[patpending]

If I understand you correctly, then it does seem true to me that nature has no agency. However, when the choice a consumer has is to either pay the asking price for a <em>needed</em> drug or to die then I think the consumer has no meaningful choice at all. Given how unequal the bargaining power is between the buyer and seller in this situation, it's hard to see a free market solutions applies: it might be efficient, but it's also brutaly inhumane.

I know I've set up kind of a straw-man. It might be that the consumer could choose to forgo an expensive drug or medical procedure without fatal consequences, but that's not the interesting case.

[tathougies]

The choice shouldnt be between whether they need the drug or not but rather who to buy it from. The fact that there exists someone who needs a product is what drives the profit to zero in a free market because newer manufacturers are incentivized to provide the product. The choice is among from whom to buy not whether to buy at all.

Right now insulin is expensive because the government is preventing companies that can produce it for cheaper from selling in the united states because of a lawsuit by the current market holder. That the government even has this power is a textbook example of the danger of governmental interference in the free market. People are literally dying because the government has made the market less free intentionally