Edit: after I submitted this, I saw that the thread got flagged. Should I delete this or leave it?

Giving a political answer since the topic is political.

COVID-19 is the first major crisis caused by laissez faire/free market/libertarian capitalism that the US has experienced. We had ample time since SARS in 2003 to be working on a vaccine, but right-leaning politicians have cut federal medical research funding since the 2000s (when I began seeing the connections between tech and politics). See this National Institutes of Health funding graph (NIH in green):

https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/Disc-1.jpg

Background:

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2014...

Here is an article from 2010 on using zinc against coronavirus, when I first realized just how long it's been around:

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

So a great deal has been known about the virus for quite some time. But we didn't commit the federal funding to properly address it, because we didn't feel it was a priority, because it didn't affect us directly yet. I watched the same thing as a child when the powers that be actively worked to undermine AIDS research in the 80s because it didn't strike the members of happily married nuclear families.

Before we have the conversation about socializing the vulnerable sectors of our economy, I think we need to get to the heart of why we are so divided politically.

To me, it began when Ronald Reagan said "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." That framed subsequent discussions as being between the people and the government, as two separate entities. But the US was founded on We the People. We're the government of the People, by the People, for the People.

Personally, I vote to start breaking down that distinction. I want to see our tax dollars at work again, solving real problems. Not going to pork barrel programs and unaudited black holes in the military industrial complex, and now the pharmaceutical industrial complex. We don't need twelve remedies for diseases of affluence like hair loss. We need hard research done by universities again, to find cures, with real money available immediately to free researchers from spending the entirety of their careers groveling for funds.

The way I see it, the glorification and defense of pure capitalism is misguided. Capitalism is a process, like evolution. It's the default position that groups of people and economies fall back to, like barter. It's a very efficient method for distributing goods and services. But unfettered capitalism eventually leads to crony capitalism, late-stage capitalism, monopoly and oligarchy.

An alternative is humanism. In a situation like this one, where we have to choose between eliminating 2% of our population or losing money in our economy, I would hope that we choose human lives over capital.

I'm aware of the benefits of a good work ethic, doing a hard day's work etc. We don't need to debate the basics of capitalism vs socialism, or point fingers that someone is lazy or getting a free lunch. I'm talking about the meta-level debate about the purpose of the US government and whether we should serve the public again or double down on catering to a small handful of wealthy oligarchs.