no version of market capitalism that forces buyers to buy something for more than they are willing to pay."

But there is no subsidizing, and there is no “overcharge” in monopoly pricing.

If you can (perfectly) price discriminate, there is just what each market is willing to bear.

Because in monopoly pricing the monopolist keeps the the economic surplus from perfect price discrimination!

It is true that this price discrimination allows them to access foreign markets.

If they needed to set a single global monopolist price, it would be higher than many countries would be willing to pay – and therefore they would not have any market access or profit in those markets.

Pharma companies do not “discount” their prices in foreign countries.

They are monopolists.

In every country they set a profit-maximizing monopolist price.

Because other countries have lower willingness to pay, the monopolist profit-maximizing price is lower.

But here's where things go off the rails.

The EO asserts "a purposeful scheme in which drug manufacturers deeply discount their products to access foreign markets, & subsidize that decrease through enormously high prices in the United States."

That is a fundamental economic misunderstanding.

Third, pharma companies do price discriminate between countries. The ability to price discriminate allows them to charge lower prices to some countries, and higher prices to the US. And effectively, the ability to price discriminate also does allow them to enter and profit from foreign markets.

Second, pharma companies very much do benefit from American upstream subsidy of publicly funded R&D, and downstream public funding of medicines. And they do fight any efforts to regulate drug prices. The overall behavior is outrageous, and the government should intervene to address it.