> Yes. If consumers and/or pharmacies in the US could easily and reliably source cheaper brand-name drugs from international markets where price ceilings are in effect, it would ruin many drug companies, especially smaller ones.

Those price ceilings only exist because of the artificial trade barrier between the US and those other countries. Without that trade barrier, pharmaceutical companies would charge roughly equivalent prices in the US and other countries. It wouldn't ruin drug companies at all.

>Without that trade barrier, pharmaceutical companies would charge roughly equivalent prices in the US and other countries.

You do know that many nations impose price controls on pharmaceutical products inside their own borders, right?

The companies would be fine, but it would probably severely limit the availability of life-saving drugs in poorer countries. One can argue that on the whole, that's a worse outcome.

That cannot be the reasoning behind imposing import restrictions. And even then I find the economic reasoning fault.

> That it was the spirit of monopoly which originally both invented and propagated this doctrine cannot be doubted; and they who first taught it were by no means such fools as they who believed it. In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind.

> The companies would be fine, but it would probably severely limit the availability of life-saving drugs in poorer countries. One can argue that on the whole, that's a worse outcome.

Not really - countries like China and India don't recognize US (or European) pharmaceutical patents to begin with, so they're not bound to purchasing brand-name drugs from the original manufacturer.