Are we talking about a coronovirus vaccine that would cover any manifestation of it, or on for 19? Should the other ( assuming at least 18) have been financed, too?. I mean this as a serious questioning, I don't denigrate the idea of being prepared. However, given so many things out their that might be the next big one, Shouldn't the money be put in to preparation to quickly react when that next one manifests rather than getting "investors" to fund one just in case it is the one ( and then probably pushing it on us "just in case").

"We could have had this ready to go and been testing the vaccine's efficacy at the start of this new outbreak in China," said Hotez, who believes the vaccine could provide cross-protection against the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory disease known as COVID-19. "There is a problem with the ecosystem in vaccine development, and we've got to fix this."

Let's be real, "how are you going to pay for it?" is kind of a pointless question when it comes to any aspect of healthcare when you consider what we do pay for on the regular. We rack up a limitless deficit on military expenditures without question while ignoring that health care is quite literally demonstrating itself to be a matter of national security.

And then top it all off, we pretty much pay for the research for almost every damn drug the pharma industry is producing anyway!
Taxpayers — not Big Pharma — have funded the research behind every new drug since 2010 | Other98

I'm not questioning that tax payers cover it ( I was concerned that they were looking for "investors"). I was more aiming at the fact that their are a huge number of potentially pandemic nasties out their and many permutations of those. For one group demonstrating a profit motive to say, "hey, it's going to be this one. Give us money" it is not clear that would have been the right move, except in retrospect. Being ready for a flexible quick response to whatever it might be, may be a more viable option than trying to cure every potential threat in the world.

Good idea, nationalize the lab, then fund them. Problem solved. :D

No, that only solves the profit motive issue. It does not solve how we decide which potential threats to allocate limited resources to when there are other threats as likely and of sufficient number as to exhaust those resources.

Cash is not the limited resource in this scenario, the time and energy of people is. The fact that you're "how are we going to pay for it?" for vaccines as if it has to come at the financial cost of other vaccines is the same mindset of people saying we can't afford to do anything about Climate Change. MONEY HAS NO INHERENT VALUE! We make money appear out of thin air whenever we do whatever form of Quantitative Easing the latest and greatest failures of the market require.

And the fact that in your own thought exercise you're imagining we have to redirect resources from one vaccine or medical emergency to another rather than say cut back on the amount of research towards another variation of an erectile dysfunction pill leads me to think maybe you're not the person I want playing god in this scenario anyway.

If I meant only cash, I would have said cash rather than the more inclusive "resources." If we spend enough cash to get every doctor and or qualified researcher in the world to work on it we would still have to make choices on which priorities to pursue among the possible future threats.

I'll ignore your last paragraph as it is an ad hominim based on something you imagine I would advocate rather than anything I said or implied.

Shouldn't the money be put in to preparation to quickly react when that next one manifests rather than getting "investors" to fund one just in case it is the one ( and then probably pushing it on us "just in case").

For one group demonstrating a profit motive to say, "hey, it's going to be this one. Give us money" it is not clear that would have been the right move, except in retrospect.

Don't ignore that last paragraph I'm completely serious about it. This thought exercise is silly in a post in which the title literally calls out capitalism.

Killing all the old people would save social security.

It was explained to me, when I was younger, that capitalism is any and all forms of commerce. And that communism was paying everyone the same no matter what. I assume that's still people's general understanding of it.

Heh - I think everyone still follows the old capitalism and cows trope.

I am noticing now is tons of, I don't know "right-flight" or "white-flight" or whatever it may be called. A lot of people I know and grew up with are leaving the U.S. for Mexico, the Caribbean Islands, and other places to live.

The strange thing about it - they are all die-hard tea-party/trumpheads. Besides the canned "taxes/blah-blah" reasons they spew forth, the one thread that runs through them all for leaving is that no one can afford the health care costs in the US. Crazy - they get all their fucking dream people in power, fuck everything up, and then leave the country. Maybe they will all start a commune in the middle of Guyana or something.

Very, very, rough answer:

Capitalism is when the people who have the capital (the means of production: Mounds of cash, tools, buildings, IP, etc) make the rules. Free market is the claimed utopian existence of it, but anyone who actually pays attention to how these things work notice that as soon as an entity gains enough leverage over the market, the market becomes anything but free.

Neoliberalism is a capitalist economic ideology that the only purpose of the government should be to enforce private property. Most US politicians are neoliberal whether they know it or not. This is because much of US education and media have over the past 6 decades or so been bought up or out by neoliberal forces (read Koch Brothers).

Socialism is when the workers own the capital and make the rules democratically. People tend to get paid the same because all workers have equal ownership of the company.

State Capitalism is what people typically think of as socialism (or even sometimes communism) where the State asserts power over the market often in the form of state owned services which are controlled through democratic control of the state. The most ideal form is the planned market where inefficiencies of production and deliveries are nullified through massive data crunching. Walmart and Amazon's internal logistics and shipping are pretty good example of a privately owned Planned Markets.

Communism is a kind of a stateless form of socialism. Trying to pin it down is kind of iffy because of how many theoretical takes of what it would look like. It tends towards a post-scarcity style of society where personal property is allowed, but private is not. IOW, you get to be a person with your own life and things, but you don't get to be a money hoarding dragon, basically.

You wouldn't know it from looking at US politics but historically, the left-right dynamic is basically Workers vs Capital. Democratic control vs Oligarchical control. The problem is in America we're so far to freaking right that even our representation of the left is still Oligarchical. Zinn's A People's History of United States is a great read on the struggles of the people through US history and is often the story of the workers. It's fascinating the way much of that history has been erased. As an example, I was just chatting on Instagram with someone how Redneck was a term used to self-identify by protesting coal miners in the 1920's but popular culture suspiciously transformed it into a derogatory term in the decades to follow.

Start with him