No profit...no vaccine....The curse of Capitalism

I am rather surprised that there has not been more commentary about the reasons why so many people are now more vulnerable to the influenza virus, due to lack of vaccines. Most certainly thousands of more people will likely die this year in the nation, than needed to be, for one simple reason. That reason being the fact that producing the vaccine did not prove monetarily profitable for US companies, so many abdicated the production of the vaccine for more lucrative drugs.

The moral or lesson in this is that having a profit driven free market society has detriments that are part and parcel to the benefits. In the case of the flu vaccine, public health was put at risk because capitalism could not find a profit in helping protect its citizens against illness and death, so they did not...and people will die. The reason being is that capitalism is in the business of monetary profit, not moral, ethical or social profit and good. The bottom line is always dollars when we have a system that is and has become so dependant on the private sector in order to shrink the size of government and reduce tax burdens.

It is not only an issue of what the private sector will not do that can be dangerous, it is also an issue of what it does make profit from, which can also be dangerous. Whenever profit is earned and livings are made from social dilemmas and problems, it becomes a conflict of interest of those profiting to ever see the problem corrected or cured. The same thing is true in regards to the profiting that pharmaceuticals do for treating symptoms of illness to the degree that the drugs keep people alive or create dependence. There is less long term monetary benefit from researching cures than researching products to treat symptoms.

There was once a time when street cars were in every major city in the USA. Public transportation was widely available to the degree that it got poor people to where they needed to go. However, there was not profit in public transit systems and the birth of the automobile resulted in efforts by the powerful Auto Industry Barons to lobby the ripping up of the street car system so that people would be more dependent upon cars to get around. The result is that today transportation gridlock is a major problem, born from the automobile dependency, and the urban sprawl in most major cities. Now, poor people without jobs or transpiration have a hard time getting to areas where the job growth is.

There is also the phenomenon of privatizing of prisons and consumer goods being produced by low cost prison labor. With so many people in prisons in the USA, disproportionately black people, prisons, prison workers, courts, lawyers, judges, police officers have all become part of the prison industrial complex employing hundreds of thousands workers to deal with the social ramifications of poverty and crime born mostly from poverty. Not that it is a realistic hypothetical, but if they ever got rid of poverty and crime, so many people would be put out of work and lose their means of earnings that poverty and crime would return, but with new faces of the poor.

I do not think that it is health when a considerable portion or our GDP is money and profit exchanged from the treatment of the symptoms of social ills and problems. The nations well being is measured most profoundly by the metrics of GDP numbers. However, GDP numbers do not reflect what people are entering into monetary transactions for. I think that there is a profound difference between GDP generated from producing widgets for sale than GDP generated from building prisons or from paying for daycare, which was once a service performed for free.

In conclusion, I think having a society driven by the monetary profit motive can a does create a callous, morally eroded and problem enabling society that will spiral downward socially and morally, while spiraling upwards in profit and GDP growth.