A video has emerged of Kamala during the 2019 campaign promising to fix drug prices and, failing that, to seize drug makers’ patents to lower drug prices. It is making the rounds now because she’s again demanding price controls in America. Kamala’s solution is typically tyrannical: Give her power, and she’ll exercise it without regard to property rights or the innovation that comes with the promise of profit.

One of the ways to encourage innovation is to ensure that people profit from their inventions. According to a cool little history I found, the Florentines came up with the first patent, which they granted in 1421 to Filippo Brunelleschi for a boat he designed to carry heavy loads up the Arno.

The English were not far behind, granting their first patent in 1449 to a stained-glass manufacturer. Although the system was initially abused (because the crown profited from it), by the 18th century, the British figured out a way to allow inventors to benefit from their inventions for a specific period before the field became crowded with others using that same idea.

Image: Patent office relief on the Herbert C. Hoover Building. Public domain.  

The Founders accepted this British viewpoint that society benefitted from a system in which people’s intellectual ideas were a form of property entitled to protection. They incorporated that protection directly into the U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:

Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Image: The first United States patent, which George Washington signed. Public domain.

The beauty of strong protections for ideas, of course, is that these protections encourage people to innovate. Indeed, at the end of the 19th century, Americans were so inspired by Thomas Edison that every person in every city and town scrambled to come up with brilliant ideas that would make them rich and famous. A lot of the ideas were silly enough that they, in turn, inspired Rube Goldberg’s brilliant cartoons, but the principle was sound: When you encourage people to think outside the box by promising profit for doing so, you get an explosion of creativity that can change the world.

The American government often puts its thumb on the scale to encourage innovation. This became a habit in the defense industry and then drifted into the medical industry. On the one hand, it’s a good idea because it allows individuals and companies to pour money into inventions. On the other hand, I’ve always struggled with the fact that the taxpayers fund the invention, but the individuals and companies get the profits. If I were in Congress, I would mandate a profit-sharing scheme as part of dispersing those taxpayer monies. Sadly, Congress never does.

Kamala Harris is an economic and free market illiterate whose entire being is focused on the abolition of private property and consolidating it in government hands (or, alternatively, adopting the fascist socialist model of allowing private property provided it’s subject to government control). That’s why, back in 2019, Kamala announced was already dreaming of the price controls she advocates for now. Moreover, she explained that, if government price fixing (which decreases supplies) didn’t work, companies would find that the government would seize patents (ending innovation):

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) suggested late last week that she would “snatch” patents from private companies if they did not abide by her orders so that the government could “take over.”

“My plan, as a candidate for president, on these drug prices is as follows: We are going to set drug prices based on fair market,” Harris said during a campaign stop in Iowa on Friday. “So, essentially what we’re going to do – and you can visit the website if you will, and if not, get you some documents – but essentially what we’re going to do is set drug prices so that American consumers are charged a price for drugs that’s the average price that’s being charged around the globe.”

[snip]

“So, for any drug where they fail to play by our rules, and if that drug came about from federal funding for what’s called ‘R&D,’ research and development, I will snatch their patent so that we will take over,” Harris continued.

The audience asked if Harris was legally allowed to do that, to which Harris responded, “Yes, we can do that! Yes, yes, we can do that! Yes, we can do that. The question is whether you have the will to do it. I have the will to do it.”

Dictator Kamala Harris discussing government takeover of companies' patents:
"I will snatch their patent, so that we [the American government] will take over.
Yes we can do that!
The question is: 'Do you have the will to do it'!?
I have the will to do it."

The party… pic.twitter.com/fLTZE1pagq

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) August 17, 2024

Kamala’s idea that she can “snatch” patents is, quite simply, government theft. As the Fifth Amendment says, no person (and a corporation is a person) may be “deprived of...property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

World history has repeatedly demonstrated that when people don’t have a profit incentive to take the time, make the effort, and expend their wealth to perfect an idea and bring it to market, they won’t. This results in societies where nothing changes for hundreds or even thousands of years. They make charming tourist destinations, but they don’t increase the local or international standard of living or increase the world’s wealth. Alternatively, you get China, which steals ideas rather than comes up with them. That provides a short-term solution to a society interested in getting rich quickly, but eventually, the society stagnates. Other countries get better at protecting their intellectual property and the thieves have no creative skills. After all, innovation is as much a learned skill as it is a societal construct.

Kamala’s plans will destroy the American economic juggernaut (which, while on life-support, can still be resuscitated). It’s to be hoped that people figure this out before voting starts.