I don’t actually know if we have stuff because of commercial motivations. The guys who discovered insulin didn’t do so out of commercial desire. Neither did the people who figured out vaccinations. There are inventors who make money off of their inventions, but they are often poor salespeople and are mostly tinkerers.

These are fair points but they are individual rather than systematic. Was in the hospital with my mom a few weeks ago, in NYC. The amount of equipment, procedure, etc she received was orders of magnitude beyond that which she would have gotten in the USSR where she grew up, and most places today.

For every piece of equipment, mobile bed, ekg, sensor, sample etc - here's a company that makes that stuff, efficiently and at scale. They are driven by the fact that hospitals buy this stuff, which is in part driven by the patients and insurance ability to pay. Money makes this stuff go round.

And yes a homeless person walking into the ER gets a benefit out of all this stuff for free - but only because everyone else pays for them. If nobody paid for it, it wouldn't exist.

This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda. The myth here is that nothing happens without the profit motive.

Another commenter mentioned insulin. Despite insulin being invented 100 years ago and the IP being given away for $1 to benefit people, we're still paying outrageous prices for insulin in the USofA even with supposedly limited patent life. The system has been successfully gamed and government bought so that people can be charged $1000/month for something necessary to live that costs a fraction of that to produce.

A lot of pharma is like this: pharmaceutical companies primarily spend on marketing and lobbying. A huge chunk of the so-called innovation actually happens with Federally funded research in universities that we just give away to a company to profit from.

If you accept that "our medicine is amazing", what about pretty much every other developed nation giving universal access to health care? Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money.

> Another commenter mentioned insulin. Despite insulin being invented 100 years ago and the IP being given away for $1 to benefit people, we're still paying outrageous prices for insulin in the USofA even with supposedly limited patent life.

No, you are not. Out of patent insulin is cheap. Newer, far more effective patented insulin is expensive. Insulin makes for great clickbait, because the average person does not understand there are many different kinds at different prices.

Where is the incentive for a business to research better insulin?

And no one is stopping US taxpayers from voting for US politicians to pay for R&D of insulin (and other medications) so that it is in the public domain and can be produced and sold as cheaply as possible.

// This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda

Comrade, I am curious - what is the economic system of the country you live in? And if it's not socialist, why have you not migrated to one of the existing socialist paradises?

I ask this as someone whose family made the move in the other direction. Life in capitalism is better empirically than the alternatives, it's not propaganda for millions of us who experienced it both ways.

// Our outcomes (eg life expectacy) are generally worse because we restrict access only to those with money.

Is that true and is it accurate to compare say Sweden which is a small, uniform country (everyone is an in-shape middle class white guy) to the US which is vast and diverse in every way?

You don't have to go to that extreme. The Myth also says that with less profit motive, less would happen. But, is that really true? If a profitable corporation has to pay a little more in taxes, and thus becomes slightly less profitable, will shareholders simply decide to "Go Galt," close the business, and stop making that delicious profit? I don't think so. If I was a business owner, and I had to go from making "great profit" to "good profit" I'm still thrilled because I'm profiting. I'm not going to take my ball and go home.

Businesses close when they make no profit, or when there's not a market fit, or for many other non-tax-related reasons. I've never heard of a business failing simply because their taxes were too darn high.

To be clear, shareholders do routinely pull their money from companies they believe are underperforming. This is what's happening when a stock price drops or bond rate climbs after a company's earnings fall short of expectations. Investors are generally not equally thrilled with a mediocre profit instead of a great profit because any profit is delicious.

Do they "Go Galt"? No, but their money often goes somewhere else. A different company, a hedge fund, or even a different country are all options used quite regularly. Taking their ball and going to play somewhere else with some other people is always an option. Tax policy can and does influence this.

You are ignoring that the net profit has to be sufficiently high to offset risk in the financial calculation. Expected ROI calculations are always net of taxes, inflation, and risk. Many businesses that look "profitable" on paper are uninvestable due to inflation and risk, so reducing realized net profits pushes more businesses into this category.

There absolutely is a level of positive profit below which it makes more financial sense for investors to sit on their money.

Governments are aware of this and set their taxation policies accordingly. That is why long-term capital gains usually have a relatively low tax rates. There is a high drag on expected ROI due to inflation and risk that makes many of those investments unattractive ceteris paribus.

> This is what we call the Myth of the Profit Motive that underpins a lot of capitalist propaganda. The myth here is that nothing happens without the profit motive.

The strawman here is that capitalist ideology requires "nothing happens without the profit motive" to work. It doesn't. Take food for instance. There's no doubt that there are altruists willing to feed people for free (eg. soup kitchens/food banks), but you can't rely on altruists to feed the world. The point of capitalism is that you don't need to rely on people's charity to get fed, or whatever other products/services you want. As Adam Smith puts it:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. "