I mean as if they dont deserve respect and appreciation as an elder

Or as people the younger generations can look up to for guidance and inspiration.

@Great Britain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIFWG8ea6HI

oh you're talking to him

China also has a huge problem in that the folks they are managing to get into the military are scrawnier and scrawnier.

They've had to lower their admission standards twice in the last ten years.

imagine thinking that growing the population to support the old ones is a viable long term approach

China also has a huge problem with the whole "out of sight, out of mind, don't raise a fuss" culture.

The West just has to hold the line, and China will collapse under its own weight.

Imagine thinking these people aren't entitled to self-ownership, freely able to save their entire lives, then demand goods and services for their support in retirement, creating an industry which would otherwise exist to care for them and employing people outside the purview of State economic planning.

will china collapse under its own weight before the west does?

Since you want to claim Capitalist so-called "commodification" is an evil, chew on that.

😉

commodification can be evil

i don't think it is necessarily

Sometimes it can be, yes. For example, when a guy buys the rights to a lifesaving medicine, then jacks up the price a hundredfold. This has happened, by the way.

This has been your daily reminder that there is nuance in all things.

Which wouldn't be possible without government interference to begin with.

Actually, without "government interference," it'd be easier.

It wouldn't, because the government is the one enforcing the patent renewals.

This has been your daily dose of libertarianism by a classical liberal.

Current government concerns with things like patents are just an extension of previous systems. Before modern economics, there were guilds. Before that, there was the simple fact that knowledge was difficult to transmit.

Guilds were even more vicious about their intellectual property than modern governments and corporations. They would and did kill to keep them secure.

The patent should be enforceable for the term until expiration by the original inventor, simply to cover the R&D, plus a little bit of profit off the top, which incentivizes them to produce anyway. Yet, we're willing to allow for a loophole - one which solely requires a regulatory agency's interference - where the original patent holder "sells" it to other companies they're associated with anyway, which automatically allows the patent to renew once again.

That was interesting

Don't get me wrong, I actually agree that patents should have inherent limits.

Just like copyright.

If chinas demographics go, then who will replace them, a muslim population?

Do they need more MIGRANTS to sustain its economy, the great replacement in a different way?

I'm saying there is nuance in all things, and the ethics of the past were a lot less clean and well-defined as they are now. For example, back in the day the guilds often as not made the law or played a huge part in making it, and had the power to enforce them with lethal force. Modern corps and governments tend to be a lot more restrained, each by the actions of the other.

Nowadays, a corporation can't just go killing its rivals.

A guild could, they just had to be slick about it.

You'll also notice many drugs have generic versions, which sell for pennies on the dollar, comparatively to their non-generic productions, something I deal with all the time. I've an aging family member who's required surgery about 8 times over the past 2 years, and almost every prescription is written out for a brand name drug, despite the fact generics exist. It's the difference between a few dollars to $800. Typically, the generic producers get around the patent law by producing a version with a slight alteration in dosing by .0001, depending on the drug. The problem is, most consumers aren't aware, nor do they act like a rational consumer, because A) they either have insurance, or B) they're utilizing Medicare or Medicaid. They're spending other people's money, so they don't shop for the lowest price. Thus, they have a negative impact on pharmaceutical markets, as they don't ensure competition. If it weren't for this, you'd be looking at pharmacies selling drugs as low as their production costs.

Then, there's also alternatives within the same family of drugs.

Yet, every doctor wants to write out a prescription for the latest patent within that family of drugs. What this comes down to is a lack of consumer information.

Of course the patient wants the most effective drug at the lowest price, yet this isn't the behavior of doctors.

medicare and medicaid always only pays for the generic unless there is no alternative

Now we start getting into kickbacks.

>imagine thinking that people aren't entitled to self-ownership
What do you mean? The only thing they are entitled to is being part of the glorious Chinese Empire, as it has been since the encient times.

Isn't that enough?

@Killzone, that's true, yet you can use discount cards to price drugs in your area, which are negotiated by a firm that keeps track of the supply and so forth, at every pharmacy. What this also amounts to is the difference between Medicare being billed out over a hundred bucks, or the consumer using the discount card paying $10, and it ends there. No burden on taxpayers, and they pay less than what they otherwise would with a co-pay using Medicare. Not to mention eliminating all the overhead and wages paid out to government, unionized and lazy labor, associated with Medicare's inefficient management, which by the way costs us all something in the tune of trillions each year. Isn't that lovely?