Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic…

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1 https://t.co/W4PuaCfCkp

Notice the % of government spending to GDP has been stuck at the entirely political and artificial level of around 25% for 30 years. That’s the victory of small-government political libertarians, who were so politically successful that this is now seen as a fact of nature. /2 https://t.co/jcldvEte9u

It’s privatised societies, the entire conservative political project today is to try to gradually strangle the State. To return your taxes to you, because it’s ‘your money’! Money you will now have to use to buy all of the things public services used to provide for you. /3 https://t.co/VQPjFwNmYW

That’s why humans invented the State, to create economies of scale in public services. To make life easier and cheaper for everybody. By artificially strangling government spending at that ridiculous 25% figure, the State can’t function. The conservatives know that. /4 https://t.co/dwfDJVZImx

It’s their plan, to strangle it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of individuals affording the services the economies of scale of the State used to provide for them. That’s why we’re seeing mass economic distress right now. But to zoom out. /5

The con is much clearer if we can get away from idiot daily news cycles. Yes the government spent a lot on the pandemic. But it spent a lot more on WW1 and WW2, relative to GDP. It’s the role of the State, to buffer populations from disaster as well as to provide services. /6 https://t.co/r7eMjraiRT

I’ve Tweeted a lot about those big surges of State activity from 1914-1945. They broke the back of generations of aristocratic privilege in societies. The idea of ‘the public’ had arrived. Society as an interdependent mix of all people. The old aristocratic class was furious. /7 https://t.co/VG6VSPGX1o

And that explains most of the conservative fight back since the 1950s. To destroy the State, the obstacle between the old aristocratic privilege, and the modern public-oriented societies enabled by the State. To return now to the pandemic. /8

The hysteria over ‘lockdowns’ was really the hysteria of these same aristocratic elites terrified that a new global catastrophe, a pandemic, might reverse the gains of the past 70 years of their cause, of destroying the State. The fear was palpable, if you knew to look. /9 https://t.co/w6tNg6eO4B

All the propaganda, happily circulated by assisting numpties in the health sciences, about ‘living with’ a pandemic would have been rightly seen as ridiculous in any other time of the past century. But the public and the institutions which created and sustained it are gone. /10

Gone, or crippled. We’re all living our best lives now, taking selfies in the wreckage, using catastrophe for dramatic backdrop in our curated social media lives. We’re back cheering on ‘the economy’ again, the thing that destroyed the public. /end