There absolutely is a difference between people that die because we, as a species, cannot afford to spend the combined sum of all of our productivity on health care (which means that you will have to tell some people "no", even though they will die as a result of that), and a tyrannical dictator specifically ordering the death of people because they are a political threat to him.

Maybe you feel that a pill that costs a few bucks to produce should be sold for that same price. In that case I'd like to remind you that in this case, a private company spent BILLIONS on medical research, without knowing if any of it would ever pay off. If you just take their one succesful product and distribute it for free, they won't bother trying again.

How many great medicins came out of communist countries?

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fzeroracer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm curious, what's your opinion on Nestle?

	▲	agent327 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Can't say that I really have one. Presumably there is some sort of hideous thing they are doing that would outrage me if I knew about it. I'll let you fill me in on that. I'm not a particularly big fan of massive companies in general; it's a concentration of power that I think is dangerous. At the same time, who do we have to blame? Who ordered absolutely everything of Amazon, who took all those Uber rides, who slept in those airbnb rooms? If we, as consumers, had the good sense to spread our money around a little, we wouldn't end up with companies like that. I'm not opposed to the ultra-rich, assuming of course that they stayed within the boundaries of the law while becoming so. They worked hard, they made smart choices, and they profited from it. And so did we - otherwise, why give them all that money? What I am opposed to is the outsized power they wield thanks to their fortune, and if that power gets misapplied, I have no problem with breaking those companies up into multiple smaller entities.

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suddenlybananas 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Plenty of people have been murdered to defend capitalism. After the fall of the Paris commune, 30000 people were butchered in the streets. Millions of people were murdered for being communist or even just belonging to a union in Indonesia.

Not to mention the fact that the 100 million figures includes Wehrmacht soldiers or terminated fetuses as "victims" of Communism to inflate its numbers.

If you really think that there simply aren't enough resources for everyone, that makes the gluttony of the wealthy so much worse.

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mystraline 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> There absolutely is a difference between people that die because we, as a species, cannot afford to spend the combined sum of all of our productivity on health care (which means that you will have to tell some people "no", even though they will die as a result of that), and a tyrannical dictator specifically ordering the death of people because they are a political threat to him.

I remember the howls of 'Death Panels' when Hillary Clinton brought forth a single payer universal healthcare back in 1995 as first lady.

I also remember the counter republican / Heritage foundation's plan of a health marketplace. Perhaps you heard of Romney are or ObamaCare? Same plan.

And about death panels? Initially it is a discussion of rationing a limited resource. But the death panels we have now are purely based upon greed of the insurance companies. Delay, Deny, Defend. That depose wasn't so much a bad idea, if we look at human suffering/death as a loss of GDP.

These deaths due to delaying and denying are capitalist deaths.

> Maybe you feel that a pill that costs a few bucks to produce should be sold for that same price. In that case I'd like to remind you that in this case, a private company spent BILLIONS on medical research, without knowing if any of it would ever pay off. If you just take their one succesful product and distribute it for free, they won't bother trying again.

First, most new drugs come out of the public higher education in the form of studies and papers. And Reagan changed the rules allowing universities to make bank on the backs of students.

Since they were publicly funded, they should be owned by the public.

But they're not. The rights get bought by a monopoly maker, who gets nearly 2 decades of protection. Who cares if those drugs could save 5 million per year if reasonably priced. Monopoly control gets monopoly pricing.

Now specifically Solvaldi.. It costs $1000 a pill, once a day for 12 weeks. $84k. Insurance won't pay for this cure, since treatments are cheaper. However it costs $300 to manufacture with chemical supplies. We could save 5 million people a year here, with easy and cheap access to cures. We, as a society, do not value life. We value 'how much I can extract from your life'.

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective talks about this on their videos https://kolektiva.media/w/6iqzQtGqGSKbeFndBkEcm7

> How many great medicins came out of communist countries?

Playing GOTCHA games with 'name something or you're invalid' is boring, and only shows not knowing some name on demand. And that's also being completely ignorant of the propaganda here in the USA.

But one wide area the USSR invested in is macrophage research, as a whole class of drugs. And that's not 1 drug, but a whole class.

But seriously, how many needless deaths are caused by capitalism? And yes, I'm looking at: lack of housing (homelessness), overpriced medicine, overpriced doctors, hyperprocessed and/or food that would not be legal elsewhere, terrible products that create obscene trash, extreme consumerism leading to unmitigated climate devastation.

But hey, a billionaire got another 10 million in the time it took to write my post.

	▲	agent327 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		>most new drugs come out of the public higher education in the form of studies and papers Citation needed. Solvaldi, the drug we are talking about, was developed by Pharmasset. I see no evidence of university ties, and I find it hard to believe that a university would let such a money maker slip out of their hands if they had any kind of claim to it. Even at a mere $300 per pill, you are still looking at $25K for a single treatment, which is well above what most people can afford. So would excluding millions of people from treatment be acceptable if the pills were priced at ingredient cost? As for the bacteriophages, it perfectly supports my point: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9sxcko/was_t... "However, just three years later Eliava and his wife were accused of fantastical crimes and murdered at the personal direction of Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD. After this d'Herelle was so terrified and disillusioned with the whole Soviet experiment that he never returned from a trip to France... ...Eliava had the misfortune to fall in love, and then sleep with, an opera singer that Beria was obsessed with. Though academic opinion suggests that Beria may have been simply demonstrating to the military and/or still influential Georgian Bolsheviks that even a Hero of Soviet Science was not safe from his machinations." Communism at work, doing precisely what I told you it does. If the head of the CIA murders a random civilian, it is, thankfully, still a crime in your capitalist society. And in opposition to your list of capitalist ills I will put the communist equivalents: no medicine, no food, and no products. And even then they managed ecological devastation, such as the lake Karachay area...