Lessons of the Virus: Who Creates Value and What the Good Life Is

So, we’re going into a recession, and will likely soon be in a depression. Why? Because the workers have to stay home. It seems that the workers, do, after all, create the value.

Marx giggles in his grave.

We notice also who actually matters, who is actually necessary in society. The people who grow food. The people who take care of sick people. The people who make medicine. The people who distribute food and goods. The grocery and drug store workers. The garbage men. The people who work in sewage, water, power, and keeping the telecom backbone up.

Everyone else? Might be nice to have, but they aren’t necessary, and that includes most of the bosses. Some coordination is needed, yes, but it’s not as rare a skill as bosses like to pretend.

Meanwhile, we have makers making ventilator valves, as firms threaten to sue them stop them. It turns out that a valve which can be made for $1, normally costs $11,000.

There’s your capitalism, children: Ghouls who vastly overprice goods so they can get rich off of other people’s death and suffering.

Nations are scrambling to give workers forced to stay home money, because if they don’t, the economy will slide off a cliff. It turns out, as we should have learned in the Depression (and did, but forgot) that it is people who buy things; the demand, that matters if you want a great economy.

Over in China, it has been calculated that seventy-seven thousand lives were saved by the decrease in pollution caused by all the factories shutting and taking the cars off the road. Coronavirus may have saved more lives than it killed.

Now, some of what those factories produce we need (ventilators, for one, but remember the price markups), but a lot of it we don’t. We could work half as much, not have stuff we don’t need, and spend time with our friends and families. Maybe even see our kids. Wouldn’t have to have school babysit them for most of the day, because parents are away.

Just do less, divide the money more equally, and do without shit we don’t actually need.

We’d be healthier, guaranteed, as the pollution dies down and stress drops through the floor. We’d be happier, and in their spare time a lot of people would make the cool stuff they always wanted to make, but couldn’t, because they were doing corporate drone jobs.

Coronavirus is going to suck more than anything most people still alive in the West can remember (though older gays will understand.) But there’s a lesson here, if we’re willing to take it.

This is going to be a hard lesson to take, because central banks and politicians are moving to bail out the rich (they did so first, and are still doing so), and so they will retain their money and power and try to use it to buy up assets on the cheap after smaller business go bankrupt, but focus on the problem. Everything the rich have they have not because they “earned it” or because they actually create more value than a janitor or nurse, but because the laws are written to allow and the politicians and central banks funnel them endless money, while picking them up every time they fall, wiping the boo-boos off and giving them trillions of dollars.

It’s all politics, in the end. It’s all power.

Now the politicians they own, in their incompetent handling of the coronavirus, are going to be responsible for the death of millions.

These are unnecessary deaths. Countries which acted promptly and competently did not and are not seeing large numbers of deaths.

This means the politicians are guilty, at best, of negligent homicide. Death from incompetence, by corrupt, venal politicians owned by billionaires and mega-corps.

A better way is possible. But not if these people stay in power. They must be removed.

If we don’t remove these politicians and business leaders more of us will die. Many, many more.

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