[nshepperd]

> put a spotlight on the big pharmaceutical companies that had brought them to market — especially Pfizer and Moderna

Moderna? The research startup that had only recently IPO'd and didn't have a single commercial product before covid? Seems weird to call it a "big pharmaceutical company".

I'd rather a few founders become billionaires from a successful startup than have Moderna gone bankrupt and lose the vaccines they were developing forever.

[sanp]

This assumes that only pharma companies can execute the steps required to bring the fruits of all that research to market. There is no reason a govt entity can’t do the same. It is a question of setting up the right incentives for the employees of that govt entity.

[rayiner]

Yes it’s a matter of the incentives, but a government entity has fundamentally different incentives than a private entity. Countries ranging from Canada to Sweden to India to China invested heavily into state-owned industries in the 20th century, and every single one reversed course. Because it just didn’t work.

[elktown]

> every single one reversed course. Because it just didn’t work.

Didn't work for whom?

To suggest that political changes happen due to "it didn't work" seems like a pretty shallow conclusion. There are a lot that can be said about the last decades of free-market privatization & reforms in Europe, and in Sweden in particular, but that it was done out of necessity rather than a general political shift after the collapse of the Soviet Union is simply a biased take.

[rayiner]

> Didn't work for whom?

Everyone from voting public in liberal democracies (Sweden, Canada, Germany), to the voting public in less liberal democracies (India), the Islamic world (Egypt), to communist regimes (China, Vietnam).

[elktown]

What do you mean didn't work for the voting public in Sweden?

[rayiner]

The voting public didn’t like the slow economic growth and high taxes, which is why they voted for parties who promised to reform the system.

[swooni]

Sweden's state-owned enterprises were sold purely because of politics. No one reversed course. It's just the right wing got majority and sold what they could when they had the chance including a large amount of public housing, schools and healthcare facilities.

[rayiner]

No, it wasn’t some accident of Swedish politics. The same thing happened all over the world at the same time. It happened in India, it happened in China. It happened in Germany. The movement toward state owned enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s was reversed in myriad countries with myriad political systems because it didn’t work.

[swooni]

I didn't say anything about the rest of the world. You made a statement about Sweden, even highlighting that it was "every single country" which, unless you want to qualify that statement, simply wasn't accurate. State-owned enterprises in Sweden weren't sold off because they didn't provide service or even didn't make profits but because of shifting politics in Sweden and the EU. Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power and the EU made many ventures outright illegal as unlawful state aid. The same politicians who privatized everything else and ended conscription so Sweden had no choice but to join Nato. You can of course argue that "it didn't work because it wasn't wanted" but then the same thing goes for anything else that was changed like government owned nuclear power plants. Which these days of course also requires approval from the EU.

[xyzzyz]

> Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power

And pray tell, how did that happen? How do people come into power in Sweden? I thought that it has a system where people propose what they will do, and the population votes on whose ideas and proposals they like the most, doesn't it?

[rayiner]

What happened in other countries is relevant because it shows that it wasn’t just something you can explain away as specific to Swedish politics and who got elected when.

[jleyank]

I really doubt any western government could pull this off as either they or their population would balk at the cost if not the concept.

[cuteboy19]

Hopefully they don't keep spending 4 million on a single toilet everytime