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Comment by exogeny | Hacker News Reader

People want it both ways. They want private business to use the free market to develop more efficient and better solutions than a socialized system, but also a limit to just how much that free market should compensate them.

Either you're a capitalist or you're not. If the company in question was Disney or Apple, this wouldn't be appearing on HN in any capacity.

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This is obviously a false binary. There is a complex multi-variable gradient between the two extremes. People don't want it both ways - they want it somewhere in the middle, and they reasonably disagree about where.

When there is so much fat cattery in the private sector, it is no longer more efficient.

Given that the relied on $1.7B of grant money, this would seem to be a heavily socialized effort but with privatized profits, no?

Have Disney or Apple received billions from taxpayers?

In a way, they have, especially Disney, through IP laws. They have been granted protections which are not really fostering innovation and have just turned into rent seeking.

We have the worst of both worlds now, socialized risk with privatized profit.

Indeed. Moderna was real science, real innovation, and mostly huge globs of real private capital at risk. And though I'm skeptical on almost anything "Covid", most people think he saved the world with this vaccine technology which has big potential in future. This is capitalism 101, and the spoils need to go to the victor for it to work.

Any government funding does muddy the waters slightly, but anything they did contribute I assume was for the public good.

>mostly real private capital at risk

It absolutely was not! It was billions of public funding for a public health emergency.

As described in peer comments, mRNA was a platform developed in the decade prior with over $3 billion of private risk capital. The government came in to help them get the Covid vaccine to market using that existing platform.

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