> Moderna created a vaccine in less than a day.

Moderna benefited immensely from decades of publicly funded research as does most of Pharma, as well as direct aid from Emory University, NIAID, etc

Look, if you believe the market works as the best mechanism for allocating goods and services, then you've also got to believe it won't work properly if prices are distorted, otherwise Garbage In, Garbage Out.

If a firm is able to pass off costs onto others, it is a hidden subsidy, a form of market distortion. For example, if I just throw all of my trash and waste into the local lake and hope no one notices, I don't pay the costs for my waste, ergo, my prices and my profits do not reflect the true marginal cost.

"But but but...tort! You can sue if injured by dumping!" Get real, this is a libertarian fantasy and not at all how diffuse stochastic waste works. The same people who tell me that what makes a poison, poison, is the dosage, not the molecule. Well, if you dump an insignificant fraction of pollutant, by itself, it is not harmful, but if 1000 firms dump the same amount, then it can be harmful. Who do you sue?

Property rights only work if you can draw a border around something. There are no property rights to the atmosphere or oceans and hence civil lawsuits can't really be a solution to tracking down and punishing individual violators after they've done the damage, the government must force firms to PRICE IN the costs of pollution, either via an upfront regulation, or an upfront tax.

The same is true for negative social externalities. If a firm, or a new technology, is having a large scale negative effect on society, making people less unhappy, more depressed, more prone to crime or violence, more impoverished, it becomes a cost that is passed off on everyone else.

Who pays the costs? We all do. We pay it at the hospital. We pay for it to the tune of $44,000/yr to house prison inmates. We pay for it in more police and criminal justice, more fear, more suicides.

If your company movies into a small town, puts all of the local shops out of business, and then refuses to raise wages or benefits, what ends up happening is, the other citizens end up paying for the healthcare, retirement, or other benefits that the Walmart, et al, aren't paying.

Acting like we don't live in an interconnected system where negative costs get transferred, or that every deal is win-win-win, is a fantasy. If you don't pay for your neighbor's kids nutrition, early education, or healthcare, you'll pay for police to lock up their kids when they try to rob you.

I'd much rather live in a society where I am "forced" to pay for educated, civilized, happy people to be around, then to live inside of a Fortress, "forced" paying for a bunch of private prisons in a police state, just so I can view the misery of the world from my tower windows.

So if you really believe capitalism is the best system for allocating resources, you should be in favor of correcting market distortions where firms can cost-shift their damages onto others, especially when it comes to diffuse-in-time-and-space mechanisms where there is no easily visible negative feedback mechanism to correct the firm's behavior.