The problem isn't over consumption [0]. We have the capacity to produce; and unless you are suggesting that society should be hoarding warehouses of miscellaneo

The problem isn't over consumption [0]. We have the capacity to produce; and unless you are suggesting that society should be hoarding warehouses of miscellaneous goods, production must equal consumption. When some external stress hit, our capacity to produce (and, in this case, consume) goes down for non economic reasons. Fortunately, we have such an overcapacity of productive capabilities that outside of a few goods that saw a sudden demand spike, this loss of productive capacity is nothing more than an inconvenience. If our productive capacity was only that which was essential, not only would we be sacrificing goods and services during the good years; but we would also not have so much slack that we could weather such a drop in capacity without without serious supply shortages. Indeed, there are still parts of the world that do not have are level of "unnecessary" production that are now facing famine. The problem we in the wealthy world are facing is one of distribution. When we made the policy decision of shutting down non critical production, we also broke a critical component of our resource distribution system (namely, giving people tokens that can be exchanged for resources). Since we don't have a centrally planned economy, no one is really in the position to make this kind of policy decision, so we are left with the option of mainting something like the previous system just giving people those tokens by central fiat. [0] Unless you want to blame the pandemic on environmental changes and travel consumption. This isn't completely unreasonable, but even in the "natural" state, pandemics happen.