A Pandemic of Authoritarianism

The good doctor has published perhaps his most philosophical examination of the Wuhan pandemic in the May issue of New English Review. His targets of justified criticism include the useless hacks in the media, globalization and materialism, our pathetic political elite, and busybody policemen and bureaucrats.

And yet our own habits—namely, spending more than we earned for years and years, indeed for decades—required precisely this. In order to maintain the illusion of solvency, money had to be created and interest rates kept low; but to avoid the appearance, though not the reality, of inflation, prices (except for property and financial assets) had to be kept low. The only way to do this was to outsource the manufacture of goods to low-cost economies, and voilà! with the able assistance of the coronavirus, the economic situation developed that we are in today.

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