Comment by yunwal
The point is that there’s nothing magical about price discovery under an anti-competitive system. It doesn’t maximize welfare, so there’s no reason to complain about another system that doesn’t allow for price discovery. That’s not a bad thing.
It’s far far more efficient to have an expert guess the price that maximizes public welfare. They won’t get it 100% correct, but they’ll do better than monopoly pricing
> The point is that there’s nothing magical about price discovery under an anti-competitive system.
There is though, because it gives you the price that it's worth to the buyers, which is the amount of benefit the buyers derive from it existing, which is the amount of incentive we want to provide to create it.
For something that wouldn't otherwise exist, the monopoly price for a temporary period of time is a close approximation to what would maximize welfare -- it's proportional to the value of having it exist without being the whole thing, because it becomes a competitive commodity when the patent expires.