The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as individuals, and interact inside ‘markets’. /1 https://t.co/n1IVySMrO7

But, and brace yourself, people act SOCIALLY. In everything they do. Including economically. Older shops showed it, people had loyalty to particular merchants because they built a social relationship with them. It was considered the core of doing business. /2 https://t.co/q8qtoJmXhK

And this never went away, because how humans operate hasn’t changed. Take even a Rotary Club, now in decline, but in its day not that long ago, these clubs were about building and maintaining these social networks, for business. My parents were very successful business…/3 https://t.co/lm3OgS4z2A

…people, and I remember a huge part of that work being building and maintaining a whole network of social ties. Not just membership of the local Rotary, but an enormous number of dinner parties at home, and other social events. /4

If you watch shows from the 1960s like Bewitched, you could see that ‘corporate’ entertaining in almost every episode. Drinks and dinner. Business and society were interchangeable. There was no ‘free market’ of exchange going on, just a lot of social schmoozing to build…/5 https://t.co/wE6vEcT2B5

…relationships. And this hasn’t changed today, either. Look at the ‘brand loyalty’ people have to their favourite bank, or energy provider, which the political libertarians desperately…/6 https://t.co/kvfQ5jvoor

…try to break with their ridiculous taxpayer-funded ‘nudge’ strategies, to try to force people to behave like a free market of isolated individuals. None of it works, because people are social. /7 https://t.co/kvfQ5jvoor

Fast forward to Covid, and we’ve seen how ‘personal responsibility’ does nothing, because people don’t think or act in that way. Not that they don’t have responsibility, but that their responsibility is to their social relationships. They won’t wear a mask if it violates the…/8

…current social conformity. Nobody wants to ‘stand out from the crowd’. Despite what the libertarians say, regulations aren’t oppression, they’re PERMISSION. Permission to act differently, socially. To break old social behaviours and create new ones. /9

And the NSW energy scheme is just one example (private health insurance rebates another) that the libertarians actually know this, they’re bad faith actors. They know they have to build behaviours, with strategies, that they don’t spontaneously emerge from individuals. /10

Their ‘freedom’ has always and only meant THEIR freedom, to do whatever they like. They have no illusions about it meaning freedom for the rest of us to do anything at all, they’ll regulate and spend billions of your dollars to make sure you follow their wishes. /end