That&#x27;s only fair if you believe that the seller has the moral right to maximize their earnings.  I think that&#x27;s questionable across the board, but certainly in the pharmaceutical industry.<p>As in: the idea behind capitalism (the reason we put up with it) is <i>not</i> that price-gouging is some fundamental right we should worship, but because capitalism <i>works</i>.  What&#x27;s that mean?  It efficiently allocates resources.  How does it efficiently allocate resources?  By letting a fluid market with many competing buyers and sellers figure out an appropriate price.<p>Notably, patents of life-sustaining medicines utterly destroy that cornerstone of capitalism.  People can and will pay almost anything to get that drug, so the seller can charge what it wants - that&#x27;s not capitalism as it&#x27;s supposed to work, that&#x27;s a hostage scenario.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the best alternative is, but I&#x27;m convinced that there are <i>many</i> trivially better solutions to allocating resources to medical research, efficacy testing and production than what we&#x27;re doing now.  Every social network, things like google&#x27;s pagerank, scientific journal impact ratings - all represent alternative means to determine worth in a competitive fashion; and even competition isn&#x27;t strictly necessary - for some scenarios plain old raw computation to solve for the optimal solution may be possible nowadays.  We&#x27;re not even <i>trying</i> to improve the status quo.