Everyone acts like all these wonders arise from private innovation. They discount the decades of public investment that brought us to the point that a company could develop a specific mRNA vaccine. From the public roads and public education to the trillions spent over the past 50 years to bring computer and bio technologies to their current point, it’s public investment that makes it all possible.

Our capitalist system works by private investors capturing most of the value of public investment. The dreaded Chomsky points out that the US socializes the risk and privatizes the profit.

But, here I am, talking trash about pirates in a barroom on the Barbary Coast! Let me stop before I lose a limb…