But look at food - capitalist economies have been much more successful at feeding their people than socialist/other highly regulated ones. (Not that they're perfect, no system is). But I think your story of "people trying to make money leads to exploitation" needs some refinement, because it implies outcomes we don't see in reality.
Just compare HK & Singapore to China in the 1960s - free market countries did fine, while communist economies starved their people. The difference is, if you let people do things they want to improve their lives or offer valuable services to others, they will do it. If you make it tough and complex to do this, or prevent them from profiting by their labor, they won't do as much.
The ability to charge what they want and have a monopoly would be bad - but I don't think that's what is being suggested.
The jump from "letting people make things other people want, and charge prices for them" to "let sellers restrict supply of competing goods, and / or force people to buy items at high prices" is a big one - it's the difference between successful capitalist countries which provide cheap goods for their people, and horrible states. The US and Europe still resemble the former, more than the latter, which is why millions of people still try to emigrate here annually.
You don't always want needs. Want is desire. Need is requirement.
People are notorious for trying to satisfy their needs with desires and left feeling unfulfilled.
It's sometimes hard to see that because alcoholism is a spectrum and people joke about being alcoholics. Dismissing alcohol as a vice is not unlike dismissing an autistic as overly sensitive.
This would be a truer test of "Do companies really, really not have any extra capacity? Or are they just allocating resources according to profit maximization, not to maximum effort?"
This is what normal markets ARE - companies take risks and investments for a chance at profit. The government could fake the system by offering high rewards... or we could just let companies do reasonable things like sell 20% of their output at market price.
This reminds me of the CCP in the 1950s where most private land was socialized... and farmers ended up putting all their effort into their private plots, because that was the only work they could do that they'd actually get to keep.
No, free market relies on the person with the need/want to decide which is which. And the person then takes the consequences of their choice.
> Regulation ensures those in need receive it.
No, regulation ensures that the people making life and death decisions about what is a "need" and what is just a "want" are unelected bureaucrats with no personal stake in the outcome, instead of the people who will actually suffer the consequences.
That's your fatal misunderstanding. There isn't a choice.
What do you mean? That individual people aren't capable of deciding what they need vs. what they want and prioritize accordingly? Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), it would not imply that unelected bureaucrats with no stake in the outcome could do any better.
Or do you mean that you refuse to accept any structure of society that allows people to make such decisions for themselves?
Things are intrinsically a need or they aren't. A need can also be a want, and people can choose to want things but you don't get to decide if something is a need. Calling something that isn't a need, doesn't magically make it need.
You also can't arbitrarily decide you no longer need something. If you can then it was never a need.
If you mean that, for example, no one can "decide" that they don't need food, yes, I agree. But that sense of "need" is irrelevant to the question of how food gets allocated to people, which was the original subject of this subthread. The fact that food is a need, not a want, does not mean a free market in food is not possible or that it does not allocate food better than regulation would. Many countries over the course of human history have run the experiment of having a central authority regulate food allocation instead of letting a free market do it. All of those experiments failed--they resulted in famine, mass starvation and death.
Some people confuse a free market in food with subsidizing food purchases for the poor, as, for example, food stamps do in the US. They're not the same thing. People on food stamps effectively get a certain amount of money each month that they can spend on food. It's true that "food" is, strictly speaking, a regulation of a sort, since, for example, gas stations or car repair shops or drugstores don't accept food stamps, so they're not exactly equivalent to money. But it still leaves a very wide scope for free choice; people on food stamps are purchasing food in a free market, even though their purchases are being subsidized by the government. They are able to choose what items they buy at the grocery store and thereby are sending price signals into the market about their preferences, just like everyone else.
The only government that didn't try to get the cheapest price for the vaccine is Israel, and we see the impressive results already.
The Israel strategy would only work for a few select countries in the world.
Regulation ensures those in need receive it.
Scarcity ensures demand, supply erodes price.
The ability for companies to charge what they want for the vaccine would ensure only those that could afford it would receive it, and there wouldn't be additional capital investment because that would dilute profits.