So they should only be allowed to charge the same price for a drug in every country? Clearly, you hate poor people, and want to spread Hep C throughout the third world and not provide treatment.

I don't disagree with you about the big pharma companies (I think I mentioned that), but you've got your head so far up your ass you can't distinguish between discretionary pricing policies and every other issue involving the pharmaceutical companies.

I know - it's all about you - you just want cheaper drugs and fuck everyone else.

Oh, sure, Germany is doing great, thanks to investments in industry and education for many decades. Not sure about unions - Germany has extensive labor regulations and employment laws. It's nothing like the "at-will employment" used in the US and other countries. Maybe the unions helped put those in place. There are actually better employment protection in the laws there than most unions can get through negotiations in the US.

And, of course, none of that extends to other members of the EU - it's just Germany. Much of the rest of the country is borrowing Euros to buy German goods. And Germany's answer is austerity.

So good on Germany for their ability to compete. Too bad about Spain. And Italy. And Portugal. And Greece. And Ireland.

'Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue!'

They would execute the labor force if they could, but for now, they just want them cheaper.

Probably because he's worth more. I know I am, because I've worked with these guys, and they SUCK. Yea, they'll work 12-14 hour days, weekends, etc. But they work STUPID. They do a bunch of manual stuff over and over instead of spending a little time to learn some automation so they can do it once. Like anyone, they make mistakes, and typos, but more of them because they work tired, and don't know how to find stuff because they're so focused on goals they don't follow process and then everything is inconsistent and exhibits random failures that are painful to track.

"Qualifications" are a total joke. These guys are the epitome of the "paper qualified" workers that can pass a test but have not idea how to make things work in a real-world scenario. They copy-paste everything, don't try to learn software or read documentation.

The culture makes it worse. If you're overloaded with assignments, you're supposed to say so, but the Indian culture doesn't work like that. It's an "honor" to take on extra work, even when you know you can't get everything in on time. So the managers pile stuff on the workers because they always say they can get it done, and then the schedules slip, and the quality suffers and you end up with something late and that's crap and then someone has to take over and fix it. And that's more expensive than paying those "IT folks" you think are overpaid. In the end, they are CHEAPER.

But you're too short-sighted to see any of that. Just like these FWD.us guys.

The bias of the hiring manager.

Funny how your uninformed hatred of "libertarians" causes these delusions that these corporatists are actually libertarians. If libertarianism is good for corporations, how come corporations always oppose libertarian ideas?

Yes, ObamaCare is, no doubt, a vast improvement for people with no healthcare before. It only sucks for the other 80%.

Single payer or universal medicaid would have been better for everyone. But of course Obama turned out to be a fascist, corporate cock-sucking piece of shit instead of the populist messiah all you low-information bleating idiot that voted for him though he was.

Yes, this happened, same thing happened to me. At the end, they offered me a permanent position, but at a rather insulting salary. So I left for another job that was paid better than my old pay (including bonuses). That company survived at a rather downgraded capability, but they had a government-granted monopoly for what they were doing, so they survived. Edison, I believe, is in the same position, so they can survive even though the company will fail their customers more than ever.

This is one of those issues where the government policies are based EXACTLY on a progressive agenda, but progressives dislike dealing with their own principles. You see, the US pharmaceutical companies spend a LOT of money researching and developing new drugs - it costs upwards of a million dollars just for the compliance with FDA requirements for approval alone. They then price the drugs in different countries based on the country's relative wealth. Since the US is the wealthiest country, the drugs are most expensive there. Isn't it a progressive ideal to provide subsidy for people less able to afford expensive life-sustaining products? Well that's what these drug policies ACTUALLY DO. But you can't stop complaining about it.

There are LOTS of issues about the pharmaceutical industry, but the "free market" for drugs is NOT one of them, because it doesn't exist in any way, shape or form.

You would think unions would have learned the lesson by now, with all the jobs they have lost by destroying companies with non-union competition and putting ALL of the workers on the street. But it seems the union bosses are doing just as well as the corporate CEOs with their golden parachutes, so fuck all those prols, I guess. It's almost like the elites are cooperating to screw everyone else and only put on a show of "protecting the workers."

This is a really long and convoluted discussion, and many people seem to have gotten very confused by some ludicrous rhetoric designed to demonize the free market. The arguments get really insane. So I'm going to make it really simple.

In a free market, the consumers (a.k.a. customers) are in control. Producers live and die by their ability to serve consumers. Governments support free markets by enforcing a competitive environment where consumers are in control.

In a command economy (i.e. Communism, dictatorships, Fascism, the US agriculture and health care industries, etc.), the focus is on Producers. Producers are in control, and call the shots, and governments support command economies by ensuring policies that ensure producers are in control. Strictly controlled command economies can only work for industries where the demand is fairly inelastic, since consumers only purchase goods through coercion (people need food, health care, and sometimes transportation for simple basic survival).

That's so wrong it even fails the wrongness test.

You would have to come up with some very specific qualifiers for this statement to come even close to being true. Jobs existed before corporations. The middle class existed before corporations. They created their own jobs based on what they found customers wanted. You don't need an artificial regulatory construct in order to provide a service - that's just government trying to control the markets. If you grow more food on your land than your family can eat, then guess what? There are customers for your "product" you created with your "job".

Almost right. The customers are the ad buyers, true. Using Facebook makes you the product being sold.