>> "Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time"

No.

mRNA vaccines are the result of decades of research with support of and collaboration with government and academia. Even the covid vaccine only happened as fast as it did because Chinese researchers sequenced and released the DNA of the virus for free online.

Researchers sequence SARS-CoV2 variants all the time, all over the world - it's a pandemic after all. The Chinese did some great work, but had they not done it first others would have.

Sorry, I forget this detail is not widely known. They were the first working on it from samples at ground zero, before it was a pandemic. Back when nobody knew anything.

https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-researchers-...

The free and public release gave the world a head start on what was then a very localized thing with little if any spread. Remember: my comment was in response to an attempt to credit capitalism with the speedy development of a vaccine. Capitalism helped, but wasn't what did it.

The CCP was pretty obviously against the release of this gene sequence. Thank God Zhang Youngzhen followed liberal norms of the scientific community and shared it with the world. [0]

Science's triumph began in in liberal societies, and both fed on and accelerated the advance of capitalism. The industrial revolution was essentially a virtuous cycle (maybe a vicious cycle depending on your perspective) of capitalism and scientific knowledge (thermodynamics & mechanics mostly). Sure, the research was going on for decades in universities funded by governments, but once a profitable use for that research presented itself, an effective good utilizing it went into production rapidly.

[0]https://time.com/5882918/zhang-yongzhen-interview-china-coro...

Yes. So you agree with me that capitalism is a symbiosis with the public systems it depends on and not solely responsible as your comment seemed to indicate. Moderna wouldn't have produced so much so quickly without a government ready to buy up their supply. Many more people would have died, and possibly from more variants, had it not been freely available.

The US would be a breeding ground for variants if most of the population weren't vaccinated, and it wouldn't be if they weren't free in this one exceptional case. Almost 80% of the US has at least one dose compared to the usual ~50% with the flu vaccine. The second dose is ticking up toward 70%.

> many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.

This is pretty obviously bad logic, you seem to be removing agency from Trump/Biden/Cuomo/Fauci. All of them in varying degrees made terrible decisions, waited too long to bother reacting, etc., and these were things the average person could easily guess would happen while good ideas were often left delayed or unexecuted.

Your rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on the concept of planning at all, which many countries did better just by having half a plan and going through with at least half the plan.

Planning is not a supernatural force that compelled our leaders to act poorly. They had agency and chose poorly.

> Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism.

It's not like feudal societies were perfectly equal. There is a genuine question as to whether capitalism tends towards increased inequality over time, perhaps merely as a side effect of its faster rate of innovation, but if you want a reasonable level of "equality" you'll need to look either to pre-modern societies or to ones where redistribution is explicitly practiced.

I saw some research when I was in college that before Deng's reforms in Communist China, the level of income inequality was pretty low. Once the market reforms were enacted, inequality went through the roof.

Markets disproportionately reward those who produce things other people want. That is inherent inequality. The ethical question is how much of that reward could be distributed to others who may actually have a bad lot in life (though my own bias is to doubt the extent to which, barring obvious physical or mental disability, a person is incapable of making her own luck).

The paper you linked about inequality and discretionary bureaucracy seems very specific to the conditions of Indonesia: a highly bureaucratic non-democratic country transitioning to democracy but not “transform[ing] detrimental institutions nor replac[ing] the existing official position of the previous bureaucracy.” It’s making a claim that the “persistence of bureaucratic clientelism” needs to be understood better when studying democracies, but doesn’t seem to be making a claim that clientelism is a driving factor of inequality in all democracies — rather, it’s claiming that it perpetuates inequality in countries that already have clientelist institutions before they become democratic. (Also, “a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance” seems to be your editorializing; the paper suggests a correlation between poor institutional quality and income development, but makes no claim that socialists and progressives automatically make poor institutions. I would posit that “clientelistic political parties in democracies” will wear whatever fig leaf is most likely to get them into strategic political offices: if the country loves socialists, they’ll be socialist, but in a country that loves right-wing populism, they’ll be right-wing populists.)

At least going by the experience we’ve had in America and other Western countries, inequality seems to be an outcome of specifically deregulated capitalism. The whole push toward communism that we saw in the early 20th century was largely a reaction to the capitalism of The Jungle and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and of course, the soaring inequality before the Great Depression. I think big business capitalists don’t give the New Deal the credit it deserves for cutting the American communist movement off at the pass -- changes in regulatory and tax policy shaped a highly-regulated market economy that at least partially flattened the inequality curve. Once we started deregulating all the things in the 1980s, inequality started growing again.

Climate change: Your point is whataboutism. It does not address the issue.

Inequality: Capitalism vs "left wing governments" is apples to oranges. And I don't think the point is that inequality exists so much as rate of growth in inequality.

Police brutality: If it's a problem, and it is, then not getting worse by some measure still doesn't mean it's no longer a problem. The "defund the police" party here in the US has responded to police brutality mostly by increasing police budgets.

Deadly pandemic: That's redundant. We don't have merely annoying pandemics. Many countries independently created vaccines - look up Cuba.

Try to take my arguments charitably. My point about climate change is that the anti-capitalist governments had horrible environmental records during the Cold War (for another instance, see Lake Baikal), and continue do to so today. Liberal societies with capitalist governments were able to eliminate most pollution through increases in efficiency, and the rest was handled by things like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Those leftist anti-capitalist governments were such a failure that most of them don't exist today, so we can't assess them on climate change, but we can extrapolate. If the claim is that climate change is worse because of capitalism, and that we instead need a progressive/socialist turn to get rid of it, then it's fair to ask the record of those systems. That isn't "whataboutism."

A "growth rate of inequality?" Show me the numbers.

My point about police brutality is that it is not increasing, contradicting the original claim.

Russia and China also were quite early to market with their vaccines. Would you trust them?