As for the second question, this is where I realize that liberals often really just do not grok what libertarians are about. For them, this is a battle between people who like health care companies, and want to defend them, and people who like the government. But I don’t care about the pharmaceutical companies qua pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies are interested in what is good for pharmaceutical companies. I am interested in what is good for society.

I am not under the delusion that those are necessarily the same thing. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” was a Great Society slogan, not a libertarian, or even a conservative one. Right now, pharmaceutical companies spend a great deal of effort on innovation because they have to in order to survive. But if survival means ditching the R&D labs and churning out low-cost copies of things they’ve already invented, then I’m pretty sure that’s what they’ll do. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it is not to the benevolence of pharma that I look, but to its self interest. In the current system, that self interest means inventing new drugs.

In other words, I’m not in favor of business. I’m in favor of competition.

—Is What’s Good for Pharma Good for America? - Megan McArdle