 In a 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. It would mean that people engaged in economic activity valuable, wealth-creating economic activity would get the drug frozen. Now not only would this be just and right because they're paying for it and it's the drug companies to allocate any way they want, of course, but also it would actually be most economically efficient and it would make sense most culturally. Young people don't have the option of locking themselves at home and not seeing anybody. Old people do because they don't have to work for a living most of them because they've saved up, they're retired. They don't need to be out there engaging and if they choose to do it, if they choose to do it, then they're taking on a risk for themselves. Young people don't have that luxury. They don't have that option of locking themselves away. They have to work for a living. They've got to live, they've got to save, they've got to take care of their kids, they've got to take care of their business that might be going under, they've got to be flying around, they've got to be taking meetings, they've got to be doing the things that they need to do in order to survive and grow and thrive and therefore they would be willing to pay more for the vaccine. They should get it first and the consequence of that would be the economy will return to normal because again remember, young people don't die from this mostly. Now if somebody had a pre-existing condition and was working and needed to go to work, they would have a even higher incentive than somebody who didn't have a pre-existing condition and therefore wasn't worried about getting the virus. So the people with pre-existing condition would pay more to get the vaccine sooner so that they could protect themselves and their families and go back to economic activity and go back to taking care of themselves and their families. Again, if you just use the principle of freedom, the principle of egoism, of people taking care of themselves, of people motivated by their own self-interest, but you can even think about it this way, I found this one fascinating, there's a paper here. Now this paper assumes the government buys all the vaccines but then how should it be allocated? It says, the best way is that everybody bids on it but you can bid for somebody else to get it. So like you can bid, you can decide I'm 20 years old, I'm young, I'm not worried about it, I'll bid for my grandmother to get it and she can bid for herself to get it. And the people who have the most bids in their name and that can come from anybody anyway, will get the vaccine first and you'd rank order them that way. Now again, I don't think this is what would happen in a free market exactly like this, but it indicates a direction of how a free market would work. So for example, he writes, a firm at the helm of a company town may subsidize the vaccination of its employees in order to accelerate herd immunity in the town and thereby a virtual lockdown costly to the firm. So companies around a city, around a town would have an incentive to vaccinate at least their employees, maybe even more than that, so that life can go back to normal. Or another one, a susceptible individual for whom the vaccine is medically contradicted, that is he can't take the vaccine because the side effects would cause him harm, may subsidize the vaccination of his doorman and housekeeper so that they can service his help him survive his isolation because he can't take the vaccine. A health insurance company may subsidize the vaccination of the most vulnerable among the insured, elderly or B suffering from chronic condition in order to avoid paying their hospitalization bills. An airline, this is where I get the airline idea, an airline or a coffee shop chain like Starbucks, knows its loyal customers. Its potential super spreaders and may subsidize their vaccination in order to neutralize the threat they pose to other customers and with them to the business. I mean, once you let the market figure this out, once you let market forces work, once you let insurance companies, drug companies, corporations, broadly employers, employees, wealthy people, wealthy individuals, just people, work out their own incentives, work out their own risk parameters, work out how much money they will need to spend on a vaccine. Amazing things happen. And you don't need this central planners in charge deciding who's vulnerable, who's essential worker, who's the 90 year old to first get the vaccine. Because what you're getting right now, if you wanted, for example, to limit the spread of coronavirus. Let's say what you really were afraid of is overloading the hospitals, right? The hospitals overloaded and you want to flatten a curve, haven't we heard that one before, right? Wanted to flatten a curve, then what would you do? Would you then vaccinate 90 year olds? First? Again, we're talking about first, right? No. Where would you do the vaccinations? If you wanted to flatten a hospital curve, if you wanted even to make sure the 90 year olds didn't get it ultimately, who would you vaccinate first? You would vaccinate super spreaders. Which means you would set up vaccination stations in bars, restaurants, airports, I don't know, wherever science is telling us that people, you know, you would vaccinate people who don't wear masks first. And in terms of risk, yeah, you might vaccinate 15, 60 year olds first, not 90 year olds, 15, 60 year olds first. But you probably wouldn't because again, yeah, 15, 60 year olds are still working, they're still engaged, so they would be the highest value vaccinations. Because they're likely to land up in a hospital if they get it, or there's a higher probability. They're likely to get it because they're still engaged in life, they're still out there, right? They're not, they can't be easily isolated. They still need to work because they haven't, they haven't retired yet. I mean, that's the ideal age group. It's not 90 year olds. So it's truly stunning that we take for granted that the government is buying the vaccine. We take the granted that the most vulnerable get it first. And that there's silence other than, I guess, John Cochran. In terms of, no, there's a free market solution to this. That's like 100 times better, except by every, by every standard, except by the standard of sacrifice and altruism. And if we left it a private incentives, if we left it a private enterprise, then it would happen faster. It would happen the most efficiently. And it would happen in priority of value. So free market vaccination, spread the word because that's what is really needed. Not 90 year olds getting vaccinated, but those who have the most to lose, those who have the, are willing to pay the most. Let's see. Yeah, I mean, whoever generates the most economic benefit from the vaccine would pay the most for the vaccine. Just like whoever benefits from, in a shortage of gasoline, whoever benefits the most from gas would pay the most. Yeah. And think about if vaccine makers makes oodles and oodles and oodles of money off of this auction, then they would have huge incentives to develop vaccines. If we did away with all these status laws, the restrictability of vaccine makers to make oodles and oodles and oodles of the money, then we would get a lot more companies going into the vaccine business. If we did away with all the different laws, the restrictability to price the vaccines the way they think it should be priced, we'd get a lot more companies incentivized to go into the vaccine business. I mean, we'll see in a minute that there should never, none of this should have ever happened. Lockdowns, destruction of business, destruction of economic activity, destruction of wealth is just absurd. One of the ways to fix the system, even though the government is distributing, is instead of for the government to actually distribute the vaccine, imagine if the government distributed options like a claim on a vaccine, so a piece of paper that says you can get a vaccine. And imagine if individuals then could sell that claim, but it's illegal today. If they could sell that claim, just like people hawking tickets is illegal, which is absurd, you would create a market for this and you would again mimic, at least to some extent, what would happen in a free market, but privatized actions and vaccines are banned. Literally right now, we live in a world in which vaccine producers can only sell to government. Jacob asks a good question. Should high value, high demand individuals have different prison terms, or more house arrest due to this logic or is law outside these considerations? Law is outside these considerations because law is not a voluntary, in this case, if you've committed a crime, that is if you have violated somebody else's rights by committing fraud, stealing, you know, committing physical violence against somebody, motoring somebody, then it's not, there is no market consideration here. There's no economics to explain it. The only consideration is justice. The only consideration here is a penalty is you suffering the consequence of your action and taking you out of society if you can't do it again, and more importantly, making you pay for what you actually did. My argument here about the vaccine, yes, there is an element of it's more efficient and it produces better results, but the fundamental is here, why can't a vaccine maker who made the vaccine, who owns the vaccine, why can't they decide how to distribute the vaccine? Why can't they decide how to charge prices? This is, vaccines are purely economic phenomena. Purely property rights phenomena. But once you violate somebody's rights, you are not in the realm of the voluntary. You are now in the realm of government retaliatory force. You are now in the realm of justice, which is a different realm, I mean legal justice, a different realm from the justice of the marketplace. Those are two different ideas. I mean, they're based on the same principles. But one is voluntary, essentially voluntary. And the other one is not, because you violated somebody else's rights. What we need today, what I call the 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 broads. 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