The Impact Of Covid-19 On The Foundation Of Capitalism

This essay will discuss how Covid-19 has challenged the foundation of capitalism with an emphasis on the capitalistic push for profit. This essay will begin by examining the history of capitalism, it will then go to discuss what capitalism is. Thirdly this essay will discuss how covid-19 has affected capitalism and lastly this essay will discuss government and health care systems approach to dealing with covid-19.

According to the Solidarity Foundation (2012) Capitalism happened during the 17th century when a person or company became more involved in making goods by suppling materials and paying the wages of workers . They made the transition to capitalism by making profits from owning companies and by having the control on production of goods. It was believed that society was made up of two different classes, the workers and the business owners who controlled the production of goods and paying the labours for the companies. After the cold war capitalism had prevailed.

Capitalism is a general way of economic life, people create and apply capital goods in order to produce goods and services in the industrial sector that they and others want. An essential feature of capitalism is the high motive to make a profit off of goods. (investopedia staff, 2020) Private individuals determine where to invest what to produce and to sell, and the price to sell goods and services. Companies decide what goods and services to provide based on what’s in demand. Capitalism is associated with a few things like ownership of property, which is fundamental to capitalism. Property rights are legal ownership of resources and how they are used. The only legitimate way of getting property is through inheritance or re-homesteading of abandoned property

Covid-19 has affected many things in many ways, it has especially affected country’s that are capitalised. Covid-19 has shown a lot of inequalities in these countries economies and society. Millions of people all over the world are still out of work. Women and minority workers have been hit the hardest all over the world. Many families can’t afford the childcare or the technology that their children need for distance learning. This is not the first time that capitalism has been affected. In 1950 in America during what they called their golden age, automation eliminated a lot of jobs and in 2008 corporate greed began to be questioned following the financial crisis.

Covid-19 has had a huge impact on hospitals all around the world. Many hospitals have postponed non-emergency care or even patients cancelling appointments or not going to hospitals when in need of care because of the fear of contracting coronavirus. It has really affected low income country’s where the health care was below regular standards across the EU before the pandemic. (Varadkar, 2020) “I also promised that we would do all that we could do to protect the health of our citizens, to prepare our health service, to support our healthcare staff”. During covid-19 public and private health systems have been brought together in some capitalist countries. According to (Wall, 2020) “The HSE is seeking to take over up to 40 per cent of activity in private hospitals, potentially for two years, to deal with further surges in Covid-19 cases”. This means even if you have health insurance or not everyone is been treated equally on the means of worse case. The HSE took over nearly 20 private hospitals to help with the large number of patients falling seriously ill with coronavirus.

The vaccine hoping to be produced and perfected in the next couple of months would be given to front line workers and other working with those who are infected then to most vulnerable and elderly. Ethnicity comes into play again. According to (Block, 2020) blacks are contracting and dying from this disease more often compared to whites. This has brought difficulties of who to receive the vaccine next as (Hannan, 2020) said “Giving it to one race initially and not another race, I’m not sure how that would be perceived by the public, how that would affect how vaccines are viewed as a trusted public health measure”. Reverting back to rely on capitalism to decide on who to receive it first would mean the wealthiest to the poorest where’s the wealthy are not more exposed than anyone else.