To save the economy, save the people first

After the Italian fascists were defeated during World War 2, many of them found a home in the relatively presentable Christian Democrats (CD).

The CD was never able to completely shake the haunting spectre of “collaboration” between Benito Mussolini and the Catholic Church in the Lateran Pacts of 1929.

Nonetheless, those fascists who changed their spots, so to speak, continued to prosper and enjoy the freedom that the Allies had brought to Europe.

Similarly, after the French Revolution, many of the nobles had been executed, others fled, but some stayed, acted as if nothing had ever happened, claimed that they were innocent, and simply carried on making money.

One French fellow (his name is too long, so let us stay with the part everyone remembers), Talleyrand, who rebranded himself after the revolution, made himself indispensable, notwithstanding the nasty pong that always surrounded him.

“Tallyrand” would become a byword for deceit — at least in France.

Fast-forward to SA, and to the Covid-19 pandemic, and we have some of the most odious of characters — some of whom have been hiding in plain sight, and waiting, salivating, to pounce on everything the post-1994 government does or says.

They too have made themselves indispensable.

They decry every transformative effort, while presenting themselves as “rational” or “classical liberal” and even “caring” people — all of which is a ruse to pretend that nothing (the injustices of our past) had happened.

Like the post-war Italians and post-revolutionary France, they continue to enjoy the freedom that was achieved — in spite of them.

There is no denying the ruling ANC must take responsibility for the state of the country, since it’s been in government for the past 25 years.

However, with respect to the Covid-19 response, the government, in the person of President Cyril Ramaphosa, has, for now, done a better job at containing the spread of the virus than Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro, the darlings of SA’s altright.

But they persist in giving primacy to “opening the economy”, perhaps with the hope that “competition” and “the market” will self-regulate and reach equilibrium.

As Professor Ivor Sarakinsky of Wits University reminded me over the weekend, the “SA branch of the Ayn Rand [the go-to thinker for the far-right] club is growing faster than Covid-19”.

Helen Zille, not to be left out of the fray, tweeted: “I personally agree that we need to get the economy going again as a first priority.”

Here we see the reproduction of machine-gun-toting Trump supporters, the altright and white supremacists, protesting around the US to “open the economy”.

As one, Texas lieutenantgovernor Dan Patrick, has suggested, the elderly would offer themselves up to die so the US economy may survive.

The mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, has offered the people of her city to be a “control group”, and serve as a Petri dish to see what happens when you open a major American city back up amid a pandemic.

It seems clear that senior financial and economics journalists have fallen in line with the standard trope of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), which seems to be driving a very austere “save the economy” as a priority, as Zille tweeted.

The duplicity is astounding. One journalist — in a respectable publication — wrote an entire article about “poor” and “hungry” people, and about “crying babies”, but interviewed only restaurant owners who were losing business.

What is clear, nonetheless, is that SA’s alt-right (and the SAIRR) are themselves falling in line with their US counterparts. It gets absurd, though.

On Twitter, the most-cited (in mainstream newspapers) economist, Mike Schussler, complained that we “are now part of history’s 1st quarantined of healthy individuals!

“Every health pandemic until now has involved the quarantine of the sick!”

It’s a fair point, but misses the mark completely.

The point of lockdown is to prevent the spread of a deadly virus — that is why we have to stay indoors.

Nobody is sufficiently dumb to believe that we do not need butchers, bakers, masons, manufacturers, financial institutions, sales people, and people to provide or maintain public goods and services.

The point that needs to be driven home is that we can save the lives of all those people (or as many as possible), if we want them to be economically active.

It sounds terribly twee, but how difficult is it to understand that “the economy,” such as it is, and “the market”, cannot exist without people.

That which we refer to as “the market” comprises millions of small and large transactions between people around the world, and around the clock.

Without people, there can be no economy.

In short, we can save “the economy” and the people, and (even the most conservative economists may accept), people always find ways to barter and truck.

For now, though, let us try to save the lives that we can, first.