Many of the wealthiest people in the country have gotten their wealth through patent or copyright monopolies. Bill Gates just being the most obvious example. Here's a person with over $100 billion in wealth on the richest people in the world. If the government hadn't given Microsoft copyrights in Pattinson Windows software, my joke is he'd probably still be working for a living. Dean Baker, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a visiting professor at the University of Utah. And I think people don't appreciate how important intellectual property is for the economy and really for society. We rely on intellectual property in here and thinking primarily of patent and copyright monopolies. We rely on them to provide an incentive for innovation in the case of prescription drugs, medical equipment, and any other areas. The idea is that the government grants these monopolies so that companies and individuals will invest the amount of money in time needed to innovate and they'll be able to recover their cost by having a monopoly for a period of time. It is expensive to innovate to develop a new drug. It requires a lot of research often many years, sometimes several decades. Well, no drug company is going to do that if they know that as soon as they have a drug that is effective, that's safe, that anyone could just manufacture it and sell it for a generic price. What I argue is we already spend a lot of money. The government spends a lot of money financing reserves, national institutes of health, and other government agencies spend over $50 billion a year financing biomedical research. And we can increase that amount. The industry currently spends a bit over $100 billion financing research that they expect to be supported through Pat Menopolis. We could look to replace that with public funding. And the big advantage would be is that when we come up with a new drug, it would be available as a cheap generic. From the day it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Instead of the new cancer drug, a new cancer treatment selling for hundreds of thousands a year, which many of them do, might sell for a few hundred dollars a year, maybe a thousand. The cost of buying the drug would not be expensive. And to my view, that's exactly what any commissary should want. We typically want items to sell for their cost of production. In the case of prescription drugs that are subject to patent protection, they could sell for markups that are 10,000 even 100,000 percent above the cost of production. We also have the perverse incentives if a drug company knows that they're selling a drug for $20,000 that costs them $200 per dose. They have a huge incentive to market as widely as possible. That might mean being deceptive and how they promote the drug. The opioid crisis, a great example, the companies that were producing opioids told the actors that it wasn't addictive. Even when they knew it was. So you give perverse incentives, you're encouraging the drug companies to push their drugs, even in context where they might not be helpful, might even be harmful. We'll spend over $500 billion this year on prescription drugs. That's about 2.5% GDP. This is big money. It's more than half the military budget. We probably spend less than 100 billion a year on prescription drugs if everything was sold at generic prices. So it's a huge amount of money out of people's pockets, in cases where you have issues with someone's in bad health and needs expensive drugs or medical treatment. Almost invariably the reason it's expensive is because of the patent. Otherwise, it would be relatively cheap. So we eliminate that problem if we had publicly funded research.