OK, let's crunch the numbers. A new class of antibiotics is going to cost you round at least $1Bn to develop[*]. Suppose you spend that and discover a totally new class, with no existing bacterial resistance. So, the clinical choices here are (a) prescribe it to every schmuck who thinks it might make his flu get better (and feed it to cows as well - why not?), or (b) give it only to people who are dying of MRSA. Option (a) is stupid as within ten years MRSA is now resistant to your new antibiotic as well, and the FDA (quite rightly) won't sanction it. Option (b) means that your total market is maybe 5,000 people per year in the western world. How are you going to recoup your $1Bn? This "pharma aren't interested in making you better" meme is a pile of crap. Pharma are interested in anything that will make them money. The first company to bring a cure-all for cancer to market is going to make so much cash that they'll drown in it. However, antibiotics are a place the the wonderful free market just fails. Unless there is some sort of subsidy, significant numbers of new antibiotics aren't going to be developed unless the drug resistance problem gets a whole lot worse.

[*] Yes, I know there are pointless Salon articles claiming that the real cost is 47 cents. They're talking bollocks.

Their $55M estimate is a complete fantasy, though. If it were that cheap, there would be an awful lot more new drugs out there. There aren't. For example, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/business/07drug.html?_r=3&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all and look at the graphic. Over the last decade, there have been on average 20 new drugs approved per year. If each one only cost $55M, then any one of the twenty biggest pharma companies could have afforded the lot out of small change. Given the financial trouble that all of them are currently in with existing drugs coming off-patent, you have to wonder why they haven't been doing that.

The ice at the north pole is (a) a few metres thick, and (b) floating. As a result, when it melts, the sea levels won't rise one iota. The ice in Greenland and Antarctica is kilometres thick, and isn't floating. If that all melts, then you will indeed need to evolve gills quickly...

And how is this different to the USA refusing to recognise or honour European copyrights for most of its history? Charles Dickens' novels were widely published in the US without any payment whatsoever to him. It's only when the US developed a big enough internal copyright industry (who wanted their copyrights recognised in Europe) that any attention was paid to any non-Americal "intellectual property". Before that, the USA "took it all for free whilst sat on their ass", as you so delicately put it.