This was a pretty good takedown of a pretty garbage essay, but I was disappointed the author didn't spend more time talking about how capitalism has failed us h

This was a pretty good takedown of a pretty garbage essay, but I was disappointed the author didn't spend more time talking about how capitalism has failed us here. For instance, corporations are fundamentally good at one thing: maximizing the amount of profit they can make by selling whatever it is they sell. This is precisely why we were scrambling for ventilators a few weeks ago: it wouldn't have been profitable to build them a year ago, because hospitals wouldn't buy them, because they didn't have the ability to use, store, or maintain them. Another example is the current situation with toilet paper. What's happening here is not that people are pooping more than they were a few months ago. It's just that they're doing it more at home, rather than at work. TP for home use and TP for commercial use are different products (anyone who's pooped at work or in a public bathroom knows this), made by different companies and using different supply chains. While we have enough capacity to make and ship all the TP we need right now, what's happening is that commercial TP makers are (rightly!) not switching to making TP for home use, because that would be really expensive for them to do. They don't have the proper supply chain (contracts, logistics, etc.) to support it, either. End result: no TP in the stores. [0] I saw a shower thought on Reddit that said something to the effect of "the economy is in a bad state right now because people are only buying what they need." While this vastly oversimplifies the issue, there is a good amount of merit to it. Right now, most of my spending on stuff that is not rent is literally food for myself and my dog, and the occasional item to make this lockdown a bit more bearable. There's no way I'm spending money on anything that isn't immediately useful or will become necessary in the near to medium term future. And, I'm one of the lucky ones who still has their job, because I can WFH. OTOH, there are a number of things I hope we can learn from this lockdown. I've already written about how I hope people can realize Keynes was right, and we don't really have to work so damn much. [1] More importantly, though, I hope people can realize that most of our elected representatives simply do not have our interests in mind (e.g. Trump wanting to "reopen the economy" by Easter, in spite of all the deaths that would have caused), and start voting in people who actually do represent them. It's an absolute crying shame that the US doesn't have even the most basic levels of worker protections that every country in Europe offers. So many people are suffering right now through no fault of their own, simply because we can't afford to let people who have lost their jobs have more than a pittance of unemployment benefits, and a pathetic $1200 check they had to wait to get because someone wanted their signature on them. --- [0]: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0 https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901430