Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for…

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid, private health insurance). /1

It’s decades of propaganda. The real function of supply and demand is to act as the ‘invisible hand’ in the market, guiding societies without the need for government and regulation. It’s a 100% political concept. It’s failed everywhere it’s been tried, because it’s a fiction. /2

Human desires determine how societies look and function, not supply and demand. Every industry that gets privatised to let the supply and demand market run it becomes more expensive, less efficient, and eventually needs bailing out and regulation. /3 https://t.co/cJPPbN7jIy.

Regulation is not a restriction on societies, it creates them. The same dimwits who parrot slogans about the economy then talk about the ‘rule of law’ to run international politics. The economy is a con. Not only do markets never work, they never actually existed. /4

Regulation is buried deep in every market, to get it to operate at all. Standardisation and contractual certainty and all the things that make markets function are brought into being by regulation. Regulation is also the only way to defeat Covid. /5

The fastest, cheapest, fairest and most powerful way to beat it, to do anything social. We already have public health acts and workplace health and safety acts. They’ll do it. They’re being deliberately sidelined. Regulation or law is both local and global, at the same time. /6

That’s why it works. It makes your individual action global action, and vice versa. Like a speed limit, which not only protects you individually from harm, but also regulates the flow of all traffic, at the same time. Public health orders give every individual permission…/7

…to act in ways that protect both themselves, and everybody else. Without them people won’t do either, regulation is the way humanity invented to give individuals permission to act socially. Which is also the best thing for them, individually. It’s not a binary. /8

That’s what the libertarian nonsense simply doesn’t understand, with its talk of regulation being oppression. Regulation is all that has ever made people free. It’s why we invented it, to short-circuit social status games and provide a framework for collective action. /9

Which then in turn provides enormously greater freedom for individuals, who no longer need to negotiate every single social transaction themselves. How much freer did responsible people free while public health requirements were being enforced? Astronomically. /10

Now they’re trying to do it all themselves, needing enormous energy and costing them a fortune in PPE and other mitigations. We privatised the pandemic, that’s what ‘living with it’ means. We turned it into a market. Like all markets, it’s a total failure. /end