re: #2 Kragar

If we really needed a cure for Ebola, the free market would have found one by now.

Thanks Obama.

No it wouldn’t have, for two reasons. The first is that Ebola, up til now, has not achieved any outbreaks on a scale that would allow the expense of producing the vaccine to be recouped by sales of the vaccine.

The second is that if a vaccine had been developed on the free market, the government would not permit the developers to sell the vaccine at whatever price the market would bear. The word `profiteering’ would be deployed.

Pharm companies can think ahead, and they correctly reason that if there’s no big outbreak, there’s no money in a vaccine, and if there is, which a priori would have been judged unlikely, there’s no big money in a vaccine.

A completely ruthless free market, no holds barred, might possibly have spotted the chance for a bonanza and developed a vaccine just in case. But the world will never accept such markets, so that leaves government to support the R&D for vaccines against maladies such as Ebola.

Which brings us back to the point of the post. Liberals are right, and conservatives are wrong, about R&D into “obscure” diseases. If only the issue could be seen as a military one, then conservatives might get it. Aliens are out to kidnap our bodies and drown us in our own blood and we need a weapon against them. Millions for defense!