| His Ideas 22 ~ Capitalism |
Frebruary 26, 2021
|
| He wondered how things were so exaggerated. He recently bought a box set of 50 unwoven masks which had three layers, called 'surgical masks'. The box cost about $10. He remembered that a year before that, the same box had cost 5 to 10 times more than now, if he was lucky enough to find a box. This is capitalism. If a lot of people want a certain product, and the amount of the product is limited, the price of it will go up because some people are willing to pay more to get it. For companies this is a business chance, if they can predict which products can sell at a good price, they would start to increase their production. Some companies might buy new machines to increase production, some companies might enter the market as a newcomer. In the case of the masks, the government had asked the industry to increase production; they even said that they would buy if there was a surplus. After increasing the production, there became too many, and they started to remain unbought. Companies don't want to have to store the remaining products because it would add to the cost. They started to lower the price. They know that the cheaper the product, the better it is for the consumer. So the prices started to go down. This is the base of capitalism, the relation between supply and demand. He never heard that the government had bought the surplus from any company... About vaccines. He heard that there were about 300 companies that have been developing  vaccines for COVID-19. Making vaccines normally cost millions of dollars, even billions of dollars. He didn't know about the details, but he could guess that it was impossible that all of the 300 companies could actually create approved vaccines. Actually some big pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, etc. already created, got approval, and started the vaccination process. They plan to produce hundreds of millions of vaccines from now. But what about the other companies? He had no idea. Maybe other companies can use their experiments for future medicine. Recently he watched news on TV that in the Philippines there was a boom of foliage plants for houses. Because of the coronavirus and lock down, people's chances to go out became fewer and citizens started to have flower pots. They said that it was relaxing to see greenery at home. Because of this, the prices of foliage plants in this country became 10 times higher as before, on average. The news mentioned about some side-effects that have happened because of this like thefts of plants from parks or picking precious plants from the mountains illegally. His Idea #22 : Capitalism He could say this. If the 300 companies hadn't competed to develop vaccines like this, for example, if WHO had gathered specialists from all over the world with the help of each country's money and cooperation, new vaccines would never have been developed by now. He knew about capitalism's bad part, only a few super rich and rich people earn more than 50 percent of the world GDP, while an uncountable number of poor people die every year. But even so, there are no alternatives to the benefits of capitalism so far, he thought. In the Philippines, on TV, a woman looked happy with a potted green plant saying that the pot was very expensive (the TV program introduced that some plants equal to an average monthly salary) but it was worth it. The plant made her relax and gave her energy. Actually, on the apartments' verandas in the news there were various green plants and flowers that looked beautiful. Looking at the news, some flower shop owners, farmers, entrepreneurs in the world must have thought that this would be a good business chance! |
| |
No.422
*capitalism : 資本主義
*exaggerate : 誇張する
*are willing to do : 喜んで〜する
*surplus : 余剰
*approve : 承認する
*pharmaceutical : 製薬
*foliage : 葉の
*side-effect : 副作用
*alternative : 代替物