Anti-capitalism and public health

A new IEA report from me - read it here.

And an article about it, also by me...

 

Academics who see disease spreading every time money changes hands tend to take a dim view of the market economy. As anti-corporate rhetoric ballooned into a blanket indictment of capitalism, many of them decided that the solution must lie in overthrowing the existing economic system. They urge the public to regard “neo-liberal capitalism as the fundamental cause of health harms” and call for “a fundamental restructure of the global political and socio- economic system”. During the pandemic, a former WHO advisor hailed China’s draconian COVID lockdowns for curbing economic activity and claimed that “switching off capitalism not only protects us from the virus, it protects us from ourselves.” Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has told Socialist Worker that “we need a mass movement of resistance” against “neoliberalism”. A WHO report published last year blamed “deregulated forms of capitalism”, “trade liberalization” and “the promotion of free markets” for poor health, and concluded that “the importance of addressing that political economic system, and rethinking capitalism, cannot be ignored”.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

 

 

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