I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are…

I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But there’s more here. /1 #COVID19Aus https://t.co/YemDa2GyMu

Clearly the Economy itself doesn’t exist. If it did, it would function no matter how healthy people are. All societies are, unsurprisingly, just people. There are no democracies or autocracies, no -isms, like capitalism, socialism or communism. Just people. With beliefs. /2

Those beliefs come up against basic physical realities. And it’s here that we can see that the binaries are debating points, not real things. As libertarian politicians withdraw government from a pandemic response, private individuals take up the slack and do it for them. /3

Nobody is ‘living with the virus’. Everybody is trying to get it out of their lives, and when the government doesn’t help, we do what we can without them. That’s because ‘government’ is just us. We invented it. Another dopey binary, us vs government. The public invented…/4

…government. Leaders are elected from this same public. Government bureaucrats are just more ordinary people. It’s people, all the way up and down. We invented government to be FREE of all the things governments do for us; so that we wouldn’t have to do them. Libertarians…/5 https://t.co/tagEvPNmFT

…who remove government from public work just dump that work onto - the public. The work still has to be done. I Tweeted recently about this in relation to government debt, how the libertarian push to eliminate government debt just pushed indebtedness back onto the public. /6 https://t.co/5UcPE3ceT3

Similarly, grand narratives about ‘authoritarian’ States like China versus ‘liberal democracies’ miss that all societies need to be directed. You can do it via a massive State apparatus, or you can dump that direction onto corporations instead, who direct and control people. /7

Somebody has to direct things, to provide structure and order. Liberal democracies aren’t sailing along with people individually free to do whatever they like, in many they get barely 2 weeks’ holiday, in a 52-week year. /8

It’s about economies of scale. You either centralise a lot of the basic work of society in a government apparatus, as our ancestors did, tired of each having to repeat the same backbreaking basic work of feeding themselves, keeping a roof over their heads etc. Or you don’t. /9

The latter is the libertarian push of the past 50 years. To dump that previously delegated work, back onto individual people. Just shifting the economies of scale. In fact increasing the burden on individuals, to do and pay for work their old delegated institutions did. /10

Most of our political debates about individual vs government totally miss that government is made up of the same individuals that libertarians are trying to ‘free’ from government. They’re trying to free us, from ourselves. That’s what the graph shows, dumping pandemic…/11

…responsibility back onto us, just removes the economies of scale in dealing with the pandemic reality. It costs us each, individually, a lot more, to try to do the same thing. /end