Will we take this moment of having our freedoms confined to reassess those freedoms, the freedoms to travel anywhere in the world, the freedom to consume way beyond our needs, the freedom to demand.
Since the end of the Second World War peoples lives have changed, mostly for the better, with the caveat that the wide ranging freedoms inevitably exact a price, particularly by those who misuse this freedom. Perhaps the Corona virus has put paid to this freedom and in future we will always be looking over our shoulder trying to anticipate the danger we are in. Other people will become suspect, we begin to shun them for our own good and enter a world of cabals, isolating ourselves in the the confined space of what and who we know. The world of work might have to embark on a global or national wage, a sort of minimum on which people sustain themselves in loo of work. The question of unemployment or worse the inability to employ in a time of high skills when our education has failed to teach the young the skills needed in this Orwellian world. To prevent starvation and revolution the concept of a minimum wage for life has raised its ungainly head and this and the fear of mixing because of the virus might be the catalyst for governments to break new ground with a new economic system.
In the third world, as it was called the general population was left to its own devises, far removed from us and our Keynesian proclivity for organisation this world of dog eat dog was something away over there and not over here. With the internet and the globally inspired mass movement of people for economic betterment is a fact of our everyday life as the potentially millions of disadvantaged people make the leap into the world of the advantaged. People who initially at least are far better equipped to live on merger wages not having cottoned on to mass consumerism they live according to what they have. It's almost impossible to imagine people raised in this country contemplating a thousand mile walk over mountains, facing harassment at hostile boarder posts. We ourselves balk at being held up for half an hour at a border, sitting in our air conditioned cars the music playing and feeding ourselves with hot soup in the thermos.
Will this pandemic and the economic distortions caused by it cause us to face reality. That the world as we knew it was founded on the giant Ponzi scheme of unsustainable credit. That trillions of dollars or pounds of 'unbacked asset free debt' has piled up just waiting for a crack in the dam wall of fiat money on the assumption that it was real.
As the economic Giants of this world reveal that they are bust and with them the people in the supply chains which feed them, the chickens come home to roost and we are maybe forced to adjust to an economic desert.
Global warming and the natural desert it heralded will be a thing of the past as industries which pollute the air, such as the aircraft industry and ones manufacturing petrol driven motor cars fold, as the leisure industry fails to build up on people's fear of contamination, as government borrowing goes through the roof with 'Rating Agencies' rating the pound Stirling as junk and adjusting their lending rates appropriately.
Doom and gloom, yes and the outcome may be less acute but the underlining problems won't go away and perhaps we will have to adjust to a new austerity and lower our sights on what is possible.
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