Just-in-time manufacturing, increased global trade and offshoring of manufacturing capabilities, incentive to downplay the severity of outbreaks to avoid scaring the stock market. All of these things have played a role on making responses harder.
This is rather No True Scotsman. A lot of people say the same thing about every failed socialist state from the 20th century too. China is primarily a planned economy, and means of production are primarily controlled “by the people” (really by the central authority which claims to represent them). It has allowed a restricted level of market activity, and a restricted level of private property (though the party retains a significant level of control over said activity). The same could be said for every socialist state in history. If you follow this line of reasoning, either every nation in the history of the world is socialist, or there has never been a true socialist country. Neither of those conclusions are reasonable, obviously.
I was going to point out that there's a common phrase "Chinese capitalism" but there was never a common phrase "Soviet capitalism", but Google proved me wrong. I guess I'll defer to the judgement of people with actual economic knowledge.
If you consider the abolition of private property, and the central planning of the economy to be the core aspects of a socialist society (which is a rather uncontroversial, though incomplete definition), and the exact opposite of that to be full property rights, and full free market, then you won’t find a single organised society that fits into either of those buckets. All socialist societies throughout history have allowed for some level of property rights, and all have had some level of market economy. Conversely, any society that could be described as capitalist has had restrictions on private property (at a minimum, through taxation, though there’s lot of other ways too), and have had restrictions on free market activity (again at a minimum, through regulation). To say that any of the socialist governments that emerged in the 20th century are not truly socialist is a quintessential No True Scotsman fallacy, and the same reasoning would be equally valid for making the (equally fallacious) argument that there are no true capitalist or free market societies.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at. If what you’re saying is that capitalism is a failed, dysfunctional, self-harming system like that of the late USSR, then I would agree with you.
It is true that other systems can be bad. This does not make our current economic system less bad and the blood sacrifices to the stock market less insane.
Maybe the issue is that any system can collapse and become dysfunctional, and that we should admit when ours has become one. Other nations have openly and honestly dealt with this as a national health crisis from the beginning. Better things are possible; more systems exist besides the late USSR and our current system.
Isn't much of this simply ... logical choices in business and / or human nature?
I'm not convinced that people panic buying toilet paper is solved because some other non capitalism like system was selected ... and someone randomly chose to storing mass quantities of TP in a warehouse for decades because someones might one day panic buy TP.
As for downplaying things ... we've already seen that done for a variety of reasons across the board in many nations.
In a country with a functioning government and economy, the entire nation would mobilize and respond to the health crisis intelligently and with the advice of health experts. The U.S. government delayed doing so for fear of making the stock market go down, and in fact several U.S. senators used their briefings to reallocate their investments in remote work companies, much like the advice in the article, rather than preparing a response to help their constituents.
Would people not panic buy toilet paper in a functioning economy? They probably still would, but the response wouldn’t be “how can we get the Dow Jones average up” it would be “how can we save people’s lives.” This is the moral and necessary thing a functioning society would try to do.
> The U.S. government delayed doing so for fear of making the stock market go down
I suspect it is more that the leadership in the White House is simply incompetent. If they believed the threat was real it doesn't take more than a few days to dump your stocks and then take action, not months.
I don't really buy that narrative.
As for mobilizing to produce a thing, I'm not sure that's a thing anyone is automatically good at. The history of nations trying to mobilize to do a thing that isn't their core competency is one of high efficiency and costs.
>In a country with a functioning government and economy, the entire nation would mobilize and respond to the health crisis intelligently and with the advice of health experts.
That's got little to do with government or economy but rather with culture. South Korea and Japan reacted decently well due to a collectivist culture. Countries with more independence driven cultures did less well as everyone went out for themselves.
> storing mass quantities of TP in a warehouse for decades because someones might one day panic buy TP.
Except that sort of thing is actually something the government did and does and should be responsible for. The Strategic National Stockpile [0] is a warehouse of "stuff" that would be needed in an emergency. It's not random either, the government has a team of people who's job it is, is to think about what would happen if there was a pandemic, and then fill that warehouse with ventilators and surgical masks.
"Run the government like a business" is at fault. Trimming out as much fat as possible that the government has. Unfortunately, pandemic response teams don't work for free and it turns out we could have used one back in January. The narrow worldview that the government is taking my money out of my paycheck, and must be wasting it. Capitalism exists outside of that narrow worldview, but it encourages it to a dangerous degree.
HEB had contingency plans for a pandemic[1]. It should also be noted that they're privately owned which means they don't have to focus on short-term profits nearly as much as a publicly traded company.
