These weren't examples of "neglect", they were active steps taken by the dam owners/resort members to maximize their own enjoyment by increasing the risk to everyone downstream. It at least rises to the level of depraved indifference.
Very similar things could be said of Aberfan. This is an argument against infrastructure mismanagement, not any particular form of infrastructure ownership.
My larger point is that "redistribution of wealth" in the form of either government regulations requiring basic safety measures be implemented by property holders or in the form of taxation used by the state to implement such repairs themselves is neither theft as @Marvin the Martiansuggested nor tyranny.
The amount of twisting and turning going on here would make an Olympic gymnast proud.
Firstly, in what sense are regulations about infrastructure safety "redistribution of wealth"?
Secondly, and as you well know, the context of the conversation you link to was not taxation but the right to property ownership in and of itself. You spent days insisting on the difference between public and private property, in the context of your assertion that a socialist government would protect the individual's right to their personal property. Why insist so much on that wording (and the definition thereof) if not to make it abundantly clear that the individual's right to private property would not be protected? From there it's easy to conclude that anyone who currently owns "private property" would have it stripped from them and taken into communal ownership - rather more serious an action than an extra penny or two on tax, wouldn't you say?
Which seems to hinge on the notion that being wealthier than your neighbour constitutes tyrannizing him. Which seems obviously false...
I'm not so sure it's obvious. Take, for example, the South Fork Dam in Pennsylvania. Originally constructed by the state, it was eventually sold to private interests who wanted to use the lake created by the dam as a luxury resort. Later alterations and neglected maintenance weakened the integrity of the dam and, well . . . Killing a bunch of poor people for your amusement might not fit the dictionary definition of "tyranny", but it's at least tyranny-adjacent. I'm also not seeing anything particularly tyrannical about redistributing wealth from rich club owners to perform necessary maintenance so their resort lake doesn't end up killing a bunch of people downstream.
Phrasing that disaster as "killing a bunch of poor people for your amusement" is ridiculous. It was an accident caused by infrastructure neglect, not a deliberate act.
"Infrastructure neglect" is a bit like invoking the passive voice in this particular case. Active decisions made:
Lowering the dam to build a road across it for the convenience of resort members
Despite lowering the dam, raising the level of the lake, probably to make it more æsthtically pleasing and/or provide more lakefront
Selling off the system of relief pipes and valves for salvage value so there would be no way to lower the level of the lake in the event of an emergency
These weren't examples of "neglect", they were active steps taken by the dam owners/resort members to maximize their own enjoyment by increasing the risk to everyone downstream. It at least rises to the level of depraved indifference.
None of which justifies drawing a direct link between "killing" and "amusement" by placing the word "for" in between them.
You might be mounting a case that various actions for the purposes of amusement** led to death. But if you can't wrap your head around the crucial differences between causation and purposes, you have no business playing in this space.
**Even this is too simplistic. There's a difference between building a road to provide better access to fun and building a road 'for fun'. But we need to get you past the basics before trying intermediate level.
Capitalism gives you Three Mile Island and socialism Chernobyl. The question is not whether the economic system is capitalist or socialist but the political question of accountability.
The amount of twisting and turning going on here would make an Olympic gymnast proud.
Ahem.
It is you Marvin who wanted to define ownership is a sense of having the right to do with as you wish. It is quite clear that there is a moral and legal liability to me if I own a dam and don't maintain it properly if it subsequently fails resulting in destruction and death to others.
Acknowledging that fact means acknowledging that ownership is not simple.
Aberfan was unforgivable in my view - a clear case of wilful negligence and cover up. As noted, the issue here is accountability. There have been disasters under both private and public stewardship hence the ownership itself is not the consideration. The issue is accountability and regulation.
The problem for you Marvin is not that you oppose public sector ownership but that you postulated a definition of private ownership that puts it beyond the law and any regulation.
In terms of the UK housing market, there's some literature that suggests that whilst there is a clear shortage of housing and this is a driver of house prices, it's not the major driver. The biggest driver is artificially low interest rates. For more than a decade now, Real interest rates (I.e. when you allow for inflation) have been almost zero. Why? Because in 2009 we faced a massive economic crisis and interest rates than were low-normal had to be cut further. And then George Osborne failed so completely that interest rates never got back to normal levels. This has lots of important effects but the more interesting question is why did he fail?
Mostly because he didn't believe the state should play a meaningful role in the economy. That is stupid at the best of times but frankly insane during a financial crisis when the government is almost the only game in town.
Firstly, in what sense are regulations about infrastructure safety "redistribution of wealth"?
In the sense that the government is confiscating resources from private citizens and repurposing them for the benefit of someone else, either in the form of regulatory takings that require certain expenditures or taxation so the state can deal with the issue themselves. The phrase "redistribution of wealth" is so vague and general it covers pretty much everything the state does.
Secondly, and as you well know, the context of the conversation you link to was not taxation but the right to property ownership in and of itself. You spent days insisting on the difference between public and private property, in the context of your assertion that a socialist government would protect the individual's right to their personal property.
Why insist so much on that wording (and the definition thereof) if not to make it abundantly clear that the individual's right to private property would not be protected?
[ Citation needed ] I'm pretty sure I never insisted that.
From there it's easy to conclude that anyone who currently owns "private property" would have it stripped from them and taken into communal ownership - rather more serious an action than an extra penny or two on tax, wouldn't you say?
I'd say (since you're bothering to ask me something rather than simply attributing to me the posts of other Shipmates) it's a question of degree, not kind. Taxation is a system by which the state confiscates property and/or resources we consider ours and puts it to use for its own purposes. I'm not seeing a significant philosophical difference between doing this to liquid and illiquid assets, though there may be pragmatic differences.
None of which justifies drawing a direct link between "killing" and "amusement" by placing the word "for" in between them.
You might be mounting a case that various actions for the purposes of amusement led to death. But if you can't wrap your head around the crucial differences between causation and purposes, you have no business playing in this space.
I'm not convinced there is a meaningful separation between intention and the known likely outcomes of deliberate actions. Petrochemical companies don't specifically intend to give people cancer when they unsafely dispose of their waste products, but it's an easily foreseeable outcome of their decision to maximize profits in this way and could reasonably be characterized as "giving people cancer for profit".
It is you Marvin who wanted to define ownership is a sense of having the right to do with as you wish. It is quite clear that there is a moral and legal liability to me if I own a dam and don't maintain it properly if it subsequently fails resulting in destruction and death to others.
Acknowledging that fact means acknowledging that ownership is not simple.
No, it just means you're liable for any damage that may be caused by your actions (or lack thereof). If I stab someone I'm liable for that damage (both criminally and civilly), but that liability doesn't mean I never really owned the knife in the first place.
Similarly, if I leave my car on a hill with the handbrake off and it rolls down into someone's house I'm liable for the damage caused due to my negligence. But that doesn't affect the fact that I own the car.
Aberfan was unforgivable in my view - a clear case of wilful negligence and cover up. As noted, the issue here is accountability. There have been disasters under both private and public stewardship hence the ownership itself is not the consideration. The issue is accountability and regulation.
Agreed.
The problem for you Marvin is not that you oppose public sector ownership but that you postulated a definition of private ownership that puts it beyond the law and any regulation.
It is you Marvin who wanted to define ownership is a sense of having the right to do with as you wish. It is quite clear that there is a moral and legal liability to me if I own a dam and don't maintain it properly if it subsequently fails resulting in destruction and death to others.
Acknowledging that fact means acknowledging that ownership is not simple.
No, it just means you're liable for any damage that may be caused by your actions (or lack thereof). If I stab someone I'm liable for that damage (both criminally and civilly), but that liability doesn't mean I never really owned the knife in the first place.
But it does radically increase the likelihood that the state will confiscate your knife, and possibly place restrictions on your ability to possess a knife in the future.
It is you Marvin who wanted to define ownership is a sense of having the right to do with as you wish. It is quite clear that there is a moral and legal liability to me if I own a dam and don't maintain it properly if it subsequently fails resulting in destruction and death to others.
Acknowledging that fact means acknowledging that ownership is not simple.
No, it just means you're liable for any damage that may be caused by your actions (or lack thereof). If I stab someone I'm liable for that damage (both criminally and civilly), but that liability doesn't mean I never really owned the knife in the first place.
But it does radically increase the likelihood that the state will confiscate your knife, and possibly place restrictions on your ability to possess a knife in the future.
Quite probably, and as a punishment for stabbing someone that would probably be reasonable. But that doesn't mean nobody should ever be allowed to own a knife. A lot of the discourse on this thread has been along the lines of "these rich people did bad things with their business/building/lake/etc, so nobody should ever be allowed to own that sort of property".
Should the criminal negligence of the people who owned and operated the resort of which South Fork Dam was a part mean they should be prevented from running any similar resort again*? Quite probably, assuming they ever get out of jail. Does that mean private ownership of resorts of that kind shouldn't be allowed at all? Of course not.
.
*= yes, I know they're all long dead by now. Not the point.
Quite probably, and as a punishment for stabbing someone that would probably be reasonable. But that doesn't mean nobody should ever be allowed to own a knife. A lot of the discourse on this thread has been along the lines of "these rich people did bad things with their business/building/lake/etc, so nobody should ever be allowed to own that sort of property".
In the UK, as you know, gun ownership is quite tightly controlled. You may not own many types of gun at all. This is directly because of the actions of a small number of people.
Nobody is allowed to own an automatic rifle because of what Michael Ryan did with one. Nobody is allowed to own a handgun because of the shooting at Dunblane.
The decision that was made, with widespread public support, was that the benefit to people who, for example, enjoyed target shooting with these kinds of weapons was outweighed by the risk of someone "going postal" with them.
It's not impossible that similar logic could be applied to private ownership of lakes.
Quite probably, and as a punishment for stabbing someone that would probably be reasonable. But that doesn't mean nobody should ever be allowed to own a knife.
But the government does restrict private ownership of a lot of things. Certain drugs, for example. Or refined uranium. I'm not sure a blanket assumption that the government can't exert prior restraint over the ownership of any type of property is warranted.
Should the criminal negligence of the people who owned and operated the resort of which South Fork Dam was a part mean they should be prevented from running any similar resort again? Quite probably, assuming they ever get out of jail.
Ha ha! You're so funny! Of course a bunch of Gilded Age plutocrats never spent any time in jail for negligently killing a bunch of working class folks. Such people might see the inside of a courtroom, but they'd never see the inside of a prison cell. You're such a kidder!
@alienfromzog , your excellent long post deserves a reply.
Seems to me that the key idea here is about the spectrum between the completely-unregulated market (which you call the neoliberal ideal, and which nobody here is arguing for) through the mixed economy, which I would have said that we all believe in, but now I'm not so sure (glances sideways at Doc Tor) to the planned economy (which we're calling the communist ideal).
Seems to me that maybe if those of us who lean rightward / marketward don't agree with neoliberalism then we should set out some principle that distinguishes us from the neoliberal extreme, that limits the amount of market that we're arguing for. And vice versa - if the left don't want to be thought communist then it's up to them to set out some principle, some limit on how leftward / stateward they want to go. Because many arguments for more or less state control (or assumptions behind such arguments) have no such inbuilt limit, and constitute an argument for the extreme as much as they are an argument for the less-extreme position that the writer claims to hold.
When it comes to government intervention in the market, I see a case for "shaping" the market in terms of
- preventing abuse of monopoly power
- smoothing out short-term fluctuation
- putting a price on environmental externalities ("polluter pays")
- providing a social safety net
- keeping transactions honest (e.g. advertising standards).
Not saying that's an exhaustive list, just recognising that government can and does intervene constructively to make the market work better as a market. So no I'm not a neoliberal in the sense you're using it.
But the opposite can also happen - government intervening to rig the market thereby preventing it from working well as a market. For example, Alan Cresswell seems to be suggesting that the UK government has rigged the housing market to keep prices artificially high.
Quite probably, and as a punishment for stabbing someone that would probably be reasonable. But that doesn't mean nobody should ever be allowed to own a knife. A lot of the discourse on this thread has been along the lines of "these rich people did bad things with their business/building/lake/etc, so nobody should ever be allowed to own that sort of property".
In the UK, as you know, gun ownership is quite tightly controlled. You may not own many types of gun at all. This is directly because of the actions of a small number of people.
Nobody is allowed to own an automatic rifle because of what Michael Ryan did with one. Nobody is allowed to own a handgun because of the shooting at Dunblane.
The decision that was made, with widespread public support, was that the benefit to people who, for example, enjoyed target shooting with these kinds of weapons was outweighed by the risk of someone "going postal" with them.
It's not impossible that similar logic could be applied to private ownership of lakes.
Guns have no purpose other than to kill. Lakes and knives have many perfectly valid purposes. Not the best comparison.
I mean, yes the public could decide that only the government should be allowed to own land or water. That’s democracy, after all. But I really don’t think it’s a good idea at all.
That's a good point. It is very tiresome to be painted as a communist when one is trying to argue that a mixed economy with certain key features is a good idea. I am sure the converse is also true on the other side.
My defence of course lies in the title of the thread. It is an unequivocal Strawman. My other defence is that we live with a lot of neoliberalism in our society that gets a free pass whilst sensible, well-evidenced government interventions are constantly decried as akin to Communism. I think there has been some of that of this thread but undoubtedly it is hugely present in our culture.
Of course a bunch of Gilded Age plutocrats never spent any time in jail for negligently killing a bunch of working class folks.
They should have done though.
The world should be a perfect place. The rich should be subject to the same laws enforced in the same way with the same penalties as are the poor. Hahahahaha! Too funny.
None of which justifies drawing a direct link between "killing" and "amusement" by placing the word "for" in between them.
You might be mounting a case that various actions for the purposes of amusement led to death. But if you can't wrap your head around the crucial differences between causation and purposes, you have no business playing in this space.
I'm not convinced there is a meaningful separation between intention and the known likely outcomes of deliberate actions.
And given the part of my remarks you chose to mark in bold, I'm not sure you understand what "causation" means. It does not mean "known likely outcomes". It means actual outcomes.
After that, you just decided to switch to a completely different example from the one I originally took you task on, to argue a quite different issue. Which reads to me like an admission that your position was not defensible, so you shifted ground.
Again you're just telling me that you cannot parse the important differences between intentions and results. I've got no problem with the notion that people need to take into account foreseeable results. But that's not what I was criticising you for.
You didn't argue that someone should have foreseen what building a road would do and failed do so. You didn't convey that they were incompetent, you conveyed that they were malicious. Which is not the same thing at all.
None of which justifies drawing a direct link between "killing" and "amusement" by placing the word "for" in between them.
You might be mounting a case that various actions for the purposes of amusement led to death. But if you can't wrap your head around the crucial differences between causation and purposes, you have no business playing in this space.
I'm not convinced there is a meaningful separation between intention and the known likely outcomes of deliberate actions.
And given the part of my remarks you chose to mark in bold, I'm not sure you understand what "causation" means. It does not mean "known likely outcomes". It means actual outcomes.
"Actual outcomes" are not always known in advance. "Known likely outcomes" are the best most people can do when trying to anticipate future developments that might flow from their actions, like removing key safety features may actually be dangerous. If someone decides to roll the dice on a bunch of other people's lives and loses that bet, I'm willing to hold them accountable for that decision.
You didn't argue that someone should have foreseen what building a road would do and failed do so. You didn't convey that they were incompetent, you conveyed that they were malicious. Which is not the same thing at all.
If I meant to convey that the owners of the dam were malicious I would have used the word "murdering" instead of "killing". It wasn't so much the building of the road as the fact that building the road lowered the dam at the same time as the level of the lake behind it was raised. Coupled with removing the emergency drain system and slipshod maintenance, a dam failure and it's likely outcome were easy to foresee. No one had any trouble connecting the dots in the aftermath once the details were known beyond the membership of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
To take a theoretical modern example as a parallel, it would be as if Grenfell Tower had a sprinkler system installed and the building owner had it pulled out and sold for salvage. Sure, there's was no fire when the system was being removed and the owner certainly wouldn't plan on setting a fire, but that decision would definitely and foreseeably get a lot of people killed.
If someone decides to roll the dice on a bunch of other people's lives and loses that bet, I'm willing to hold them accountable for that decision.
The distinction between intended consequences and consequences known to be likely is not the same as the distinction between consequences for which people can be held accountable and those for which they can't. One can perfectly well hold people accountable for unintended consequences they knew were likely.
The distinction between intended consequences and consequences known to be likely is not the same as the distinction between consequences for which people can be held accountable and those for which they can't. One can perfectly well hold people accountable for unintended consequences they knew were likely.
I'm wondering about this whole notion of accountability.
If I accidentally hit a cricket ball through somebody's window, does my accountability depend on how likely that outcome was ?
Is the answer different if you think "accountability" means moral culpability than if you think it means responsibility to pay for the damage ?
Noting that likelihood is infinitely divisible, but that responsibility to pay tends to be all-or-nothing...
The distinction between intended consequences and consequences known to be likely is not the same as the distinction between consequences for which people can be held accountable and those for which they can't. One can perfectly well hold people accountable for unintended consequences they knew were likely.
I'm wondering about this whole notion of accountability.
If I accidentally hit a cricket ball through somebody's window, does my accountability depend on how likely that outcome was ?
Is the answer different if you think "accountability" means moral culpability than if you think it means responsibility to pay for the damage ?
Noting that likelihood is infinitely divisible, but that responsibility to pay tends to be all-or-nothing...
At the risk of creating a tangent, in most jurisdictions that last bit isn't quite true. Often is some culpability is attached to the victim then the compensation awarded will be discounted proportionately.
At the risk of creating a tangent, in most jurisdictions that last bit isn't quite true. Often is some culpability is attached to the victim then the compensation awarded will be discounted proportionately.
And with something like a cricket ball, it's easy to come up with examples. In the back of my head is an example of a motorist who parked their car adjacent to the village cricket green on a Saturday, and had a window broken. I think they were judged mostly responsible, because they could see the cricket match going on when they parked, and should have realized that there was a chance of a ball hitting their car.
It certainly sounds different if you talk about someone setting up a cricket game next to some parked cars vs someone parking their car next to a cricket game.
None of which says much about whether cricket pitches should be privately or communally owned.
True, but it may cast light on the thinking of socialists.
For example, if someone moves house to an area that's downstream of a dam, are they thereby partly responsible for any loss they suffer if the dam breaks ? Which they wouldn't
be if they were there before the dam ?
Once you accept a "we were here first" argument in one sphere, it may have application elsewhere...
Or is there some level of likelihood that is so low that one is entitled to treat it as zero ? If you can park anywhere along the street from right next to the village green to a mile away, does it follow that there is one parking space where the motorist has no responsibility and an adjacent one where he has some ?
Or is the important question whether he's a wealthy motorist?
For example, if someone moves house to an area that's downstream of a dam, are they thereby partly responsible for any loss they suffer if the dam breaks ?
Silly comparison. A hard ball being hit in any and all directions, with an associated risk to cars parked near the pitch, is an integral part of the game of cricket. Releasing a large and dangerous flood is not an integral part of the function of a dam. The former is to be expected, the latter is very much not - and that directly affects who bears liability for the damage if the accident happens.
Which still says nothing at all about which form of ownership is better or worse.
None of which says much about whether cricket pitches should be privately or communally owned.
True, but it may cast light on the thinking of socialists.
For example, if someone moves house to an area that's downstream of a dam, are they thereby partly responsible for any loss they suffer if the dam breaks ? Which they wouldn't
be if they were there before the dam ?
Once you accept a "we were here first" argument in one sphere, it may have application elsewhere...
Or is there some level of likelihood that is so low that one is entitled to treat it as zero ? If you can park anywhere along the street from right next to the village green to a mile away, does it follow that there is one parking space where the motorist has no responsibility and an adjacent one where he has some ?
Or is the important question whether he's a wealthy motorist?
I completely fail to see how any of this pertains particularly to socialists.
A hard ball being hit in any and all directions, with an associated risk to cars parked near the pitch, is an integral part of the game of cricket. Releasing a large and dangerous flood is not an integral part of the function of a dam. The former is to be expected, the latter is very much not
The point is about likelihood.
Most people don't seem to think that watching a game of cricket from the boundary is such a dangerous activity that a hard hat or other PPE is needed. Being hit on the head by a ball is not that likely. But likely enough that nobody's going to be astounded if they read in the paper that somewhere it happens.
What I'm expressing scepticism about is the double standard that treats improbable events as likely enough to have been reasonably foreseeable ("to be expected") when discussing the actions of someone that one blames for the accident. But unlikely enough to have been totally unforeseeable by the innocent victims (with whom one rightly sympathizes).
Which still says nothing at all about which form of ownership is better or worse.
Indeed. The suggestion that either private ownership in general, or private ownership by those in receipt of incomes above a certain threshold, necessarily involves a callous disregard for the safety of others is, when you examine it, false.
But that won't stop some people hinting at such a causal relationship if it suits their narrative.
I'm wondering now whether this dam was owned by one individual or a group of people collectively ?
What I'm expressing scepticism about is the double standard that treats improbable events as likely enough to have been reasonably foreseeable ("to be expected") when discussing the actions of someone that one blames for the accident. But unlikely enough to have been totally unforeseeable by the innocent victims (with whom one rightly sympathizes).
There is very often a substantial information differential between those two groups. For example, the people selling off a dam's emergency relief pipes and valves for scrap know this has been done. The people living downstream from the dam probably do not.
Could someone please clarify the point of the current discussion. Is it about the relationship between ownership, private or public, and likelihood of carelessness regarding public safety and environmental degradation or what? To my mind it's a question of accountability rather than type of ownership, and that the critical variable is the strength of democratic accountability.
Johnson spekes his branes, before remembering someone might hear him and acting like a cat trying to claw the soiled carpet into the litter tray: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56504546
This is the heart of democratic socialism and this whole thread.
All of the vaccines were developed and deployed very quickly because of the following factors:
1. The basic research already existed
2. Governments and charities funded the key research in the past 15 months
3. The drug companies are providing the vaccines at cost price
4. There is significant cooperation between sectors and companies - even one company in the US producing a competitor's product.
So a) this is what modern socialism looks like, what collective action for the common good can do and what capitalism could never achieve
And b) Right-wingers claim the success for capitalism, contrary to the basic facts.
YMMV, of course...
AFZ
P.s. I know I have oversimplified slightly but only because these points are so fundamental and I'm so tired of the same old lies.
Another factor (especially relevant to your point 1, that the basic research already existed) is international cooperation. Science isn't individuals or small groups in single institutions, but large collaborations dependent upon individuals moving between institutions.
To take the Oxford vaccine research group as an example. The expertise there is multinational, a lot of it developed through EU funding (direct funding of projects through Framework and ERC grants, plus mobility funds such as Marie Curie Sklodowska fellowships and Erasmus+) in addition to UK funding and other multinational funding. There would also have been an indirect effect from proximity to the EMA based in London, which in turn attracted large numbers of pharmaceutical companies to London and surrounding areas; a year into this pandemic and most of us are forgetting what physical meetings are like, but proximity does play a bit role in forging collaboration - how many pharma business people visited the Oxford group with networks formed simply because they had offices an hour or two away? Would those meetings have happened if those pharma business offices were located to be convenient for EMA based somewhere else, like Amsterdam?
Of course, you could say that all relates to Brexit rather than socialism (and, you could be right!). But, it's also true that if medicine was entirely within the remit of private businesses then it's very likely that the levels of collaboration and mobility would be significantly lower than what we currently have where the basic research is very often conducted in publicly funded universities and research institutes working collaboratively with extensive networks and staff frequently moving between those labs and between the public and private sectors. It can be argued that private capital is very good at bringing new products to market, that final step where profits can be made (or, as is the case of the initial vaccine roll-out at least covering costs). But, how good is private capital at funding the basic research where it's never clear that there will be a product, or even where that product might be - remember the Biontec and Moderna vaccines are based on research aimed at cancer treatments.
Another factor (especially relevant to your point 1, that the basic research already existed) is international cooperation. Science isn't individuals or small groups in single institutions, but large collaborations dependent upon individuals moving between institutions.
To take the Oxford vaccine research group as an example. The expertise there is multinational, a lot of it developed through EU funding (direct funding of projects through Framework and ERC grants, plus mobility funds such as Marie Curie Sklodowska fellowships and Erasmus+) in addition to UK funding and other multinational funding. There would also have been an indirect effect from proximity to the EMA based in London, which in turn attracted large numbers of pharmaceutical companies to London and surrounding areas; a year into this pandemic and most of us are forgetting what physical meetings are like, but proximity does play a bit role in forging collaboration - how many pharma business people visited the Oxford group with networks formed simply because they had offices an hour or two away? Would those meetings have happened if those pharma business offices were located to be convenient for EMA based somewhere else, like Amsterdam?
Of course, you could say that all relates to Brexit rather than socialism (and, you could be right!). But, it's also true that if medicine was entirely within the remit of private businesses then it's very likely that the levels of collaboration and mobility would be significantly lower than what we currently have where the basic research is very often conducted in publicly funded universities and research institutes working collaboratively with extensive networks and staff frequently moving between those labs and between the public and private sectors. It can be argued that private capital is very good at bringing new products to market, that final step where profits can be made (or, as is the case of the initial vaccine roll-out at least covering costs). But, how good is private capital at funding the basic research where it's never clear that there will be a product, or even where that product might be - remember the Biontec and Moderna vaccines are based on research aimed at cancer treatments.
I couldn't agree more, Alan. On every level. Drug companies do not do basic research. Basic research is funded by the public and charity sectors.*
Pharmaceutical companies only invest once they have a potential agent to develop.
I have no problem with that model. That's how it works and for the most part it works well. But let's be honest here, capitalism does not create new medicines. It simply doesn't.
AFZ
*it is worth noting here that Glaxo-Smithkline contribute a lot of money to basic research via the Wellcome Trust but that is a charity they inherited with a previous merger.
I don't think you can look at today's vaccine production and ascribe all the good to "democratic socialism." The existing drug companies are pretty important, and it's a huge leap of faith to assume they'd behave exactly the same way in the absence of capitalism.
This is the heart of democratic socialism and this whole thread.
All of the vaccines were developed and deployed very quickly because of the following factors:
1. The basic research already existed
2. Governments and charities funded the key research in the past 15 months
3. The drug companies are providing the vaccines at cost price
4. There is significant cooperation between sectors and companies - even one company in the US producing a competitor's product.
So a) this is what modern socialism looks like, what collective action for the common good can do and what capitalism could never achieve
And b) Right-wingers claim the success for capitalism, contrary to the basic facts.
There was an interesting article in the New York Times* a few days ago dealing with vaccine development and distribution. It compared the rollout in the EU with that in the U.S. and U.K.
The calls began in December, as the United States prepared to administer its first batches of Covid-19 vaccine. Even then, it was clear that the European Union was a few weeks behind, and its leaders wanted to know what they could learn from their American counterparts.
<snip>
Since then, the rollout gap between Europe and the United States has only widened, and some of the countries hardest hit early in the pandemic are facing a deadly third wave of infections. France, large parts of Italy, and other regions are back in lockdown. Roughly 20,000 Europeans die of Covid-19 each week.
<snip>
But the biggest explanation, the one that has haunted the bloc for months, is as much philosophical as it was operational. European governments are often seen in the United States as free-spending, liberal bastions, but this time it was Washington that threw billions at drugmakers and cosseted their business.
Brussels, by comparison, took a conservative, budget-conscious approach that left the open market largely untouched. And it has paid for it.
In short, the answer today is the same as it was in December, said Dr. Slaoui. The bloc shopped for vaccines like a customer. The United States basically went into business with the drugmakers, spending much more heavily to accelerate vaccine development, testing and production.
“They assumed that simply contracting to acquire doses would be enough,” recalled Dr. Slaoui, whom President Donald J. Trump hired to speed the vaccine development. “In fact what was very important was to be a full, active partner in the development and the manufacturing of the vaccine. And to do so very early.”
There's more at the link if you're interested. The basic lesson here is that relying on the free market for disaster relief is an even bigger handicap than being led by Donald Trump or Boris Johnson for most/all of the relevant time period. ContraDave W, government policy/interference has a big effect on the way corporations behave.
* The New York Times has a paywall that limits non-subscribers to five or ten articles per calendar month. If you're not a NYT subscriber only click through if you're willing to use one of your monthly Times clicks on an article comparing EU vaccine development and distribution to efforts in the U.S. and U.K.
I don't think you can look at today's vaccine production and ascribe all the good to "democratic socialism." The existing drug companies are pretty important, and it's a huge leap of faith to assume they'd behave exactly the same way in the absence of capitalism.
Why not? It's a blatantly socialist program, as both Alan and I have laid out. Which part of my or Alan's posts are you trying to refute?
I don't think you can look at today's vaccine production and ascribe all the good to "democratic socialism." The existing drug companies are pretty important, and it's a huge leap of faith to assume they'd behave exactly the same way in the absence of capitalism.
Why not? It's a blatantly socialist program, as both Alan and I have laid out. Which part of my or Alan's posts are you trying to refute?
Where did all these drug companies come from? Not from democratic socialism.
ContraDave W, government policy/interference has a big effect on the way corporations behave.
That's not contra me at all. I just said that claiming the speedy development of the vaccine as a victory for democratic socialism ignores the pre-existence of a lot of big capitalist drug companies.
ContraDave W, government policy/interference has a big effect on the way corporations behave.
That's not contra me at all. I just said that claiming the speedy development of the vaccine as a victory for democratic socialism ignores the pre-existence of a lot of big capitalist drug companies.
Given how heavily regulated medical manufacturers are, I'm not sure they count as purely capitalist entities. For example, governments often interfere to keep competitors out of the market in the form of various drug regulations. (e.g. the competitor who sells a "COVID-19 vaccine" that's nothing but saline will likely be put out of business, possibly even face criminal charges.) Another socialized practice of big pharma from the articleI mentioned earlier:
The United States made the negotiations easy — its critics say far too easy — by signing away any right to intellectual property and absolving the drug companies of any liability if the vaccines disappointed. Washington paid for the development and the trials; the companies had essentially nothing to lose.
Drugmakers expected the same concessions in Europe, but the back and forth over liability was the major stumbling block, Ms. Gallina said. European negotiators had to reconcile disparate liability laws across multiple countries, finding common ground among 27 leaders.
This kind of lemon socialism (privatized profit and socialized risk) is not limited to the COVID vaccines but a common feature of drug companies' business practices.
I don't think you can look at today's vaccine production and ascribe all the good to "democratic socialism." The existing drug companies are pretty important, and it's a huge leap of faith to assume they'd behave exactly the same way in the absence of capitalism.
Why not? It's a blatantly socialist program, as both Alan and I have laid out. Which part of my or Alan's posts are you trying to refute?
Where did all these drug companies come from? Not from democratic socialism.
ContraDave W, government policy/interference has a big effect on the way corporations behave.
That's not contra me at all. I just said that claiming the speedy development of the vaccine as a victory for democratic socialism ignores the pre-existence of a lot of big capitalist drug companies.
But the drug companie' role is actually surprisingly small, that's the point. The research and development has been government funded and to a huge extent performed in publically funded institutions. And remember democratic socialism is not anti-capitalism (that's the Strawman that underpins this thread title). The role of the drug companies in all this has been completely underwritten by various national governments!! Left to the market alone, this would never have happened: too big a risk, too little return (in financial terms). No drug company would do this on their own.
I'm not saying they're "purely capitalist" entities, or that their business practices are entirely defensible. But they're certainly examples of private ownership of the means of production. It's really been really convenient to have them available for developing and producing the vaccine. A democratic socialist system might have something just as good (or maybe not) but it wouldn't have these, and to the extent that they were important in vaccine development it's wrong to just claim it's all been a clear victory for democratic socialism.
A democratic socialist system might have something just as good (or maybe not) but it wouldn't have these, and to the extent that they were important in vaccine development it's wrong to just claim it's all been a clear victory for democratic socialism.
Yet the U.S. and U.K. seem to have had more success with a democratic socialist approach to the problem, at least according to the New York Times.
And the NYT article nowhere uses the term "democratic socialist". Where's the public ownership of the means of production? Where are the workers' councils? What's democratic socialist about stuffing private companies full of money?
The point is that big pharma rarely (if ever) develop and produce anything. The vast majority of development is conducted elsewhere, in publicly funded labs at universities and similar institutes. Big pharma pick up promising products when the public purse has picked up the majority of the costs to that point - they'll make a payment for that which is probably a decent contribution to the development of that product, but adds very little to the costs of the fundamental research or research into drugs that didn't get very far.
Big pharma is very good at scaling up from research scale to mass production, especially important for vaccines where we'll need more than 10 billion doses.
I'm not criticising big pharma (certainly not in their role in getting the vaccines rolled out). Just pointing out that the costs of basic research are rarely (if ever) borne by the private companies - these costs are very high, and the chances of no return (in the form of a product that can be sold) also high. That sort of research where returns are only of the form of intellectual knowledge doesn't lend itself well to private business funding - there are likely to be products, but at an unknown time in the future, and potentially it will be a competitor who gets the product.
I'm with you Alan and AFZ but I thought the big pharma companies always 'justified' their large profits by citing high development costs of their products along with high risk of dead-end product research. Have they been misleading us?
None of the basic research (which begins really with SARS and MERS nearly 20 years ago) was in or funded by the private sector. The rapid development in the past 15 months has been underwritten by national governments. Big Pharma has provided the production capacity.
What part of my narrative is wrong?
What part of my conclusion is wrong? That this is a classic example of where the market alone was incapable but the public sector can play a key role in improving outcomes for the population in a way that simple market forces never will?
I'm objecting to your claim this is a victory for "democratic socialism" or "modern socialism" when a very large part of the effort was performed by existing, capitalist pharmaceutical companies.
This isn't "modern socialism" - it's an emergency effort, like a war. Fascist countries could have done similar things - and did, in WWII. I don't think the democratic socialist state you would advocate would operate anything like this under normal circumstances, so I think it's misleading to claim this as a victory for socialism.
I'm objecting to your claim this is a victory for "democratic socialism" or "modern socialism" when a very large part of the effort was performed by existing, capitalist pharmaceutical companies.
This isn't "modern socialism" - it's an emergency effort, like a war. Fascist countries could have done similar things - and did, in WWII. I don't think the democratic socialist state you would advocate would operate anything like this under normal circumstances, so I think it's misleading to claim this as a victory for socialism.
Which part of the basic research that occurred over the past 2 decades is not 'normal circumstances'?
Essentially the vaccines produced in the past year were off-the-shelf solutions to the crisis. The whole shelf in question is publically funded.
Just to spell this out: taking the Oxford vaccine as the archetype (simply because this is the one I know most about because part of the team working on it was at Southampton Uni and colleagues of one of my PhD supervisors). There is a large body of work since SARS on coronaviruses which shows that targeting the Spike protein is the way to go in terms of creating a vaccine for an emerging coronavirus threat. I can't prove it, but that will be almost universally publically funded.
Similarly the 'Oxford team' has done some brilliant work on how to produce adenoviruses (which are non-pathogenic adenoviruses) with added proteins (I.e. the spike protein from SARS-COV2, in this case). As soon as the Chinese labs released the DNA sequence for SARS-COV2, they began work on making this vaccine. Publically funded. Similar circumstances apply to the other vaccines.
The emergency effort applies to the safety studies and then full up clinical trials. Underwritten by the public purse.
The role of the pharmaceutical companies is in mass production. That's the bit that fascists countries do well...
Comments
Very similar things could be said of Aberfan. This is an argument against infrastructure mismanagement, not any particular form of infrastructure ownership.
The amount of twisting and turning going on here would make an Olympic gymnast proud.
Firstly, in what sense are regulations about infrastructure safety "redistribution of wealth"?
Secondly, and as you well know, the context of the conversation you link to was not taxation but the right to property ownership in and of itself. You spent days insisting on the difference between public and private property, in the context of your assertion that a socialist government would protect the individual's right to their personal property. Why insist so much on that wording (and the definition thereof) if not to make it abundantly clear that the individual's right to private property would not be protected? From there it's easy to conclude that anyone who currently owns "private property" would have it stripped from them and taken into communal ownership - rather more serious an action than an extra penny or two on tax, wouldn't you say?
None of which justifies drawing a direct link between "killing" and "amusement" by placing the word "for" in between them.
You might be mounting a case that various actions for the purposes of amusement** led to death. But if you can't wrap your head around the crucial differences between causation and purposes, you have no business playing in this space.
**Even this is too simplistic. There's a difference between building a road to provide better access to fun and building a road 'for fun'. But we need to get you past the basics before trying intermediate level.
Ahem.
It is you Marvin who wanted to define ownership is a sense of having the right to do with as you wish. It is quite clear that there is a moral and legal liability to me if I own a dam and don't maintain it properly if it subsequently fails resulting in destruction and death to others.
Acknowledging that fact means acknowledging that ownership is not simple.
Aberfan was unforgivable in my view - a clear case of wilful negligence and cover up. As noted, the issue here is accountability. There have been disasters under both private and public stewardship hence the ownership itself is not the consideration. The issue is accountability and regulation.
The problem for you Marvin is not that you oppose public sector ownership but that you postulated a definition of private ownership that puts it beyond the law and any regulation.
In terms of the UK housing market, there's some literature that suggests that whilst there is a clear shortage of housing and this is a driver of house prices, it's not the major driver. The biggest driver is artificially low interest rates. For more than a decade now, Real interest rates (I.e. when you allow for inflation) have been almost zero. Why? Because in 2009 we faced a massive economic crisis and interest rates than were low-normal had to be cut further. And then George Osborne failed so completely that interest rates never got back to normal levels. This has lots of important effects but the more interesting question is why did he fail?
Mostly because he didn't believe the state should play a meaningful role in the economy. That is stupid at the best of times but frankly insane during a financial crisis when the government is almost the only game in town.
AFZ
In the sense that the government is confiscating resources from private citizens and repurposing them for the benefit of someone else, either in the form of regulatory takings that require certain expenditures or taxation so the state can deal with the issue themselves. The phrase "redistribution of wealth" is so vague and general it covers pretty much everything the state does.
I'm pretty sure that was Doc Tor and Alan Cresswell, not me.
[ Citation needed ] I'm pretty sure I never insisted that.
I'd say (since you're bothering to ask me something rather than simply attributing to me the posts of other Shipmates) it's a question of degree, not kind. Taxation is a system by which the state confiscates property and/or resources we consider ours and puts it to use for its own purposes. I'm not seeing a significant philosophical difference between doing this to liquid and illiquid assets, though there may be pragmatic differences.
I'm not convinced there is a meaningful separation between intention and the known likely outcomes of deliberate actions. Petrochemical companies don't specifically intend to give people cancer when they unsafely dispose of their waste products, but it's an easily foreseeable outcome of their decision to maximize profits in this way and could reasonably be characterized as "giving people cancer for profit".
No, it just means you're liable for any damage that may be caused by your actions (or lack thereof). If I stab someone I'm liable for that damage (both criminally and civilly), but that liability doesn't mean I never really owned the knife in the first place.
Similarly, if I leave my car on a hill with the handbrake off and it rolls down into someone's house I'm liable for the damage caused due to my negligence. But that doesn't affect the fact that I own the car.
Agreed.
That was not my intent.
But it does radically increase the likelihood that the state will confiscate your knife, and possibly place restrictions on your ability to possess a knife in the future.
Quite probably, and as a punishment for stabbing someone that would probably be reasonable. But that doesn't mean nobody should ever be allowed to own a knife. A lot of the discourse on this thread has been along the lines of "these rich people did bad things with their business/building/lake/etc, so nobody should ever be allowed to own that sort of property".
Should the criminal negligence of the people who owned and operated the resort of which South Fork Dam was a part mean they should be prevented from running any similar resort again*? Quite probably, assuming they ever get out of jail. Does that mean private ownership of resorts of that kind shouldn't be allowed at all? Of course not.
.
*= yes, I know they're all long dead by now. Not the point.
In the UK, as you know, gun ownership is quite tightly controlled. You may not own many types of gun at all. This is directly because of the actions of a small number of people.
Nobody is allowed to own an automatic rifle because of what Michael Ryan did with one. Nobody is allowed to own a handgun because of the shooting at Dunblane.
The decision that was made, with widespread public support, was that the benefit to people who, for example, enjoyed target shooting with these kinds of weapons was outweighed by the risk of someone "going postal" with them.
It's not impossible that similar logic could be applied to private ownership of lakes.
But the government does restrict private ownership of a lot of things. Certain drugs, for example. Or refined uranium. I'm not sure a blanket assumption that the government can't exert prior restraint over the ownership of any type of property is warranted.
Ha ha! You're so funny! Of course a bunch of Gilded Age plutocrats never spent any time in jail for negligently killing a bunch of working class folks. Such people might see the inside of a courtroom, but they'd never see the inside of a prison cell. You're such a kidder!
Seems to me that the key idea here is about the spectrum between the completely-unregulated market (which you call the neoliberal ideal, and which nobody here is arguing for) through the mixed economy, which I would have said that we all believe in, but now I'm not so sure (glances sideways at Doc Tor) to the planned economy (which we're calling the communist ideal).
Seems to me that maybe if those of us who lean rightward / marketward don't agree with neoliberalism then we should set out some principle that distinguishes us from the neoliberal extreme, that limits the amount of market that we're arguing for. And vice versa - if the left don't want to be thought communist then it's up to them to set out some principle, some limit on how leftward / stateward they want to go. Because many arguments for more or less state control (or assumptions behind such arguments) have no such inbuilt limit, and constitute an argument for the extreme as much as they are an argument for the less-extreme position that the writer claims to hold.
When it comes to government intervention in the market, I see a case for "shaping" the market in terms of
- preventing abuse of monopoly power
- smoothing out short-term fluctuation
- putting a price on environmental externalities ("polluter pays")
- providing a social safety net
- keeping transactions honest (e.g. advertising standards).
Not saying that's an exhaustive list, just recognising that government can and does intervene constructively to make the market work better as a market. So no I'm not a neoliberal in the sense you're using it.
But the opposite can also happen - government intervening to rig the market thereby preventing it from working well as a market. For example, Alan Cresswell seems to be suggesting that the UK government has rigged the housing market to keep prices artificially high.
Guns have no purpose other than to kill. Lakes and knives have many perfectly valid purposes. Not the best comparison.
I mean, yes the public could decide that only the government should be allowed to own land or water. That’s democracy, after all. But I really don’t think it’s a good idea at all.
They should have done though.
That's a good point. It is very tiresome to be painted as a communist when one is trying to argue that a mixed economy with certain key features is a good idea. I am sure the converse is also true on the other side.
My defence of course lies in the title of the thread. It is an unequivocal Strawman. My other defence is that we live with a lot of neoliberalism in our society that gets a free pass whilst sensible, well-evidenced government interventions are constantly decried as akin to Communism. I think there has been some of that of this thread but undoubtedly it is hugely present in our culture.
AFZ
The world should be a perfect place. The rich should be subject to the same laws enforced in the same way with the same penalties as are the poor. Hahahahaha! Too funny.
And given the part of my remarks you chose to mark in bold, I'm not sure you understand what "causation" means. It does not mean "known likely outcomes". It means actual outcomes.
After that, you just decided to switch to a completely different example from the one I originally took you task on, to argue a quite different issue. Which reads to me like an admission that your position was not defensible, so you shifted ground.
Again you're just telling me that you cannot parse the important differences between intentions and results. I've got no problem with the notion that people need to take into account foreseeable results. But that's not what I was criticising you for.
You didn't argue that someone should have foreseen what building a road would do and failed do so. You didn't convey that they were incompetent, you conveyed that they were malicious. Which is not the same thing at all.
"Actual outcomes" are not always known in advance. "Known likely outcomes" are the best most people can do when trying to anticipate future developments that might flow from their actions, like removing key safety features may actually be dangerous. If someone decides to roll the dice on a bunch of other people's lives and loses that bet, I'm willing to hold them accountable for that decision.
If I meant to convey that the owners of the dam were malicious I would have used the word "murdering" instead of "killing". It wasn't so much the building of the road as the fact that building the road lowered the dam at the same time as the level of the lake behind it was raised. Coupled with removing the emergency drain system and slipshod maintenance, a dam failure and it's likely outcome were easy to foresee. No one had any trouble connecting the dots in the aftermath once the details were known beyond the membership of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.
To take a theoretical modern example as a parallel, it would be as if Grenfell Tower had a sprinkler system installed and the building owner had it pulled out and sold for salvage. Sure, there's was no fire when the system was being removed and the owner certainly wouldn't plan on setting a fire, but that decision would definitely and foreseeably get a lot of people killed.
Oh right. We were all supposed to think that "killing for amusement" was completely different from "murdering for amusement".
Spare me.
I'm wondering about this whole notion of accountability.
If I accidentally hit a cricket ball through somebody's window, does my accountability depend on how likely that outcome was ?
Is the answer different if you think "accountability" means moral culpability than if you think it means responsibility to pay for the damage ?
Noting that likelihood is infinitely divisible, but that responsibility to pay tends to be all-or-nothing...
At the risk of creating a tangent, in most jurisdictions that last bit isn't quite true. Often is some culpability is attached to the victim then the compensation awarded will be discounted proportionately.
AFZ
And with something like a cricket ball, it's easy to come up with examples. In the back of my head is an example of a motorist who parked their car adjacent to the village cricket green on a Saturday, and had a window broken. I think they were judged mostly responsible, because they could see the cricket match going on when they parked, and should have realized that there was a chance of a ball hitting their car.
It certainly sounds different if you talk about someone setting up a cricket game next to some parked cars vs someone parking their car next to a cricket game.
True, but it may cast light on the thinking of socialists.
For example, if someone moves house to an area that's downstream of a dam, are they thereby partly responsible for any loss they suffer if the dam breaks ? Which they wouldn't
be if they were there before the dam ?
Once you accept a "we were here first" argument in one sphere, it may have application elsewhere...
Or is there some level of likelihood that is so low that one is entitled to treat it as zero ? If you can park anywhere along the street from right next to the village green to a mile away, does it follow that there is one parking space where the motorist has no responsibility and an adjacent one where he has some ?
Or is the important question whether he's a wealthy motorist?
Silly comparison. A hard ball being hit in any and all directions, with an associated risk to cars parked near the pitch, is an integral part of the game of cricket. Releasing a large and dangerous flood is not an integral part of the function of a dam. The former is to be expected, the latter is very much not - and that directly affects who bears liability for the damage if the accident happens.
Which still says nothing at all about which form of ownership is better or worse.
I completely fail to see how any of this pertains particularly to socialists.
The point is about likelihood.
Most people don't seem to think that watching a game of cricket from the boundary is such a dangerous activity that a hard hat or other PPE is needed. Being hit on the head by a ball is not that likely. But likely enough that nobody's going to be astounded if they read in the paper that somewhere it happens.
What I'm expressing scepticism about is the double standard that treats improbable events as likely enough to have been reasonably foreseeable ("to be expected") when discussing the actions of someone that one blames for the accident. But unlikely enough to have been totally unforeseeable by the innocent victims (with whom one rightly sympathizes).
Indeed. The suggestion that either private ownership in general, or private ownership by those in receipt of incomes above a certain threshold, necessarily involves a callous disregard for the safety of others is, when you examine it, false.
But that won't stop some people hinting at such a causal relationship if it suits their narrative.
I'm wondering now whether this dam was owned by one individual or a group of people collectively ?
There is very often a substantial information differential between those two groups. For example, the people selling off a dam's emergency relief pipes and valves for scrap know this has been done. The people living downstream from the dam probably do not.
Still resolutely refusing to click through any of the links offered, I see.
This is the heart of democratic socialism and this whole thread.
All of the vaccines were developed and deployed very quickly because of the following factors:
1. The basic research already existed
2. Governments and charities funded the key research in the past 15 months
3. The drug companies are providing the vaccines at cost price
4. There is significant cooperation between sectors and companies - even one company in the US producing a competitor's product.
So a) this is what modern socialism looks like, what collective action for the common good can do and what capitalism could never achieve
And b) Right-wingers claim the success for capitalism, contrary to the basic facts.
YMMV, of course...
AFZ
P.s. I know I have oversimplified slightly but only because these points are so fundamental and I'm so tired of the same old lies.
To take the Oxford vaccine research group as an example. The expertise there is multinational, a lot of it developed through EU funding (direct funding of projects through Framework and ERC grants, plus mobility funds such as Marie Curie Sklodowska fellowships and Erasmus+) in addition to UK funding and other multinational funding. There would also have been an indirect effect from proximity to the EMA based in London, which in turn attracted large numbers of pharmaceutical companies to London and surrounding areas; a year into this pandemic and most of us are forgetting what physical meetings are like, but proximity does play a bit role in forging collaboration - how many pharma business people visited the Oxford group with networks formed simply because they had offices an hour or two away? Would those meetings have happened if those pharma business offices were located to be convenient for EMA based somewhere else, like Amsterdam?
Of course, you could say that all relates to Brexit rather than socialism (and, you could be right!). But, it's also true that if medicine was entirely within the remit of private businesses then it's very likely that the levels of collaboration and mobility would be significantly lower than what we currently have where the basic research is very often conducted in publicly funded universities and research institutes working collaboratively with extensive networks and staff frequently moving between those labs and between the public and private sectors. It can be argued that private capital is very good at bringing new products to market, that final step where profits can be made (or, as is the case of the initial vaccine roll-out at least covering costs). But, how good is private capital at funding the basic research where it's never clear that there will be a product, or even where that product might be - remember the Biontec and Moderna vaccines are based on research aimed at cancer treatments.
I couldn't agree more, Alan. On every level. Drug companies do not do basic research. Basic research is funded by the public and charity sectors.*
Pharmaceutical companies only invest once they have a potential agent to develop.
I have no problem with that model. That's how it works and for the most part it works well. But let's be honest here, capitalism does not create new medicines. It simply doesn't.
AFZ
*it is worth noting here that Glaxo-Smithkline contribute a lot of money to basic research via the Wellcome Trust but that is a charity they inherited with a previous merger.
There was an interesting article in the New York Times* a few days ago dealing with vaccine development and distribution. It compared the rollout in the EU with that in the U.S. and U.K.
There's more at the link if you're interested. The basic lesson here is that relying on the free market for disaster relief is an even bigger handicap than being led by Donald Trump or Boris Johnson for most/all of the relevant time period. Contra Dave W, government policy/interference has a big effect on the way corporations behave.
* The New York Times has a paywall that limits non-subscribers to five or ten articles per calendar month. If you're not a NYT subscriber only click through if you're willing to use one of your monthly Times clicks on an article comparing EU vaccine development and distribution to efforts in the U.S. and U.K.
Why not? It's a blatantly socialist program, as both Alan and I have laid out. Which part of my or Alan's posts are you trying to refute?
That's not contra me at all. I just said that claiming the speedy development of the vaccine as a victory for democratic socialism ignores the pre-existence of a lot of big capitalist drug companies.
Given how heavily regulated medical manufacturers are, I'm not sure they count as purely capitalist entities. For example, governments often interfere to keep competitors out of the market in the form of various drug regulations. (e.g. the competitor who sells a "COVID-19 vaccine" that's nothing but saline will likely be put out of business, possibly even face criminal charges.) Another socialized practice of big pharma from the article I mentioned earlier:
This kind of lemon socialism (privatized profit and socialized risk) is not limited to the COVID vaccines but a common feature of drug companies' business practices.
But the drug companie' role is actually surprisingly small, that's the point. The research and development has been government funded and to a huge extent performed in publically funded institutions. And remember democratic socialism is not anti-capitalism (that's the Strawman that underpins this thread title). The role of the drug companies in all this has been completely underwritten by various national governments!! Left to the market alone, this would never have happened: too big a risk, too little return (in financial terms). No drug company would do this on their own.
AFZ
Yet the U.S. and U.K. seem to have had more success with a democratic socialist approach to the problem, at least according to the New York Times.
And the NYT article nowhere uses the term "democratic socialist". Where's the public ownership of the means of production? Where are the workers' councils? What's democratic socialist about stuffing private companies full of money?
Big pharma is very good at scaling up from research scale to mass production, especially important for vaccines where we'll need more than 10 billion doses.
Maybe it's more a big victory for the lemon socialism that Croesus was complaining about.
I don't quite see what you're arguing.
None of the basic research (which begins really with SARS and MERS nearly 20 years ago) was in or funded by the private sector. The rapid development in the past 15 months has been underwritten by national governments. Big Pharma has provided the production capacity.
What part of my narrative is wrong?
What part of my conclusion is wrong? That this is a classic example of where the market alone was incapable but the public sector can play a key role in improving outcomes for the population in a way that simple market forces never will?
This isn't "modern socialism" - it's an emergency effort, like a war. Fascist countries could have done similar things - and did, in WWII. I don't think the democratic socialist state you would advocate would operate anything like this under normal circumstances, so I think it's misleading to claim this as a victory for socialism.
Which part of the basic research that occurred over the past 2 decades is not 'normal circumstances'?
Essentially the vaccines produced in the past year were off-the-shelf solutions to the crisis. The whole shelf in question is publically funded.
Just to spell this out: taking the Oxford vaccine as the archetype (simply because this is the one I know most about because part of the team working on it was at Southampton Uni and colleagues of one of my PhD supervisors). There is a large body of work since SARS on coronaviruses which shows that targeting the Spike protein is the way to go in terms of creating a vaccine for an emerging coronavirus threat. I can't prove it, but that will be almost universally publically funded.
Similarly the 'Oxford team' has done some brilliant work on how to produce adenoviruses (which are non-pathogenic adenoviruses) with added proteins (I.e. the spike protein from SARS-COV2, in this case). As soon as the Chinese labs released the DNA sequence for SARS-COV2, they began work on making this vaccine. Publically funded. Similar circumstances apply to the other vaccines.
The emergency effort applies to the safety studies and then full up clinical trials. Underwritten by the public purse.
The role of the pharmaceutical companies is in mass production. That's the bit that fascists countries do well...
So what what your point?