Don’t trust “the state” and “taxpayers” with ownership. They’re subservient to corporate oligarchies. Only absolute rejection of capitalism solves.

As Mazzucato and colleagues point out, governments have “accepted externally imposed rules-based frameworks limiting discretionary interventions.” They have done so because international trade agreements are not about trade at all—as even a classical neoliberal might point out—but about entrenching the oligopolies of home-grown IP corporations and billionaires, owners of intangibles, and controllers of global value chains. Governments have neglected antitrust enforcement at home, Sell argues, because they care less about concentration in domestic markets and more about their corporations being globally competitive. Ever since the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations that ended in 1993, the United States has worked tirelessly to increase property protection, whether through the Trans-Pacific Partnership or massive public investment in the military to ensure enforcement. This protection explains why, even in a global pandemic, “missionoriented” governments could not ensure the global distribution of a vaccine. Patents had been written to exclude others from using knowledge owned by the vaccine manufacturing corporations or Big Pharma. And it's not just vaccines. A review of the range of masks used during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that 309 had industrybacked patents behind them. As Sell argues, any government wishing to protect the health and thereby the domestic economy of its people—by compulsory licensing and parallel importation, say, to make essential medicines affordable and accessible—would find its pro-health initiatives blocked by Big Pharma, given the threat to profits and to shareholder capital gains. This state-backed enforcement of concentrated economic power, together with a state-subsidized financial system buoyed by central bankers, gives the lie to the suggestion that our dominant economic model is neoliberal. In other words, the problem is not that states are not action-oriented. Instead it is that taxpayer resources are deployed to sponsor an increasingly concentrated private sector that has intensified inequality. It is thanks to political decisions—such as the Nixon Shock to international financial architecture fifty years ago—that capital is mobile, that public assets are privatized, and that taxes are dodged. Meanwhile, taxpayers have repeatedly come to the rescue of the private, globalized, and deregulated financial system, bailing them out when they inevitably fall into crisis. In just the same way, the power of today's Big Pharma oligopolies depends on capital mobility, tax evasion, and a private, deregulated shadow banking system, which in turn is backed and managed by public servants at central banks. Putting all this together, the lesson is clear: if governments are to use Earth's finite resources to develop viable strategies for tackling the grand challenges that threaten the very existence of human civilization, the answer cannot lie in the sound creation of an “industrial policy,” however ambitious. The globalized, financialized, monopoly capitalism of our day instead requires wholesale structural reform. Recognition of the role played by taxpayers and states in upholding and extending the power of both Silicon Valley oligopolies and Wall Street investment banks should provide the rationale, the anger, the energy, and the momentum to bring today's capitalism to heel in the interests of public institutions, public resources, and the public good. Only then will it be possible for governments to devise strategies that protect the security and interests of their people.