Linked to me earlier, this is, on the surface, an explanation of why “big business” and “big government” should collaborate to solve problems - but, at least from my perspective, it’s more a report on just how broken and fragile things have gotten, and how utterly risk-adverse big companies have mostly become.
The nine months of the pandemic have shown that in a modern state, capitalism can save the day — but only when the government exercises its power to guide the economy and act as the ultimate absorber of risk. The lesson of Covid capitalism is that big business needs big government, and vice versa.
The example is raised of Pfizer, who had guaranteed sales of nearly $2B of a vaccine they had yet to produce to the US government, yet, with a gigantic balance sheet, taking risk on R&D is something companies generally are, at least in theory, supposed to do - not wait for an order and then start trying to fill it.
The article then wanders off into a defense of government bailing out of JIT supply chains, without ever stopping to ask how we’ve let supply chains get so fragile that there’s only one supplier of automotive widgets of a particular point in the first place.
And I’ll argue that the right path forward is a deliberate search for inefficiency - for more local production, and not a “Well, this is the most profitable way if absolutely nothing ever goes wrong!” sort of thinking about problems.