<You don't complain about CEO's of failed companies or monopolies, but lawyers can't make a few bucks?

When a CEO makes money by fraud and deceit, it's a crime. You certainly seemed to think so when they were chasing corporate CEOs with flaming torches a few months ago. And in case you hadn't noticed at the time, I agreed with you.

When a lawyer makes money by fraud and deceit, it is also a crime.

That was easy, wasn't it?

How about the drug companies? Uncle Sugar funds the vast majority of drug research through universities, and the drug companies come along, license them, then sell them to the people who paid for most of them for 3 to 10 times what they charge the people in countries who DIDN'T pay for the development.

This is actually a myth, which is the nice term for a lie, but as usual it won't keep you from repeating it until the heat death of the universe.

Pure research is often done at universities, paid for by a variety of sources, including the private sector. If the research is funded by the government, the results are usually in the public domain. The reason that everybody doesn't immediately snap up the results and start making the new drug is that it currently costs on the close order of a billion dollars to drag a drug through the insane number of hoops--far more than are necessary--that the FDA requires to get a drug to the point where you can actually sell it. All of this money comes from the drug companies. Then, after years of work, while the patents slowly tick away, and assuming that the FDA doesn't turn thumbs down and throw their hundreds of millions of investment into the trash, the company can finally put it on the market for the last few years before the patent runs out and the generic companies can jump all over it. Not too surprisingly, they sell it for as high a price as they can manage.

If you want to do something about the costs of prescriptions, try giving the FDA bureaucracy a good, hard look.

In any case, the government has its fingers entwined so firmly into almost all parts of the private sector, that there are damn few industries that can claim that the taxpayer hasn't funded SOME portion of the work they are doing somewhere along the line. It sure as heck is true in the aerospace industry.