|
Tecoyah, I wonder whether your point about a slowdown in technology would really come to pass. I do think that the emergence of collective goverment-directed action in drug research (rather than multiple groups independently vying for profits) might actually increase productivity. Rodney pointed out a good analogy when he mentioned the Cold War and the Space Race - in that instance, strong government support brought results that profits would never have justified. (Beyond satellites, what significant dollar profit has any corporation gained from space exploration?)
Another plus of removing profit as a primary motivation would be the re-prioritization of critical life-saving technologies. Cosmetic medicine has enjoyed a boom because its generally affluent clients are able to pay top dollar for treatments such as Botox, which now has a handful of copycat cousins (like HydroDerm, which is applied dermally rather than by injection). These efforts misdirect a great deal of attention towards relatively unimportant endeavors, and they often consume the resources of not one but several competing labs.
I suppose the bottom line, as always, would involve how we would pay for a more regulated system, and how in fact such a system would work.
|