The Economics of COVID–19
We all want to live in a better world! Period! Where your quality in life develops over time and becomes more efficient and easy. Our ancestors knew this before we did.
So, whether one is in Sri Lanka or China, New Delhi or New York, whether you have lockdowns, mask regulations, travel restrictions, school closures, mandate demand vaccine cards, etc. the virus may expose the real systemic virus. Obese and elderly people will be excessively crowded in hospitals and deaths as a result of covid. To be frank, two-thirds or more of the deaths occur in people over the age of 65, yet even among the elderly, more than 90% of those infected survive. Also, only around 7% of all covid deaths are “COVID only,” with no other vital contributing factors.
But here is the catch! This Pandemic serves as a potent tool to expose the flaws and stains of our society and the complemented system that governs society.
I believe the preceding point is self-evident. We have particularly neglected clear and honest thinking regarding the damages incurred by covid policies to our economy. We severely fail to grasp the economics of covid because we really want to believe that the economy would revert to “normal” soon. Delusional, yet unfortunate.
What befuddles me is that people continue to underestimate the government’s exponential capacity, both to boss the individual citizen around and to presume that fiat money, when printed, can pay inefficient programs. Governors and municipal officials have sought to exploit ambiguous “emergency” powers to shut down firms and impose criminal penalties, then challenged any attempts by courts to reign them in. this too, reinforced by a corporate press with a particularly vivid political agenda — to weaponize a ‘centralized and uniform’ scientific narrative in terms of achieving certain policy objectives. Some have dubbed this union “the Establishment,” since we have seen the assumed divine right of kings reborn in the assumed divine right of trusted scientists. I mean, one doesn’t even need to clarify the stats on the federal/governmental spending of astronomical proportions by both developed and developing nations which convert to astronomical proportions of inflationary pressure.
What my country currently goes through along with many other countries now is economic uncertainty. Especially the young labor force who are struggling for employment and the wage per day community is in a do or die situation. So, the impulsive question here is, then ‘What is the government’s ‘compassionate’ intention to embark in an effort to fight this pandemic hammer and tongs, through thick and thin, to feed the economy with Quantitative Easing and Liquidity Injections, or stimulus spending as the Americans would like to call it, and tax the general public with deliberate inflation? Meanwhile, ever since the pandemic has climaxed periodically, People have been spending less, working less which is a natural deflationary phenomenon. So now this may start to wonder if, by any case to avoid a slippery slope, if the government has produced any merit goods per se?
We have to admit, throughout history, powerful governments had always produced is misinformation. You saw this with Lysenko’s Biology in Soviet Russia, we see this in Sri Lanka with various antidotes like the Dhammika Paniya (Syrup) and Indian politician Swami Chakrapani claimed that drinking and applying cow dung on the body could cure COVID-19 are amongst them. OH, THERE IS MORE, but let's just get to the crux of the matter. What is most shocking, despite what corporate media suggests, is our inability to understand the basic economic concept of “Opportunity Cost”! This is the bread and butter principle of economics no matter what advanced Ph.D. holders tell you. (Don’t worry, I don’t have a Ph.D.…)
The inference of this COVID-19 Virus is that it even exposed our ignorance and lack of knowledge in economics from Heads of the state down to the ordinary citizen. For the majority, this means, by leaving surrogate decision-makers like the political class, to think and print money and sell healthcare merchandise to private hospitals and obtain a pure profit out of it, is at most, complacent and laudable! OR that To encourage housing and consumerism, central banks can simply acquire assets from private banks, lend them unlimited sums, and command lower interest rates.
Economics is the study of choice in the presence of scarcity, of how we acquire the products and services we want in the face of tradeoffs and uncertainty. Nothing could be more environmentally damaging than ambiguous, open-ended government lockdown restrictions. We don’t need to twist numbers around till they please us as a substitute for gnostic wisdom. We have shut down the world because of a virus; reviving it will be costly, and the economic damage will be huge and long-lasting. Economists should be showing us the underlying damage instead of cheering the juiced-up, bureaucracy-pleasing data.
Covid policies commissioned by the centralized state are ruined cities, at least for some time, and the Great reawakening by the masses when we hit rock bottom will hopefully want more decentralization of power that was mistakenly given to the politicians and their deep pockets. Hopefully, let us be enlightened more about economics both micro and macro, thereby depleting the recurring government expenditure, focus and savings, and investments, rather than be obsessed with consumption and low-interest rates. and let the market be given the freedom to adjust by itself and not let the artificial hand of big brother intervene like the Price controls and red tape we currently experience!
