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Free market ignores need and just exploits want. Regulation ensures those in need receive it. Scarcity ensures demand, supply erodes price. The ability for c

Free market ignores need and just exploits want. Regulation ensures those in need receive it. Scarcity ensures demand, supply erodes price. The ability for companies to charge what they want for the vaccine would ensure only those that could afford it would receive it, and there wouldn't be additional capital investment because that would dilute profits.

xiphias2 6y ago
Regulations price lives of old people at about $500 right now (vaccine price / death rate). The only government that didn't try to get the cheapest price for the vaccine is Israel, and we see the impressive results already.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  This is true, but also misleading. There would not be more vaccines made if every country were overbidding, Israel is just moving ahead in the queue. It can do this because it is rich and is really tiny. The Israel strategy would only work for a few select countries in the world.
throwaway9980 6y ago
Needs are wants with greater urgency. Demand is ensured by the ongoing widespread death associated with the virus. Government should stand ready to pay a large price to ensure supply and provide subsidy for those with less means. Regulation, in this case, introduces inefficiency. Inefficiency, in this case, costs lives.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  > Needs are wants with greater urgency. You don't always want needs. Want is desire. Need is requirement. People are notorious for trying to satisfy their needs with desires and left feeling unfulfilled.
  - throwaway9980 6y ago
    I don’t always want my wants either. The point is that needs usually produce greater motivation. The alcoholic who really wants that drink describes it as a need and works to satisfy it as if it is.
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      Alcoholism is a disease and addiction. They feel physical withdrawal so alcohol is a need to an alcoholic. It's sometimes hard to see that because alcoholism is a spectrum and people joke about being alcoholics. Dismissing alcohol as a vice is not unlike dismissing an autistic as overly sensitive.
pdonis 6y ago
> Free market ignores need and just exploits want. No, free market relies on the person with the need/want to decide which is which. And the person then takes the consequences of their choice. > Regulation ensures those in need receive it. No, regulation ensures that the people making life and death decisions about what is a "need" and what is just a "want" are unelected bureaucrats with no personal stake in the outcome, instead of the people who will actually suffer the consequences.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  > free market relies on the person with the need/want to decide which is which. That's your fatal misunderstanding. There isn't a choice.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > There isn't a choice. What do you mean? That individual people aren't capable of deciding what they need vs. what they want and prioritize accordingly? Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), it would not imply that unelected bureaucrats with no stake in the outcome could do any better. Or do you mean that you refuse to accept any structure of society that allows people to make such decisions for themselves?
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      No, I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. Things are intrinsically a need or they aren't. A need can also be a want, and people can choose to want things but you don't get to decide if something is a need. Calling something that isn't a need, doesn't magically make it need. You also can't arbitrarily decide you no longer need something. If you can then it was never a need.
      - pdonis 6y ago
        > I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. If you mean that, for example, no one can "decide" that they don't need food, yes, I agree. But that sense of "need" is irrelevant to the question of how food gets allocated to people, which was the original subject of this subthread. The fact that food is a need, not a want, does not mean a free market in food is not possible or that it does not allocate food better than regulation would. Many countries over the course of human history have run the experiment of having a central authority regulate food allocation instead of letting a free market do it. All of those experiments failed--they resulted in famine, mass starvation and death. Some people confuse a free market in food with subsidizing food purchases for the poor, as, for example, food stamps do in the US. They're not the same thing. People on food stamps effectively get a certain amount of money each month that they can spend on food. It's true that "food" is, strictly speaking, a regulation of a sort, since, for example, gas stations or car repair shops or drugstores don't accept food stamps, so they're not exactly equivalent to money. But it still leaves a very wide scope for free choice; people on food stamps are purchasing food in a free market, even though their purchases are being subsidized by the government. They are able to choose what items they buy at the grocery store and thereby are sending price signals into the market about their preferences, just like everyone else.
monkeypizza 6y ago
You argue that allowing free markets for vital needs leads to exploitation. But look at food - capitalist economies have been much more successful at feeding their people than socialist/other highly regulated ones. (Not that they're perfect, no system is). But I think your story of "people trying to make money leads to exploitation" needs some refinement, because it implies outcomes we don't see in reality. Just compare HK & Singapore to China in the 1960s - free market countries did fine, while communist economies starved their people. The difference is, if you let people do things they want to improve their lives or offer valuable services to others, they will do it. If you make it tough and complex to do this, or prevent them from profiting by their labor, they won't do as much. The ability to charge what they want and have a monopoly would be bad - but I don't think that's what is being suggested. The jump from "letting people make things other people want, and charge prices for them" to "let sellers restrict supply of competing goods, and / or force people to buy items at high prices" is a big one - it's the difference between successful capitalist countries which provide cheap goods for their people, and horrible states. The US and Europe still resemble the former, more than the latter, which is why millions of people still try to emigrate here annually.
- throwaway123x2 6y ago
  Food is highly regulated by the government. All those farm subsidies paid for by taxpayer money are essentially a form of socialism for farmers.
monkeypizza 6y ago
The OP doesn't actually propose giving the money as profit. An alternative interpretation of his proposal to "let people pay more" would be for the government to offer a prize to companies for producing X number of additional vaccines by a certain day, offering to buy them from the company for say 3x the current price - then selling a portion of those at 5x and giving the rest away for free to need people, to balance out the cost. This would be a truer test of "Do companies really, really not have any extra capacity? Or are they just allocating resources according to profit maximization, not to maximum effort?" This is what normal markets ARE - companies take risks and investments for a chance at profit. The government could fake the system by offering high rewards... or we could just let companies do reasonable things like sell 20% of their output at market price. This reminds me of the CCP in the 1950s where most private land was socialized... and farmers ended up putting all their effort into their private plots, because that was the only work they could do that they'd actually get to keep.

xiphias2 6y ago

Regulations price lives of old people at about $500 right now (vaccine price / death rate). The only government that didn't try to get the cheapest price for the vaccine is Israel, and we see the impressive results already.

kmonsen 6y ago
This is true, but also misleading. There would not be more vaccines made if every country were overbidding, Israel is just moving ahead in the queue. It can do this because it is rich and is really tiny. The Israel strategy would only work for a few select countries in the world.

throwaway9980 6y ago

Needs are wants with greater urgency. Demand is ensured by the ongoing widespread death associated with the virus. Government should stand ready to pay a large price to ensure supply and provide subsidy for those with less means. Regulation, in this case, introduces inefficiency. Inefficiency, in this case, costs lives.

cptskippy 6y ago
> Needs are wants with greater urgency. You don't always want needs. Want is desire. Need is requirement. People are notorious for trying to satisfy their needs with desires and left feeling unfulfilled.
- throwaway9980 6y ago
  I don’t always want my wants either. The point is that needs usually produce greater motivation. The alcoholic who really wants that drink describes it as a need and works to satisfy it as if it is.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    Alcoholism is a disease and addiction. They feel physical withdrawal so alcohol is a need to an alcoholic. It's sometimes hard to see that because alcoholism is a spectrum and people joke about being alcoholics. Dismissing alcohol as a vice is not unlike dismissing an autistic as overly sensitive.

pdonis 6y ago

> Free market ignores need and just exploits want. No, free market relies on the person with the need/want to decide which is which. And the person then takes the consequences of their choice. > Regulation ensures those in need receive it. No, regulation ensures that the people making life and death decisions about what is a "need" and what is just a "want" are unelected bureaucrats with no personal stake in the outcome, instead of the people who will actually suffer the consequences.

cptskippy 6y ago
> free market relies on the person with the need/want to decide which is which. That's your fatal misunderstanding. There isn't a choice.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > There isn't a choice. What do you mean? That individual people aren't capable of deciding what they need vs. what they want and prioritize accordingly? Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), it would not imply that unelected bureaucrats with no stake in the outcome could do any better. Or do you mean that you refuse to accept any structure of society that allows people to make such decisions for themselves?
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    No, I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. Things are intrinsically a need or they aren't. A need can also be a want, and people can choose to want things but you don't get to decide if something is a need. Calling something that isn't a need, doesn't magically make it need. You also can't arbitrarily decide you no longer need something. If you can then it was never a need.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. If you mean that, for example, no one can "decide" that they don't need food, yes, I agree. But that sense of "need" is irrelevant to the question of how food gets allocated to people, which was the original subject of this subthread. The fact that food is a need, not a want, does not mean a free market in food is not possible or that it does not allocate food better than regulation would. Many countries over the course of human history have run the experiment of having a central authority regulate food allocation instead of letting a free market do it. All of those experiments failed--they resulted in famine, mass starvation and death. Some people confuse a free market in food with subsidizing food purchases for the poor, as, for example, food stamps do in the US. They're not the same thing. People on food stamps effectively get a certain amount of money each month that they can spend on food. It's true that "food" is, strictly speaking, a regulation of a sort, since, for example, gas stations or car repair shops or drugstores don't accept food stamps, so they're not exactly equivalent to money. But it still leaves a very wide scope for free choice; people on food stamps are purchasing food in a free market, even though their purchases are being subsidized by the government. They are able to choose what items they buy at the grocery store and thereby are sending price signals into the market about their preferences, just like everyone else.

monkeypizza 6y ago

You argue that allowing free markets for vital needs leads to exploitation. But look at food - capitalist economies have been much more successful at feeding their people than socialist/other highly regulated ones. (Not that they're perfect, no system is). But I think your story of "people trying to make money leads to exploitation" needs some refinement, because it implies outcomes we don't see in reality. Just compare HK & Singapore to China in the 1960s - free market countries did fine, while communist economies starved their people. The difference is, if you let people do things they want to improve their lives or offer valuable services to others, they will do it. If you make it tough and complex to do this, or prevent them from profiting by their labor, they won't do as much. The ability to charge what they want and have a monopoly would be bad - but I don't think that's what is being suggested. The jump from "letting people make things other people want, and charge prices for them" to "let sellers restrict supply of competing goods, and / or force people to buy items at high prices" is a big one - it's the difference between successful capitalist countries which provide cheap goods for their people, and horrible states. The US and Europe still resemble the former, more than the latter, which is why millions of people still try to emigrate here annually.

throwaway123x2 6y ago
Food is highly regulated by the government. All those farm subsidies paid for by taxpayer money are essentially a form of socialism for farmers.

monkeypizza 6y ago

The OP doesn't actually propose giving the money as profit. An alternative interpretation of his proposal to "let people pay more" would be for the government to offer a prize to companies for producing X number of additional vaccines by a certain day, offering to buy them from the company for say 3x the current price - then selling a portion of those at 5x and giving the rest away for free to need people, to balance out the cost. This would be a truer test of "Do companies really, really not have any extra capacity? Or are they just allocating resources according to profit maximization, not to maximum effort?" This is what normal markets ARE - companies take risks and investments for a chance at profit. The government could fake the system by offering high rewards... or we could just let companies do reasonable things like sell 20% of their output at market price. This reminds me of the CCP in the 1950s where most private land was socialized... and farmers ended up putting all their effort into their private plots, because that was the only work they could do that they'd actually get to keep.