One of the clearest examples of the evil of capitalism is that there's even a debate about the profits of pharmaceutical companies vs. making it easier to vaccinate billions of people around the world
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Replying to @JoshuaPotash @BrianTRice
i have nothing against profit when it empowers and motivates efforts; i don’t understand why people are penny pinching. the price is less than $10 a dose when the value is (my guess) in the many hundreds / thousands! scale up! we have not set up capitalism to do its best here.
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but i guess why you’re writing about is the fact that nobody has succeeded in negotiating an ip sharing agreeement with e.g. pfizer and moderna, which is really frustrating. seems less about the innate evils of capitalism as much as just inept negotiation
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This is the point though. The fact that negotiation is even necessary in the first place highlights the problem. Rather than helping the world get over a global pandemic whilst breaking even, these arseholes are still primarily concerned with profiting from it.
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you do need some system of some kind to deploy billions of dollars to scale up manufacturing of a novel thing, so i do think you need some mechanism of governance & while i would hope for a jonas salk like opening up of the ip, folklore on this is that this actually slowed scale
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Yes, because companies are not willing to do it for no profit. They COULD though. But capitalist mindset dictates they SHOULDN'T. They could stop their crusade for maximum profits and growth in this one instance and produce the vaccine at break even. They just won't.
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i mean, the $ per dose is like $3 or something, they can’t produce at a loss in a capitalist economy for long. the lockdowns cost trillions!
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