Vaccine Economics – Greed, Politics, and Disease Profit

Imagine if you had a product to sell that didn’t require advertising or marketing, but the majority of people thought they had to have it. Better still, millions of children and adults are forced to obtain your product in order to keep their jobs or go to school.

The government is one of your guaranteed buyers. Your product doesn’t need to be 100% effective or 100% safe. If your product hurts your consumers, you won’t be held liable for damages. Instead, your product is taxed and the money goes to consumers or family members of those who were harmed or killed by the product. You don’t even need to be involved in the court cases, to determine who gets the money. The government will do that for you.

Vaccines operate under a different business model than anything else that is bought and sold in America. And don’t fool yourself into believing pharmaceutical companies don’t make a profit off of vaccines. Each vaccine is worth billions of dollars.

The Market Economy, Better Known as the Free Market

In a free market, the public is never coerced into buying anything. There are multiple manufacturers, buyers, and sellers of every product. In order for companies to stay in business, their products must stand on their own. Companies compete with each other and are free to enter and leave the marketplace. No industries or companies receive special protection from the government, so safety becomes a financial responsibility as well as a moral one.

A free market is competitive, with companies competing with one another for customers and employees. In order for this system to work, the marketplace must be decentralized, with market power spread out over many businesses and households, not concentrated in the hands of a few politically powerful businesses and government agencies.

Free Markets Produce Favorable Efficient Outcomes, as if Guided by an Invisible Hand

The free market system is far from perfect, but it is the most efficient means of allocating resources. The father of economics, Adam Smith, explained how this system leads to desirable outcomes for society.

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it … He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end, which was no part of his intention.” ¹

Less Than Free Markets

A free market is, of course, not the only way to buy and sell goods. Communist economies were built on the notion that the government knew best, and they should be the ones to decide what is bought and sold, and how it is done. This idea has been shown to be a colossal failure, and most centrally planned economies have abandoned this system in order to develop market economies.

Healthcare makes up a substantial portion of the American economy. In 2013, U.S. health care spending reached $2.9 trillion or $9,255 per person. This accounts for 17.4% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).² Increasingly, government has been taking more and more control over our healthcare decisions, mandating insurance and vaccines. This is being done under the guise that they know best.

This level of coercion is not the endgame for government regulators and vaccine manufacturers. As of 2012, there were nearly 300 vaccines in development,³ and pharmaceutical companies lobby endlessly to make all vaccines, even the flu vaccine, mandatory for everyone. Obviously, this would make pharmaceutical companies more money. Some people believe it would increase our so-called herd immunity, but many feel our freedom is worth more than that.

Mandated Vaccines Do Not Belong in a Free Country

So far we have seen mandatory vaccines for hospital workers, childcare workers, government employees, public school children, and college students. This is not how a free market, or a free society functions. Our freedoms, especially our medical freedoms, have been eroding for some time now, sold off to the highest corporate bidders.

Years ago, a leading economist wrote a book warning us about what happens when government becomes too heavily involved in our affairs. Milton Friedman’s book, Capitalism & Freedom, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976.

In the conclusion of his book he writes:

The importance of government as a buyer of so much of our output, and the sole buyer of the output of many firms and industries, already concentrates a dangerous amount of economic power in the hands of the political authorities, changes the environment in which business operates and the criteria relevant for business success, and in these and other ways endangers a free market.”

Conclusion

Milton Friedman’s predictions are disturbingly accurate. Progressively, more and more of the market is coming under the control of powerful corporations and the federal government. Our society that was built on capitalism and freedom is being replaced by corporate cronyism and coercion. Freedom to make our own healthcare decisions is the most basic kind of freedom, control over own bodies. If we can free the market, we can free ourselves at the same time.

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