"The public pays to build roads. General Motors, ExxonMobil, and Amazon (delivery vans) collect the returns"
"The public pays for public schools. Shareholders (of any company that doesn't solely rely on menial labor) collect the returns"
That just depends on how you do the accounting, right? In a similar vein to how "police just exist to protect capital", it's not hard to construct a narrative how the whole point of schools and roads are to prepare workers to be corporate cogs and to transport them to work as corporate cogs. In the case of roads it'd be difficult to argue otherwise. For someone working 9-5, non-wfh, most of their road use is for getting to and from a job, in other words an activity that benefits corporations and their shareholders. On the flip side, if an amazon delivery truck uses public roads to send packages to you, is that only amazon that benefits (because $$$, obviously) or are you benefiting too?
Nah - most of their road use will be embedded within every single product they consume across every waking (and sleeping) moment of their life.
Whether that's the immediately obvious direct road-transport involved in getting finished items from the farm / market / factory to their local store for them to be able to buy or whether it's the never-ending long-tail of indirect road-transportation usage that's ultimately critical to every aspect of modern life - from the most basic movement of raw material to produce energy (and the moment of the people who do the extraction and production), through movement of materials to grow their food - whether the literal seeds; the fertilisers, the raw materials to make the spade that was used and so on ad nauseam.
So, like everybody else? Or do you try to pay more tax than you owe.
This was basically never true because of all the exceptions and deductions you could do.
>now its optional. this isnt that hard
No, such arguments usually rely on redefining "income" to mean something else, eg. unrealized gains. Even the much maligned "borrow, lend, die" wheeze is less common than what people think.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Ironic given that seemingly all you have to substantiate your arguments are vibes, and the rest of your comment is just a pathetic attempt at tribalism rather than anything concrete.
Found Elon's HN burner account
Edit: according to ChatGPT, it doesn’t:
> the analysis considers resources such as research funding, scientists' labor, data collection, analysis, and manuscript preparation. It does not assign an economic value to lives saved, illness prevented, or economic activity preserved by a vaccine
Why that particular combination? You could just as easily compare private spending and public benefits, and it would make about as much sense.
Maybe better to include both public and private costs and benefits?
It shouldn't, because that doesn't make a lick of sense. Government-funded research came up with the vaccine. Why would the government owe a debt to private industry for selling it back to us?
If you paid for me to build a house that I rented back to you, should you be grateful for having a place to live?
Academic researchers don't get a vaccine approved and manufacture it at scale. They do experiments and publish papers.