Profiteering is undercutting every possible thing. The profit motive over a democratically planned economy is horrible most of the time but really becomes a mess in a crisis.
Why not have bread lines only in a crisis, when you can have them all the time instead?
The OP was literally advocating for a centrally ("democratically") planned economy. Having production dictated by the political process as the default is the extreme position.
Developed countries all find some balance between central planning and laissez faire, but they do so by assuming the free market as the default. Intervention and central planning is only applied to specific cases where there is a concrete public interest in doing so.
No. You just seem to have reacted reflexively seeing the word "planned" placed next to the word "economy," without seeking any clarification or understanding or even really putting it in context.
The OP was clearly focused on criticizing prioritization of profit-seeking over all other interests, and the corrosive effect that has had on our ability to respond to this present crisis.
> Developed countries all find some balance between central planning and laissez faire, but they do so by assuming the free market as the default. Intervention and central planning is only applied to specific cases where there is a concrete public interest in doing so.
And you know what? This crisis is uncovering a lot of areas where less laissez faire and more government intervention would have been "concretely in the public interest."
The market system is an imperfect means to an end, not an end itself.
I don't how one could see the phrase "planned economy" and not think the OP meant something other than "planned economy". One can criticize profit motive and not promote a planned economy. The OP is literally a self-professed Trotskyist[0].
> And you know what? This crisis is uncovering a lot of areas where less laissez faire and more government intervention would have been "concretely in the public interest."
Please do tell.
> The market system is an imperfect means to an end, not an end itself.
No one said it was an end unto itself.
> Please do tell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
> Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators....
> Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.
> And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators....
> The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis....
> Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business....
> In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.
That's just something I read recently.
There's also the general fact that capitalists love efficiency and hate excess capacity, which means they tend to sacrifice resiliency. There's no profit today in maintaining capability to handle a disruption in a socially beneficial way, so they specialize for their hothouse environment. Heck, if some apologists for price-gouging had their way, such a firm could even profit handsomely from a crisis they failed to prepare for.