The right has walked a very long way to end up referring to Friedman as a neoliberal ideologue. This article is a badly written and badly researched piece of no

The right has walked a very long way to end up referring to Friedman as a neoliberal ideologue. This article is a badly written and badly researched piece of nonsense held together by enough name-dropping to look like a half-decent junior high school essay. > Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. The economies of all countries all over the world were stopped at the same time by their governments, it wasn’t a shock in just one corner that stopped the global supply chains. > The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer, or the author of this article, may have not realised that profits, tax receipts and the capacity of the state to do whatever it wants (such as lockdowns or mass surveillance or raise taxes every 3 months) have all increased significantly since the alleged beginning of this fantasy collapse. > Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. So it took 30 things all happening at the same time to destroy the Roman Empire. Any single one of these thing would have destroyed any less sophisticated civilization and that’s proof of fragility? Does the author know that from the end of the second Punic war to the fall of the western empire (which is in no way an immediate catastrophic collapse) passed more than 600 years? Is it unstable and fragile compared to a British government that can’t keep national insurance stable for more than 3 weeks? > The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. No, they aren’t, and anybody with half a brain knows that food security doesn’t mean food autarchy. What happens in Unheard’s Lalaland when there’s a drought?