“There’s no doubt — I’m a capitalist, I’m trying to create a big drug company, a successful drug company, a profitable drug company. We’re trying to flourish.”

So said Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager and founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who has recently come to be known as “Big Pharma’s Biggest Asshole.” (And, truth be told, he sounds very much like a character out of an Ayn Rand story.) Shkreli is perhaps the most detested man in America at present for boosting the price of a medicine used by some of the most vulnerable people in society — AIDS patients and babies — by over 5,000 percent. According to court documents, he may be more than just unscrupulous.

There have been many good articles discussing how all around unethical this was. A chief scientific officer at a biotech company told Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, for example:

“I’m not a pricing expert. When I first entered the business I thought a bunch of guys would sit around in a room and whoever could say the highest number without giggling would set the price. [But] this is a guy who genuinely doesn’t give a shit.”

There is no doubt that Shkreli was “price gouging,” and he has since given in to public pressure and will be lowering the price (by how much is currently unknown). What was particularly interesting to hear, however, was Shkreli’s defense of his price hike, which, fortunately, the American people didn’t buy. It’s a defense that has long been used by capitalists; in fact, Donald Trump has been using a similar defense during his campaign.

“I’m a capitalist.”

It’s as if “being a capitalist” or a “businessman” excludes one from having to act ethically (which is certainly not to say that all businesspeople act this way, but it does seem to be a great excuse when someone is under fire for something that is generally frowned upon). Shkreli even went so far as to say that he was being altruistic: “I can see how it looks greedy, but I think there’s a lot of altruistic properties to it.” Of course, he was discussing research, a common defense made by Big Pharma to justify huge profits.

(And there are huge profits. Pharmaceutical companies have profit margins similar to those of the banking sector.)

Research always sounds better than price gouging. And while drug discovery is undoubtably an expensive and risky endeavor, drug companies never seem to mention that much more of their spending actually goes towards marketing than research. Good for television networks, but not so good for people paying outrageous prices for their medicine.

(By the way, the United States and New Zealand are the only countries that allow direct-to-consumer drug advertising.)