Is there penance in the virus

Subject: Is there penance in the virus 

As the worlds financial system goes into free fall will there be winners and losers or will it be only the poor who really lose out.
Generally speaking the poor are always financially fragile with earnings barely able to make it to the end of the week whilst conversely the rich have deep pockets. Of course the poor are more used to having little and making do whilst the shock of loosing much of their wealth will psychologically be a difficult for the wealthy and for some, an unbearable strain knowing the "gravy train" is coming to an end. The definition of a gravy train is when money is made with little effort and this pretty much describes events from 1980 when in the Anglo/Saxon world at least, Reagan/Thatcher economics and the unfettered capitalism of Milton Friedman's neo liberal free wheeling concept of market forces, demolished much of the fabric of the rules based Keynesian system. Reagen in America and Thatcher in the UK unleashed the idea that markets could solve all economic variances and therefore, magically the market became the arbiter in the financial equation of our lives.
The enforced shutdown of the economies who wouldn't listen or take heed as in the Chinese case, imposing their own stringent rules which in the short turn imposed hardship but in the long run allowed earlier reopening of business with the important advantages that that will bring on the world stage from here onward.
Conspiracy theory's as to the advantage of a dictatorial communistic, quasi capitalistic economic system was able to apparently overcome the effect of the virus being able to shut down and isolate the people virtually overnight whilst democratic nations have to first gain a consensus and only then close down, leads one, if only fleetingly to wonder if this was not some sort of plan given China was losing out on the trade war with the US, to infect and bring western capitalism to its knees.
But that's another story. This one is to question the obscene rise of inequality and wonder if, after we pass through this seismic interruption of 'business as usual', that wiser heads in the mould of Maynard Keynes, might refashion our ideals on a more  utopian outcome.
Whilst earnings on capital far exceed those of work the imbalance will continue. Only taxation can redress the balance and the sooner these tax havens and the rigging of a companies earning by selective domicility are outlawed can we begin to reclassify our concept of earnings.
The monstrous leap in wealth of certain individuals, completely out of proportion to anything which could be construed as to the common good. When executive pay has moved from 20 times the mean of a companies pay scale to currently 300 times the mean. When cities become unaffordable to the ordinary citizen who, until 40 years ago worked and lived in suburbs much as they had for 200 years before slowly but surely these city suburbs have become unaffordable to all but the wealthy.
This disproportionate accumulation of wealth has been largely the result of deregulation and to reassume any sort of balance capital markets the speculators who trade them have to be reigned in. The speculative rent market and the hoovering up of property by a few has to be stopped. Leissez faire capitalism which has not only excluded the majority of people from earning a decent living from the proceeds of one job but has distorted family life to the extent that many of the children from these undernourished families have gone feral, a generation lost.
Perhaps if society is forced to reexamine its role and politicians are forced into enacting the checks and balances which used to be in place then the effect of the virus will have been worth it.