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Originally Posted by acropolis
if we had a cure for cancer, we could charge whatever we wanted for it
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You really couldn't. Free market fantasies are all well and good, but if you did have some kind of ultimate cure for cancer* you'd either
a) patent it (in which case it would generic versions would appear and be tolerated to an extent if your price was thought to be too high)
b) keep it some kind of Coca Cola style secret in which case I suspect if the price you charged was too high people would simply steal it.
It's like imagining you had a total monopoly on food. You could start trying to calculate roughly how much you could charge each person, but it's far more likely you'd be shot in the head and it'd be taken from you.
* obviously cancer is a pretty bad example because of it's complexity/variety, and may not ever have a single cure - and even if so it's unlikely this one cure will be reached in one uber leap of understanding - but we're in hypothetical land here)