Yeah with pharma in particular you need that initial profitability, as you say.

Additionally...

People will say “what would give someone the incentive to make new things?” Without actually thinking it through. For a great example of how lack of IP is a good thing, look at how Shenzhen went from a fishing village to a Chinese San Francisco in a few short decades… one company will take the product of another and iterate on top of it.

This doesn't really make sense. Shenzen company's might have copied products developed by other companies, but surely you still need another company to invest the R & D initially in order to have something to copy.

Consumer products don't "evolve". Developing and producing are two different processes. If there's no IP then there's only an incentive to produce things, and no incentive to develop them. I think this is especially true of pharmaceuticals given that there's no incremental / evolutionary pathway to discovering new drugs and the costs of conducting trials et cetera is preclusive.