 I went then to one of the websites I always go to when I'm not sure what I want to talk about. And as always, I went to a John Cochran's website. I went to grumpyeconomist.com, grumpyeconomist.com. I highly recommend John's blog, one of the best blogs and economics and just anything that touches economic culturally, politically. And John is always insightful, always interesting. Even when you disagree with him, you have to marvel at his ability to reason and to think and to present evidence. So I went to his blog and I found two fabulous articles to talk about. And so I initially wanted to talk about both. And then I decided I'll postpone one and just talk about today, just talk about one of the articles he wrote because it's excellent. It's a point I'm pissed off at myself because I should have thought of. It's a topic for show I should have had already because it hits on everything that is fitted to the Iran book show. It's about economics. It's about morality. It's about ethics. It's about politics. It's about what a world would look like if there was a free market. It's just perfect. So I want to talk about free market vaccines, free market vaccination. And again, all credit goes to John Cochran for bringing this up and for writing out his ideas. And I'll basically be summarizing what John has written and what some others have got. A couple of other, Tyler Cowan wrote something, which I don't think is very good about this. And then I found a working paper that somebody wrote about vaccines that I also found interesting. So we're going to talk about how vaccines, how would vaccination work in a free market and what should be done even today? Note that there is one thing that nobody seems to question, that there's just no discussion about. And John actually makes this point in his article and he's kind of shocked and he says, you know, not a single libertarian is making this point. What's going on out there? What's going on with the libertarian? Is there no courage? Is there no, what has happened to them? He says, he says, quote, that nobody dares say this publicly. Not even my favorite libertarians that I have seen, he says, is a little surprising. What happened to America and to economics? That absolutely nobody seems to even question the holy writ that drug companies shall only sell to governments. Governments shall allocate vaccines and severe legal penalties, severe legal penalties shall accrue to anyone who doesn't like it, unquote. That is the shocking reality we live in. Only governments can buy the vaccines. Only governments can allocate the vaccines. If I, and only governments can tell private entities like CVS or Walgreen who are basically acting here as government agents, who to give the vaccines to? If I want to contract with my local CVS to buy a vaccine, I can't. Only the government can allocate vaccines. It's truly stunning that not a single voice, nobody, including by the way the great defender of the free market, Donald Trump, not a single voice is arguing to let the market be, to let drug companies decide how to allocate the vaccine, to let drug companies indeed profit maximize in allocating the vaccine. Now maybe they've already profit maximized because they've charged so much to governments that that is their profit maximizing strategy. I don't know. I haven't run the economics of it. I haven't run the math on it. But imagine a world, imagine a world, a free market world or a semi-free market world in which the drug companies got to decide how to allocate the vaccine, who to sell it to. Now it could be that some buyers, maybe it's CVS, maybe it's Walgreen, maybe it's insurance companies, maybe it's hospitals, pre-order some amount of vaccine at a market-driven price. Maybe drug companies auction off the vaccine to the highest bidder, maybe CVS and Walgreen buy the drug and then they auction off to the highest bidder or maybe they don't auction off. Maybe they set an initial very, very high price when there's limited supply and then start increasing the price, decreasing the price over time as more and more, you know, basically supply and demand matching up as more and more vaccines come online, decreasing the price and therefore making it available to more and more people. Yes, Ian says, Tyler Khan has actually made the point that government pre-bought things will actually slow down manufacturing at least. That's right, because you're not letting the price mechanism, you're not letting price signals, you're not letting market signals of supply and demand dictate that location. So, but you can imagine it would slow it down, but you can imagine that if governments overpaid dramatically for the vaccines, much more than let's say the market would have, that the drug companies could theoretically make a lot more money from pre-selling it to governments. Again, I don't know if they have, but they could, whereas on a market, they'd have to sell at a market price. Of course, if they were first to market, they would have kind of be able to price it very, very high and if they auctioned it, they would price it to price it very, very high for some people and our fathers. So, how exactly a drug company would allocate the vaccine? I think would be interesting, but you'd have to take away all the laws that restrict things like charging different people, different prices. You'd have to take all the laws about what do you call it in times of shortages when prices go up. You'd have to take all the laws away, the prohibit, that kind of behavior. You would actually have to have let the market price these, make the market actually free and nobody's suggesting this, even Tyler Cowan in his piece about allocation of drugs, vaccines. It takes for granted that the government is going to do it and then the argument is how should the government do it? What's the most optimal way to allocate the vaccine given that it's the government doing? And you could do that, but it would be nice if more of us stood up as John Cochran has and made the argument that the government shouldn't be involved at all. I mean, there's a big debate about are we going to make vaccinations mandatory? Well, of course not, but it's worse than that. It's not the government's job to decide who should get it first. I'll give you a quick example. Right now, the first vaccine has been given in the UK to a 90 year old woman, to a 90 year old woman. A 90 year old woman is probably doing fine isolating herself, protecting herself by not interacting with other people. A 90 year old woman is probably not a super spreader. She's probably not going out and partying all night. She's probably not going to bars and restaurants and music concerts and sporting events, and therefore spreading it widely. She's probably sitting at home or in her nursing home and having limited contact with limited number of people who could all be tested and therefore she would be fine. How does it make sense to give it to a 90 year old when there's a shortage and when people are actually dying of COVID? How does it make sense to give it to a 90 year old who's probably going to die in the next, let's say, five years, probably very high, 10 years, probably almost 100 percent? What kind of thinking other than altruism drives a policy that gives it to the most vulnerable rather than giving it to the ones who would benefit the most from the vaccine? Now, how do you know who will benefit the most from the vaccine? Well, one way to do that is to have people bid on the vaccine. If it's in limited supply, the people who pay the most for the vaccine are the ones most likely to benefit the most from getting it. And who would those be for the most part? I mean, there would be people who in order to create wealth, in order to work, in order to go out there and engage in economic activity, need a vaccination so they can go out and work and, again, travel and do the things necessary. It could be, you know, it could be that airlines have this massive incentive to buy huge quantities of vaccine and provide it, let's say, even free of charge to the frequent flyers. Like, I'm like, I mean, American Airlines didn't make a fraction of what they made in 2019 on me in 2020. But imagine if American Airlines said, we need to get a vaccine to Iran so he can start flying again, because if he starts flying again, we make money. Hospitals. I mean, instead of the government decided that first responders need it, I don't know what the mortality rate is among first responders. I don't know how many first responders land up in hospital. But if so, then hospitals would be bidding for vaccines, bidding high for the vaccines. And of course, here you'd have to assume that they were being paid, you know, and so they were on a for-profit basis. But they, because of the damage that the virus might be doing to their staff, to their doctors, who then can't work, who can't do procedures, and as a consequence, who can't do procedures, the hospital can't make money. They would want to buy vaccines. And who would they vaccinate first? Like Stanford. John Cochran has a story about Stanford. So Stanford is getting some vaccines. Stanford is a hospital, you know, and Stanford has decided it's going to allocate the vaccines first to, you know, to the, to its hospital, right? So let me just see, okay, so Stanford's decided it's going to be to its healthcare, right? Okay, so they said, so let's assume that if Stanford as a university had bid for this vaccine, they still would have probably allocated it first to healthcare. That's its highest and best use, let's assume. But now, within the healthcare system, who should get it? Who should get it first? Should it be the doctors? Because there's limits of supply, even there. Should it be the doctors? Or should it be the custodial workers? They're all exposed to the vaccine. So you've got a whole group of superstar, I'm sure, medical ethicists at Stanford University, one of the best places in the world, best universities in the world, thinking and struggling and trying to figure out who should get the vaccine first, doctors. Or custodial workers. And they couldn't come up with an answer. They can't, there's no algorithm, right? Because it's, it's, they're driven by altruism. And they've got a utilitarian, but a utilitarian system muted by egalitarianism. So if you just looked at it from a benefit analysis, you probably want to get the doctors first, because if the doctor gets sick, Stanford loses more money. If the doctor gets sick, he can't treat patients. And you probably want to get the COVID doctors first, and then, you know, as for their weight, but you want to get the doctors and nurses. I mean, based on how rare, how difficult it is to find that talent, that's who you want to vaccinate first. But, but that's unfair. Fair based on an egalitarian standard. So fair means, but, but what about the custodial workers? Well, custodial workers are replaceable. Custodial workers, if they get sick, do less damage to the institute than if a doctor gets sick. But those considerations will be selfish on the part of the hospital. So you can't have those kinds of considerations. A consideration has to be egalitarianism, what they call fairness, which means equality. And therefore what I need is, we need is to treat everybody the same, but we can't. That doesn't make any sense either. So guess how Stanford is allocating the vaccine? Anybody have any idea how Stanford is allocating their vaccine? Stanford University. Randomly. They're doing it randomly. They're putting all the names into a random generating machine and whoever's name comes out first, will get it first and then they'll go down a list and it's random. God forbid, God forbid, morality forbid, altruism forbid, egalitarianism forbid, that they make a decision based on their own self-interest, based on what would benefit their own institution. They can't just make it the poor or the custodials because that just, that is insane. Even they get that, that is insane, right? Some of the doctors need to get it at least. So it's completely random, completely random. Now again, in a free market, Stanford could decide whatever it wanted to do in terms of how it wanted to allocate the vaccine that it bought. But in a rational world, Stanford would give the vaccine to the people most valuable to Stanford. It's, I mean, this vaccine issue and the whole COVID issue from beginning have been amazing ethical laboratories, amazing to see how people have twisted and turned to ignore the self-evident. For example, God forbid we isolate the old and let the young live. That would be discriminatory. That would be non egalitarian. So we sacrifice the young for the old, which we do all the time anyway. So security, Medicare, you can go on and on. We sacrifice the young to the old and lock down the young. And then destroy the economy. Now, who suffers the most when you destroy the economy? Well, it's the young because they have a future. The old hopefully have saved money. They've already sat. But it's the young, you've destroyed the economy for them. You've destroyed their lives for them because they stuck at home. And for what? Virus is not dangerous for the young. Virus is not that big of a risk for the young. But that's what altruism. That's what egalitarianism. That's what quote fairness means. That's what it demands. That's what it necessitates. Let's be fair. Let's treat everybody the same. Even if it means sacrificing some to others. Well, particularly if it means sacrificing some to others sacrifices, noble sacrifices, good sacrifice is indeed virtuous, virtuous. So in the free market, drug companies would be profit maximizers. They would have contracts and they would try to sell the drug to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder would be those who thought they could generate the most benefit from the drug. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. 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