The COVID-19 pandemic

[MacBerry]

Sorry to be pedantic, but you mean World War II. In the first world war, Canada saw something over 60,000 deaths, and 150,000 wounded.

I really want to play devil's advocate, though, and say that 287,000 Canadians died last year, 2019. If the 22,000 deaths all occurred in the year 2020, this virus would be the third leading cause of death this year (the second leading cause, heart diseases, kills over 50,000). It might be unknowable how many, but at least some of those deaths would have occurred in the same period in the absence of the virus.

Those are just facts, not opinions. I have to say that I'm not entirely sure what the proper context to think about these things is.

We're in uncharted waters, so there is probably no saying with any kind of confidence by anyone what the real consequences of our actions will be. We've done serious damage to our economy and society so far, but the long-term consequences to mental health and emotional and material well being can only be guessed.

My personal opinion is that shutting down large swaths of society and the economy as we have seems prudent. But it seems to me that most people are taking their responsibility to curtail the spread of the virus by isolating themselves pretty seriously, and so I think enforcing these guidelines/orders with police is unnecessary and highly risky. Ultimately, I don't think it's even productive from the perspective of slowing the spread: people will do many things when told it's their duty, but when ordered to under threat of force will focus more of their energy on just not getting caught.

We all want to do what we can to help save lives. It is inevitable that people die, and that people will unfortunately die in this pandemic, though. If we opt to live in a police state (say) to try to minimize that loss of life, we may wind up doing harm to our society that will not be easily repaired once this pandemic is passed.

I disagree with the notion that "we are in uncharted waters"

We are 20 years in the new century. Within these 20 years we’ve had 3 economic crashes. The first being the so called Dot-com crash. We then had the sub prime mortgage crisis in 2008/9, and here we are with the coronavirus crisis in 2020.

I understand why these crisis’s have those names. The reason is, a desperate effort to focus everyone’s attention on the external cause of these three crisis’s.

The point I’m trying to get to is that, in order to have an economic crash, you can’t explain it from some external factor.

The dot com crisis was set off by the fact that the stock prices of many companies were in the stratosphere. Likewise in 2008, we heard about all these people who got mortgages that they shouldn’t have gotten, and couldn’t afford to make the payments, etc etc. And now we have a viral pandemic.

Here’s what shouldn’t be odd news.
Overpriced stocks have recurred in the history of capitalism countless times. Failures of large numbers of people to make mortgage payments have happened repeatedly in the history of capitalism

Pandemics are not new. The worst one was in 1918. In recent times we’ve had SARS, MERS, Ebola.

Our scientific community is wrapped up in anticipating viral pandemics.

Here’s my point,
Capitalism should have, could have, and if it were properly run, would have prepared for and been able to manage each and every one of those events just like it was successful in managing them in previous history.

Calling it the crisis of X or Y is an attempt to divert attention from this question: why was capitalism so incapable?

It gives the lie that a country like America has the greatest economy in the world. That the economy was in great shape.

An economy in great shape does not collapse when it is confronted with crisis’s of this sort.

It either has the resilience, it either has the capability, or it doesn’t.

So what was the problem?

To prepare for a viral pandemic, everyone in healthcare knows exactly what we need: early detection of the virus, having enough PPE to deal with this recurring problem of a viral pandemic.

Either producing or importing PPE, ventilators, having enough personnel, hospital beds, etc.

These things need to be produced, stock piled and distributed according to the need of the pop.

All of this is very well known, so why was this not done?

Answer: it is **not** profitable to produce huge numbers of PPE and have them sitting in a warehouse. It is **not** profitable to stock pile beds. It is **not** profitable to stockpile tests.

Why not? Because that’s not how profit works. The system needs the money to turnover as fast as possible. This is the reason why nobody produced these essential things and stockpiled them.

It’s possible for the government to admit that the private profit system is a big fat **failure** in coping with crisis’s and then to come in and compensate for the private and capitalistic sectors’ failures by taking active steps.

Whether we like it or not America’s economy is the largest economy in the world. Their dollar is the worlds dollar. And their economy shapes ours.
America cannot get its head around the fact that private capitalism is a big fat failure. That it needs the government to come in and compensate for its failures.

This is not just because of the leadership of trump, that is a mistake, this is also president Obama, bush, Clinton, etc. All of them, to various degrees of course.

We had a private failure, compounded by a public failure ending up being complicit with this entire mess.

Capitalism in America, the private sector and the government it owns, failed to protect public health.

It is then first and foremost a failure of capitalism to perform at the basic function of protecting public health.

Here’s the irony of it all,
What the private sector did and what the government allowed them to do, was to make private profit. It was more profitable for them to do other things, than to accumulate masks, gowns, ventilators, beds, etc.

What was profitable was **not** what public health demanded.

We have already lost, many times over, the wealth that would have been spent to accumulate the stockpiles of all the equipment that we could have ever dreamed necessary.

Therefore there is no other conclusion then this:

The f*ck up that was performed here was an exercise in gross inefficiency.

It was inefficient not to produce those medical supplies, it was inefficient not to stockpile them.

Capitalism was **efficient** in producing profit, and **inefficient** in protecting public health.

Therefore the claim in economic textbooks that profit maximization is the royal road to efficiency, is now definitively proven **wrong**

Capitalism is what lies at the core of the failure of this economic system, to minimally perform a basic requirement of any economic system, which is to protect public health.

The answer that “we didn’t know this virus was coming” is either stupid or perverse.

Capitalism does not perform adequately.

The real question we are left with is: why the hell do the people of the United States accept a system that works this badly

Excellent read of the reality of 20th and 21st Century economics of the "isms" world for that matter. Your writing captures and paraphrases the works and ideas of David Harvey writings. Marx has always been misappropriated by the capitalists as the enemy of the state, while they gathered all the loot. Awesome read!