There are alternatives, like increasing revenue through increased productivity...
The revenue comes from payroll taxes. Increased productivity decreases revenue as a result. If SS taxes came from taxes on capital gains and such then increased productivity would help pay for it.
That ship sailed 7 or 8 years ago. It's in deficit and will be until the baby boom is dead. We will print money. It's inevitable at this point.
The funny thing is that I imagine that the results will be no different for the elderly living at that time than simply cutting benefits. At some point you get a lot of inflation, and the various indexes will be gamed so that the increases to benefits don't keep up. So, seniors will get their full payments, but they won't be drinking their $50 coffees at McDonalds in the morning, let alone their $350 senior value meals. Those who work will be fine, due to the $400/hr minimum wage.
Ultimately you can only "save up" for anything so much.
Here is a plan that sounds good on paper but would never actually work at a societal scale. Imagine that I take 80% of my income and bank it and just live off of 10%. After 5 years I quit my job and just sit at home still living at the same standard of living. I should be able to last 25 years before I need to get another job as long as the money is in an account that pays interest at the rate of inflation.
Now imagine that EVERYBODY does that at the same time. Everybody saves up, and everybody quits their job. Nobody is farming the land, nobody is running the gas stations, nobody is working in the stores, etc. Suddenly all that money everybody has saved up is worthless, because nobody is willing to do any services in exchange for it. In practice there would be massive inflation, because anybody willing to work can demand an incredible rate of pay since labor is scarce.
That's the problem the boomers face - they can save up all the money they want, and they can print all the money they want. The problem is that there are way more people demanding goods and services than producing goods and services, and that means anybody who is working will be able to command a higher wage. To the extent that there is automation it will just result in prices still rising but the money going to those who own the machines.
Or, maybe we just think we shouldn't be obligated to pay (via tax dollars) for a woman to murder her unborn child. Rights have nothing to do with it. For some of us, it's a money thing. For others, it's a morals thing. For some, it's both.
I'm sorry. Nobody has the right to tell me that I can't kill somebody who is causing me a hardship. That's my choice to make. As long as you don't tax me on the firearm sale I'll pay for my own bullets, thank you...
One difference is that one can vote with one's feet much easier in leaving a backward town or state, than leaving one's nation.
The problem with this is that the states are required to allow free trade, which leads to the same race to the bottom that free trade leads to everywhere else. A state that passes an environmental law will just see all the corporations in that state move to other states - they can still sell to the consumers in the original state free of any special duties.
If you want to have things like environmental laws and worker protections then you need to also apply tariffs on goods and services that were not subject to an equivalent level of protection. Otherwise all you do is make your citizens unemployed and destroy your tax base. The same applies to any kind of social benefit.
States lost their power once communications and transportation allowed companies the upper hand in negotiations. The same is slowly happening to national governments. It is becoming almost impossible to regulate environmental issues at a national level as a result - everything is global now.
If you really want local regulatory control over all the stuff the federal government is managing today, you need to start by giving states the right to apply tariffs to goods and services produced in other states, as well as to goods and services produced outside the US. I don't see any libertarians lining up behind that anytime soon.:)
Get over the "national healthcare mandate". The Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is hardly what you think it is, but rather a huge corporate welfare program for big insurance companies to be heavily subsidized (all at taxpayer expense) in an attempt to shove additional programs at some targeted voter blocks.
Well, the only reason it turned out the way it did was that it was a compromise due to a large number of representatives who didn't want a public option, which would have been anything but a corporate welfare program.
I've yet to see an option out there which ensures universal coverage that is any better. Certainly the Republicans haven't proposed any plans that ensure universal coverage (assuming you don't count the elements of Obamacare that they invented).
The Russkies now had more than enough time to develop advanced long-range, low-frequency (100 MHz an less) ground-based radars.
I have to admit that I haven't read up much on an ELF radar concept, but how do they get around the fact that this is a wavelength of 3000 km? Wouldn't that basically tell you that there might be something in the sky somewhere in the southern hemisphere?
I think the key to defeating stealth is to separate radar transmitters from receivers. Best would be to figure out how to make the transmitters super-cheap and spam them all over the place. The receivers would be passive and undetectable (and thus undefeatable with anti-radiation weapons). I believe most stealth and jamming techniques really rely on defeating a receiver co-located with the transmitter. A lot of jamming techniques probably only deny the radar range information, while giving away azimuth. That means that if you have two receivers in the vicinity and they can talk to each other, the jamming would be useless (indeed, it would only broadcast the position of the aircraft).
I'm also not convinced that you could use low-frequency radar to actually guide missiles. Even if you know where the target is, the best you can do is try to strategically position fighters to intercept it. Those interceptors wouldn't actually be able to fire at it unless you can reflect radar radiation off of it for missiles to home in on.
Yes, and people will pick 2 and be upset that you held them to their choice, and then leave for your competitors. I didn't say that consumers were rational.
Simply put -- consumers can't be trusted to be able to deal with complex secure authentication schemes.
What complex secure authentication scheme would that be? Is is the one where you authenticate somebody by determining if they know an unchanging number that they provide to every single person they do commerce with? I'll take the NSA's ECC RNG over that any day...
Believe it or not I've actually heard it argued that when terrorists hijack an airliner the military should just shoot it down killing everybody on board.
I'm not sure I like that approach, but if it were a credible threat it would certainly eliminate the incentive for hostage-taking. Terrorists might still try to blow up planes, but hijacking them is a lot more work with more risk of failure just to get to the same end result.
I guess that is what the russians were thinking back when they stormed that theater...
This is the truth, some customers are not partial to jumping through hoops for secured access, at all. For those of us that want the hoops, why don't these companies offer you the ability to opt-out of the 'workaround' security practices?
Because "real" customers would think they want to have the higher level of security, when in reality they still want the lower level of security. If the company offers higher security to them, the customer will accept it, and then the customer will get upset when the company delivers it to them. The customer will then change to a competitor who promises high security but in reality delivers low security, because that is what they really want.
Classic IT mistake - you need to deliver what the customer wants, not what they ask for.
Soviets were prone to make lofty claims about their equipment
True. I am an reserve officer of Serbian Army. When we learned about Soviet/Russian equipment, we always learned two values - declared value (e.g. range) and actual value proved in practice.
Well, you could say the same about any countries weapons. If you stick an assault rifle on a mount and train it on a target on a very calm day you could probably hit something miles away, given enough shots to find the right azimuth/elevation. However, you'd never use an assault rifle that way in real life - if you open fire at a guy miles away all you're going to do is give away your position so that they can call in an attack using something that actually is effective at that range. If you're actually stopping to fire while running between cover you really just care that the bullet travels in a rough straight line and smashes up whatever it actually hits at a few hundred yards at most, and if you're firing while running you just care that it makes a lot of noise and kicks up dirt and makes whizzing sounds so that the guys shooting back duck.
That's my problem with MMOs in general, and multiplayer-anything longer than 10min. Real life just isn't conducive to can't-walk-away-from-keyboard-for-next-hour or gotta-set-the-alarm.
Mind you that a real starship battle would be done with lasers and thousands of miles between players, people would try to maximize distance between each other. Eve is more of a glorified star wars than anything else.
Actually, I've given this a little thought. A real space battle with speed-of-light detection and weaponry would of course take place at long distance, but the ships would need to close in order to attack. The effective range of a ship's weapons would be dictated by their power output relative to the target's ability to absorb power without being destroyed, and the target's maneuverability. An armored target would require more energy to be concentrated upon it in order to be destroyed, which is obvious to most. What isn't obvious to most is that when you fire on a target at long range with speed-of-light detection/fire you actually have to fire a cone-like projection of energy (or beams directed across a cone of space which is effectively the same thing).
This is all caused by the fact that the target's position is uncertain, and the outgoing fire takes as long to get to the target as any possible updates on its position take to get back. So, if you just shoot at where you last saw the target then you're going to miss unless it is stationary. The more maneuverable the target is, the larger the uncertainty in the target's position, so maneuverability behaves just like armor - more dispersed fire means you can sustain more of it.
So, the ships close until one is able to direct enough fire at its target to take it out of the fight. That could be very far or relatively close, and it all depends on how much firepower/survivability/maneuverability the ships have.
Unguided kinetic weapons follow the same principles, but ranges are much lower and thus info about target position is better understood. The slow weapon speeds means you still have uncertainty in where the target will be, but the close range means that you know exactly where they are when you fire. Ability to detect incoming fire also means dodging becomes a factor (so just pulsing fire over an area probably won't be effective, but salvos with shotgun-like coverage would be impossible to dodge if the spread is large enough and the distance between the projectiles is smaller than the target's size).
Guided kinetic weapons would probably lead to tactics similar to what is done with submarines. You fire a stealthy weapon from very long range, and success depends on strategically anticipating the target's movements so that it is within the weapon's effective range when the weapon is able to detect it and start homing. Modern torpedos work this way - if the target chances course right after it is fired (for an uncontrolled weapon) then the weapon will be wasted, because you had to fire the thing at where the target would be in 15 minutes due to the slow speeds involved compared to the speed of sound in water (which is the speed of detection) and counter-detection range. If you had the weapons to spare you could of course fire a ton of them, and if they were stealthy the target's first warning would be a whole bunch of small seeking weapons at close range and no idea of where they came from, which is about what it is like to be the target of a well-executed submarine attack.
Oh, and the only thing humans would do is direct strategy (where you want the ships to generally head). Under automated control the ships would be constantly performing random evasive maneuvers, and directing continuous fire at any targets worth the expenditure. A ship not performing constant and sufficiently random maneuvers becomes a target at a MUCH longer range if the weapons fired against it can be fired with low dispersion. A low-dispersion weapon doesn't lose much power at all over astronomic scale and could be used successfully if you could predict the target position.
But there's still the issue of card not present transactions. Until you find a viable solution for that, the scammers will always have an avenue for fraud.
I'd put the console on the card itself (keypad and small LCD display). Then I'd include USB and acoustic modem interfaces. Now you can handle card not present just fine. The "card" would cost more, but it would make sense to make it a generic device that can support any number of payment accounts. It could still be easily pocket sized - probably smaller than a PCMCIA card.
October 2015. At least the Chip part. The PIN part will be optional (unfortunately). The national retailer association wants it to be mandatory but MasterCard and Visa don't for some reason.
Mastercard and Visa get paid by the transaction I imagine. They really don't care if they're legit or not - if they aren't then the members of the national retailer association pay the bill. I can't imagine why there is a difference of opinion...:)
Yeah, I'd think they could steal the PIN, or tamper with the amount of the current transaction, but they couldn't actually create new transactions without having the chip present.
I think a better design would be putting the keypad and display on the card itself as that eliminates just about every way to tamper with a transaction I can think of, but as long as each transaction is individually signed and the chip throttles signature requests (one per insertion/removal) then the potential for abuse is pretty limited.
The chip is not there to protect customers interests. It's there so the store (or bank in my case) can say: Nope, your card wasn't copied, the chip was used at the ATM.
And being able to know that and prevent use of a cloned card IS in the customer's interest. You're making it sound like those two things are mutually exclusive.
Well, the chip doesn't guarantee that it wasn't cloned. It just guarantees that if it was cloned it becomes the consumer's problem. It also makes it much harder to clone.
Lavabit was willing to take the sword and went out of business.
Yup, hence suggesting that over the long-term the only viable privacy supporting email servers will be ones that don't actually maintain privacy. Just artificial selection at work...
Do me a favor, sit quietly for 2 minutes and do nothing. Does it seem that fast to you?
If you take two minutes to make your first move then you'll lose on your second when the flag drops. This was 2 minutes to play an entire game of chess. You'd spend half that time just moving the pieces and clicking the button in a 20 move game.
That's exactly the case for almost any drug. Small companies discover them all the time, and the big companies tend to license them and test them.
There's a huge ante to bringing a drug to market that has nothing to do with the market itself.
Well, yes and no.
The thing with drugs is that the market isn't really for the pills, but for information about whether the pills work. If somebody got a radio broadcast from the future with the structure of the cure for atherosclerosis along with a statement that it had no side effects, then actually making the pills would be easy. It is coming up with the structure along with the data supporting its safety and efficacy that really takes all the work, and which is ultimately rewarded by the market.
The whole patent system is just a way to bundle the information side of the drug into the price of the pills, since the information itself (which is what has 95% of the value) can't really be monetized otherwise (who would pay $800M for a painkiller if they didn't have exclusive rights to sell it?).
Now, the market is a bit distorted because of the hurdle that without the information you aren't allowed to sell a pill. In an idealistic world there would be a healthy market for both true cures and snake oil. The problem is that in the real world people will buy $20/month snake oil over $300/month moderately-effective diabetes medications every time. The average member of the public is also really not able to properly evaluate the claims of snake-oil salesmen. So, while the libertarian in me finds the status quo distasteful, I'll live with it so that companies can afford to actually make working drugs so that I can take them, instead of going out of business or pursuing the much more profitable snake oil.
Slashdot Mirror
There are alternatives, like increasing revenue through increased productivity...
The revenue comes from payroll taxes. Increased productivity decreases revenue as a result. If SS taxes came from taxes on capital gains and such then increased productivity would help pay for it.
That ship sailed 7 or 8 years ago. It's in deficit and will be until the baby boom is dead. We will print money. It's inevitable at this point.
The funny thing is that I imagine that the results will be no different for the elderly living at that time than simply cutting benefits. At some point you get a lot of inflation, and the various indexes will be gamed so that the increases to benefits don't keep up. So, seniors will get their full payments, but they won't be drinking their $50 coffees at McDonalds in the morning, let alone their $350 senior value meals. Those who work will be fine, due to the $400/hr minimum wage.
Ultimately you can only "save up" for anything so much.
Here is a plan that sounds good on paper but would never actually work at a societal scale. Imagine that I take 80% of my income and bank it and just live off of 10%. After 5 years I quit my job and just sit at home still living at the same standard of living. I should be able to last 25 years before I need to get another job as long as the money is in an account that pays interest at the rate of inflation.
Now imagine that EVERYBODY does that at the same time. Everybody saves up, and everybody quits their job. Nobody is farming the land, nobody is running the gas stations, nobody is working in the stores, etc. Suddenly all that money everybody has saved up is worthless, because nobody is willing to do any services in exchange for it. In practice there would be massive inflation, because anybody willing to work can demand an incredible rate of pay since labor is scarce.
That's the problem the boomers face - they can save up all the money they want, and they can print all the money they want. The problem is that there are way more people demanding goods and services than producing goods and services, and that means anybody who is working will be able to command a higher wage. To the extent that there is automation it will just result in prices still rising but the money going to those who own the machines.
Or, maybe we just think we shouldn't be obligated to pay (via tax dollars) for a woman to murder her unborn child. Rights have nothing to do with it. For some of us, it's a money thing. For others, it's a morals thing. For some, it's both.
I'm sorry. Nobody has the right to tell me that I can't kill somebody who is causing me a hardship. That's my choice to make. As long as you don't tax me on the firearm sale I'll pay for my own bullets, thank you...
Is that the libertarian approach? :)
One difference is that one can vote with one's feet much easier in leaving a backward town or state, than leaving one's nation.
The problem with this is that the states are required to allow free trade, which leads to the same race to the bottom that free trade leads to everywhere else. A state that passes an environmental law will just see all the corporations in that state move to other states - they can still sell to the consumers in the original state free of any special duties.
If you want to have things like environmental laws and worker protections then you need to also apply tariffs on goods and services that were not subject to an equivalent level of protection. Otherwise all you do is make your citizens unemployed and destroy your tax base. The same applies to any kind of social benefit.
States lost their power once communications and transportation allowed companies the upper hand in negotiations. The same is slowly happening to national governments. It is becoming almost impossible to regulate environmental issues at a national level as a result - everything is global now.
If you really want local regulatory control over all the stuff the federal government is managing today, you need to start by giving states the right to apply tariffs to goods and services produced in other states, as well as to goods and services produced outside the US. I don't see any libertarians lining up behind that anytime soon. :)
Get over the "national healthcare mandate". The Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is hardly what you think it is, but rather a huge corporate welfare program for big insurance companies to be heavily subsidized (all at taxpayer expense) in an attempt to shove additional programs at some targeted voter blocks.
Well, the only reason it turned out the way it did was that it was a compromise due to a large number of representatives who didn't want a public option, which would have been anything but a corporate welfare program.
I've yet to see an option out there which ensures universal coverage that is any better. Certainly the Republicans haven't proposed any plans that ensure universal coverage (assuming you don't count the elements of Obamacare that they invented).
The Russkies now had more than enough time to develop advanced long-range, low-frequency (100 MHz an less) ground-based radars.
I have to admit that I haven't read up much on an ELF radar concept, but how do they get around the fact that this is a wavelength of 3000 km? Wouldn't that basically tell you that there might be something in the sky somewhere in the southern hemisphere?
I think the key to defeating stealth is to separate radar transmitters from receivers. Best would be to figure out how to make the transmitters super-cheap and spam them all over the place. The receivers would be passive and undetectable (and thus undefeatable with anti-radiation weapons). I believe most stealth and jamming techniques really rely on defeating a receiver co-located with the transmitter. A lot of jamming techniques probably only deny the radar range information, while giving away azimuth. That means that if you have two receivers in the vicinity and they can talk to each other, the jamming would be useless (indeed, it would only broadcast the position of the aircraft).
I'm also not convinced that you could use low-frequency radar to actually guide missiles. Even if you know where the target is, the best you can do is try to strategically position fighters to intercept it. Those interceptors wouldn't actually be able to fire at it unless you can reflect radar radiation off of it for missiles to home in on.
Yes, and people will pick 2 and be upset that you held them to their choice, and then leave for your competitors. I didn't say that consumers were rational.
That was my point - he was another person selected for the prize for not being W.
Hey, don't forget Al!
Simply put -- consumers can't be trusted to be able to deal with complex secure authentication schemes.
What complex secure authentication scheme would that be? Is is the one where you authenticate somebody by determining if they know an unchanging number that they provide to every single person they do commerce with? I'll take the NSA's ECC RNG over that any day...
Believe it or not I've actually heard it argued that when terrorists hijack an airliner the military should just shoot it down killing everybody on board.
I'm not sure I like that approach, but if it were a credible threat it would certainly eliminate the incentive for hostage-taking. Terrorists might still try to blow up planes, but hijacking them is a lot more work with more risk of failure just to get to the same end result.
I guess that is what the russians were thinking back when they stormed that theater...
This is the truth, some customers are not partial to jumping through hoops for secured access, at all.
For those of us that want the hoops, why don't these companies offer you the ability to opt-out of the 'workaround' security practices?
Because "real" customers would think they want to have the higher level of security, when in reality they still want the lower level of security. If the company offers higher security to them, the customer will accept it, and then the customer will get upset when the company delivers it to them. The customer will then change to a competitor who promises high security but in reality delivers low security, because that is what they really want.
Classic IT mistake - you need to deliver what the customer wants, not what they ask for.
Soviets were prone to make lofty claims about their equipment
True. I am an reserve officer of Serbian Army. When we learned about Soviet/Russian equipment, we always learned two values - declared value (e.g. range) and actual value proved in practice.
Well, you could say the same about any countries weapons. If you stick an assault rifle on a mount and train it on a target on a very calm day you could probably hit something miles away, given enough shots to find the right azimuth/elevation. However, you'd never use an assault rifle that way in real life - if you open fire at a guy miles away all you're going to do is give away your position so that they can call in an attack using something that actually is effective at that range. If you're actually stopping to fire while running between cover you really just care that the bullet travels in a rough straight line and smashes up whatever it actually hits at a few hundred yards at most, and if you're firing while running you just care that it makes a lot of noise and kicks up dirt and makes whizzing sounds so that the guys shooting back duck.
That's my problem with MMOs in general, and multiplayer-anything longer than 10min. Real life just isn't conducive to can't-walk-away-from-keyboard-for-next-hour or gotta-set-the-alarm.
"What's it doing now?" Something you never want to hear your pilot say, lest this happen...
Mind you that a real starship battle would be done with lasers and thousands of miles between players, people would try to maximize distance between each other. Eve is more of a glorified star wars than anything else.
Actually, I've given this a little thought. A real space battle with speed-of-light detection and weaponry would of course take place at long distance, but the ships would need to close in order to attack. The effective range of a ship's weapons would be dictated by their power output relative to the target's ability to absorb power without being destroyed, and the target's maneuverability. An armored target would require more energy to be concentrated upon it in order to be destroyed, which is obvious to most. What isn't obvious to most is that when you fire on a target at long range with speed-of-light detection/fire you actually have to fire a cone-like projection of energy (or beams directed across a cone of space which is effectively the same thing).
This is all caused by the fact that the target's position is uncertain, and the outgoing fire takes as long to get to the target as any possible updates on its position take to get back. So, if you just shoot at where you last saw the target then you're going to miss unless it is stationary. The more maneuverable the target is, the larger the uncertainty in the target's position, so maneuverability behaves just like armor - more dispersed fire means you can sustain more of it.
So, the ships close until one is able to direct enough fire at its target to take it out of the fight. That could be very far or relatively close, and it all depends on how much firepower/survivability/maneuverability the ships have.
Unguided kinetic weapons follow the same principles, but ranges are much lower and thus info about target position is better understood. The slow weapon speeds means you still have uncertainty in where the target will be, but the close range means that you know exactly where they are when you fire. Ability to detect incoming fire also means dodging becomes a factor (so just pulsing fire over an area probably won't be effective, but salvos with shotgun-like coverage would be impossible to dodge if the spread is large enough and the distance between the projectiles is smaller than the target's size).
Guided kinetic weapons would probably lead to tactics similar to what is done with submarines. You fire a stealthy weapon from very long range, and success depends on strategically anticipating the target's movements so that it is within the weapon's effective range when the weapon is able to detect it and start homing. Modern torpedos work this way - if the target chances course right after it is fired (for an uncontrolled weapon) then the weapon will be wasted, because you had to fire the thing at where the target would be in 15 minutes due to the slow speeds involved compared to the speed of sound in water (which is the speed of detection) and counter-detection range. If you had the weapons to spare you could of course fire a ton of them, and if they were stealthy the target's first warning would be a whole bunch of small seeking weapons at close range and no idea of where they came from, which is about what it is like to be the target of a well-executed submarine attack.
Oh, and the only thing humans would do is direct strategy (where you want the ships to generally head). Under automated control the ships would be constantly performing random evasive maneuvers, and directing continuous fire at any targets worth the expenditure. A ship not performing constant and sufficiently random maneuvers becomes a target at a MUCH longer range if the weapons fired against it can be fired with low dispersion. A low-dispersion weapon doesn't lose much power at all over astronomic scale and could be used successfully if you could predict the target position.
But there's still the issue of card not present transactions. Until you find a viable solution for that, the scammers will always have an avenue for fraud.
I'd put the console on the card itself (keypad and small LCD display). Then I'd include USB and acoustic modem interfaces. Now you can handle card not present just fine. The "card" would cost more, but it would make sense to make it a generic device that can support any number of payment accounts. It could still be easily pocket sized - probably smaller than a PCMCIA card.
October 2015. At least the Chip part. The PIN part will be optional (unfortunately). The national retailer association wants it to be mandatory but MasterCard and Visa don't for some reason.
Mastercard and Visa get paid by the transaction I imagine. They really don't care if they're legit or not - if they aren't then the members of the national retailer association pay the bill. I can't imagine why there is a difference of opinion... :)
Yeah, I'd think they could steal the PIN, or tamper with the amount of the current transaction, but they couldn't actually create new transactions without having the chip present.
I think a better design would be putting the keypad and display on the card itself as that eliminates just about every way to tamper with a transaction I can think of, but as long as each transaction is individually signed and the chip throttles signature requests (one per insertion/removal) then the potential for abuse is pretty limited.
The chip is not there to protect customers interests. It's there so the store (or bank in my case) can say: Nope, your card wasn't copied, the chip was used at the ATM.
And being able to know that and prevent use of a cloned card IS in the customer's interest. You're making it sound like those two things are mutually exclusive.
Well, the chip doesn't guarantee that it wasn't cloned. It just guarantees that if it was cloned it becomes the consumer's problem. It also makes it much harder to clone.
Lavabit was willing to take the sword and went out of business.
Yup, hence suggesting that over the long-term the only viable privacy supporting email servers will be ones that don't actually maintain privacy. Just artificial selection at work...
Do me a favor, sit quietly for 2 minutes and do nothing. Does it seem that fast to you?
If you take two minutes to make your first move then you'll lose on your second when the flag drops. This was 2 minutes to play an entire game of chess. You'd spend half that time just moving the pieces and clicking the button in a 20 move game.
Probably just trying to get it done with before the commercial break. In any case, if you watch the clocks the time was cumulative.
That's exactly the case for almost any drug. Small companies discover them all the time, and the big companies tend to license them and test them.
There's a huge ante to bringing a drug to market that has nothing to do with the market itself.
Well, yes and no.
The thing with drugs is that the market isn't really for the pills, but for information about whether the pills work. If somebody got a radio broadcast from the future with the structure of the cure for atherosclerosis along with a statement that it had no side effects, then actually making the pills would be easy. It is coming up with the structure along with the data supporting its safety and efficacy that really takes all the work, and which is ultimately rewarded by the market.
The whole patent system is just a way to bundle the information side of the drug into the price of the pills, since the information itself (which is what has 95% of the value) can't really be monetized otherwise (who would pay $800M for a painkiller if they didn't have exclusive rights to sell it?).
Now, the market is a bit distorted because of the hurdle that without the information you aren't allowed to sell a pill. In an idealistic world there would be a healthy market for both true cures and snake oil. The problem is that in the real world people will buy $20/month snake oil over $300/month moderately-effective diabetes medications every time. The average member of the public is also really not able to properly evaluate the claims of snake-oil salesmen. So, while the libertarian in me finds the status quo distasteful, I'll live with it so that companies can afford to actually make working drugs so that I can take them, instead of going out of business or pursuing the much more profitable snake oil.
Yup - right up there with Linux Distro with Quarterly Releases Does Another Quarterly Release! But, we seem to have no end of those...