Once upon a time, we used to make stuff. Manufacturing employed engineers and machine operators and truck drivers and office clerks and accountants. It was a Gibraltar-sized chunk of American middle-class stability.
But then we got smart. Really smart.
We sent our manufacturing infrastructure to Asia and outsourced the distribution. That freed-up a great many employees, who were unceremoniously terminated. As stock prices soared, we looked for still more things to divest ourselves of.
It wasn't long before we were little more than a post office box on the Isle of Man, a leased boardroom in a Manhattan skyscraper and plants scattered throughout Asia. We were Forbes magazine's business of the future.
A model of ruthless efficiency.
Business could now milk a cow and receive an urn full of cream in return.
But as profits and their margins spiral upwards in an unbroken trajectory, who is paying for this? Who's going to get the bill?
Someone must be, surely.
As employer's profit margins explode, businesses are enjoying the succulent fruit that comes from being let off the leash of regulation and oversight. The Citizen's United decision remains the high-water mark of this cancerous trend.
(Unless we're counting Donald Trump's three-billion-dollar bribe to the nation's billionaires and their companies, of course.)
This is the environment in which Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, after having created one of three vaccines that successfully resisted COVID, decided to increase the cost per dose from the $26.36 the U.S. government was paying to $130.
Fair enough, right? His people did the work and spent the time to figure this thing out. They should rightfully profit for their work.
Shouldn't they?
Yes, Bancel's employees did a good bit of heavy lifting. But let's not forget they received an enormous amount of money from people completely unrelated to Moderna.
Depending on your level of cynicism, you may already know where this is going. For the rest of you, I'll lay it bare here: You paid for the COVID vaccine's research and development. One point seven billion dollars of American taxpayer money was handed over to Moderna (and Pifzer) to devise such a thing.
That's right. It was on your dime.
But those nineteen-billion-dollars in profit? Oh, yeah. About that. Um, that's not for you. That's for us because we “made” it. You just paid for it.
Public expense for private profit. I wonder what will our next great idea will be.
This is how far off the rails we are. This is a new low in exploitation and ghoulishness. And let me guess—these firms feel they should get a tax-break on those profits for their unwavering commitment to the American people, too.
Anyone have an air-sickness bag?
But with a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican majority in the House, feeling this monstrosity develop and take shape is quite easily done. Even while Republicans seek to gut Social Security and Medicare (that's right Marjorie Taylor-Greene!) as excessive entitlements, the American public can, in essence, be put to work for a behemoth like Moderna without so much as a cent in compensation.
Failing that, is expecting Moderna to return the funds that subsidized their research hoping for too much?
Given one party's affinity for labeling the policies of another as “creeping socialism”, I wonder how we can possibly compare something like social security or MediCare to a nineteen-billion-dollar private slush fund.
They don't fit in the same universe much less a shared government building.
Use the term 'business ethics' in a conversation and you're as likely to encounter a blank expression as one weary with disappointment and resignation. Can you choose which person is better informed?
I can.
