I thought this might be a pretty good post to have by itself because it would carry different comments compared to the other thread, but the reason that so many drug ads are on US television compared to anything else is because the US and New Zealand are the only countries that don't outright ban direct-to-consumer drug advertisements. This ban was lifted under Bill Clinton's FDA in 1997 under the caveat that the ads list all the side effects, but of course they didn't realize how much they'd advertise.
Advertising directly to doctors was never banned, which is how Purdue Pharma, run by the Sackler family, members of the Triple Parentheses Gang, were able to outright lie to doctors about how OxyContin was non-addictive, resulting in its over-prescription and the current opioid epidemic.
https://jheor.org/post/2674-with-tv-drug-ads-what-you-see-is-not-necessarily-what-you-get
For sure. I'm not saying free market is the problem just that, at least with the current morality of people, it can't really be the solution either.
Point is, even though it's not a free market, they got away with a lot of this shit because people support the idea of free markets, and don't realize how stacked everything is. "Free market," even if fake, let's them get away with a lot of evil. It's the worst of both worlds.
Again, it pains me to say, as I've always been pretty libertarian.
Heck, the concept of "markets" has been so twisted that when I hear some bad actors talk about it...it just seems like treason. I saw a video of that opposition leader lady in Venezuela talk about "opening up the markets" or whatever. That's just code for shipping real resources out to foreigners, in return for fiat currency. It sounds crazy, but they'd probably literally be better as a nation under their retarded socialism, than international "capitalism."
We'd need to completely rollback the federal reserve, banking, and fiat for anything to be viable. And if the people had the will to do that, or the knowledge to demand it, the change wouldn't even be necessary. Just seems like a bit of a Catch 22.
I think the problems are cultural and societal at the core, not economic.