Capitalism helped Covid-19 develop into the worst pandemic in over a century – many things has been sacrificed for the sole interest of business
Byttebier 22 (Koen Byttebier is an experienced author with a demonstrated history of working in the judiciary industry, Covid-19 and Capitalism Success and Failure of the Legal Methods for Dealing with a Pandemic, 1.3 Further Impact of Globalization, Cham: Springer International Publishing AG, 2022, pg. 18-19//JL)
In the context of the contemporary globalised economy and driven by a wide variety of neoliberal economic theories, these disastrous consequences of “pure” or “unbri- dled” capitalism have, in recent decades, been further accentuated and amplified to extreme proportions.93 E.g., in the period 1989–1991, the neoliberal world order that had emerged in the 1980s under the influence of neoliberal doctrines was reinforced by the collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.94 More precisely, the collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ended much of the resistance, especially on an economic and political level, to the power of capitalism. Since then, the collapse of the communist economies has even been used as a further argument that there is no alternative to the free market.95 As a result, the belief in the free market would become ever more fanatical than in previous centuries, leading to the idea that the free market is an absolute condition for a free society and for individual and collective progress. In the 1990s, these influences paved the way for an invisible “globalisation” of the capitalist economic system. This led to a continuous increase in the level of interconnection between countries at a socio-economic level, characterised by an increase in the international traffic of goods, services, capital and labour (thus people).96 The so-called principles of “liberalisation” and “deregulation” hereby became the guiding principles of public policy in almost all countries of the world.97 Since (economic) neoliberalism managed to make capitalism the dominant eco- nomic system on Earth, the polluting effect of economic activities has nowadays even taken on a global dimension (with so-called “new economies” even having made claims in the recent past to be as entitled to pollute the world as the Western countries have done in the past).98 As a result, during the past three ages, the protection of the global ecosystem, the only “habitat” of the human species and all other known living creatures, has been increasinglysacrificed to the capitalist principle of profit-making. Similarly, public health has also been sacrificed to the sole interests of business, with the working methods of the pharmaceutical industry as a clear example.99 (Cf. Sect. 9.2) All of these elements helped Covid-19 develop into one of the worst pandemics the world has seen in over a century.100
