We're much better off right now with the government seizing the means of production and figuring out how to make as many as possible.
Also, government is much less effective at producing things than private companies.
You don't know how happy I am to see you say that.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239675564199481347.html
>The President said today that governors should try to get things like respirators and masks on their own. The problem with that approach is that suppliers will have to emergently engage w 50 different state purchasers who would in effect be competing for supply. 8/x
>Instead, the US fed gov should be central buyer and partner to this industry. It brings substantial immediate resources, and clarity. And when manufacturers make new ventilators in a mass effort, the fed gov would help organize their distribution around the country. 9/x
>What we need is a massive fed gov program to buy ventilators on unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. They don’t need to be the fanciest ventilators on the market. They need to be able to keep ARDS pts alive through course of COVID infection. 10/x
>This @forbes article gives snapshot of vent industry and a sense of what might be possible. It quotes one US manufacturer from 2 days ago saying he could ramp up production 5 fold but he hasn’t been asked to do it yet.
Why would we give them a choice?
The last thing we want is for "the government" to go around seizing production capacity from companies that have successfully produced these units for decades. When you imagine "the government", don't imagine your ideal policitian in a cape - you should imagine the bloke down at the local tax office who keeps opening obvious malware emails.
Corporations are not your faceless enemy, they're the ones who've helped your hospitals become amazing in the last few decades.
There's no way the current problem is only the price, for sure they are already trying to sell the most they can, they simply can't produce enough of them. Allowing some kind of shadow production, handled by the manufacturer can only means much more product made thus sold. It's a win-win for both the manufacturer and the government.
> We're much better off right now with the government seizing the means of production and figuring out how to make as many as possible.
Sure that would work, but that's always been true for anything. If the government could seize production, it would be "cheaper" to produce because the cost of R&D and production has been already done. That's not healthy though, that will now be an added risk in the industry that will have a cost to be mitigated.
Lets works together, not against eachother.
The arrangement does actually work fairly well in a crisis; you just need the sense of urgency to get everyone in the private sector all cranking on the same problem.
Or at least it has worked well before. Things like the F-22, F35, and Littoral Combat Ship aside... There is a point where stuff turns into a nightmare. The medical equipment needed though isn't really a problem where you should run into the sort of slog those projects ran into though.
Because capitalism only works with a functioning economy. If everything goes all pear shaped, and we have tens of thousands of people dying because we don't have enough ventilators (and the numbers suggest that this is quite possible), these companies that have been filling their bathtubs with cash are going to have angry gun toting mobs of newly homeless and bereaved Americans using their office windows for target practice. This will happen regardless of what's right or wrong, legal or illegal. We haven't seen this here before because we haven't had a strong enough economic collapse yet (excluding the Great Depression of course, where some of this did happen). It's happened in many other countries, and may happen here too if CEOs don't take a more long term perspective on pricing.