Re the "debate" on socialism -- it’s here one way or another. Trump is a national socialist of the 1930s Italian/German model, brow-beating Google to make him a website, yelling at GM for not making his ventilators.

The chalice of the free market has been long broken -- and with Coronavirus broken not only in practice (the Fed is buying muni bonds!) but in theory.

There is no moral component to a pandemic, it requires fast action of the kind that only a powerful centralized authority can provide and the data is undeniable there. Who succeeded? In the West, the most technocratic socialist state, Germany. In Asia the surveillance behemoths.

Milton Friedman just didn't write a whole lot about the situation we're now in.

America is, ideologically, a poorly health-rated All You Can Eat Buffet. Germans taking in the French sick. That is a role we used to play. Now? Trump has Robert Kraft to use the Patriots airplane to get back the masks he gave to China when he was still calling this all a hoax.

It is the worst of the free market and the worst of socialism. And, with Joe Biden locked in his basement, it is worth considering that this road goes beyond the horizon.

The shame and trauma of the 1918 Spanish Influenza was so great that the memory of the event was repressed. This is why you didn't hear about it until 2 weeks ago, even though it killed millions. Trauma repression. Didn't happen.

My guess is that can repeat here. The virus breaks by late August. 200k die. It is a national humiliation and loss and indignity so great that an (electoral?) majority of us choose to pretend we did a good job. To move on.

The British did this when their ships, Eremus and Terrible, got locked in Arctic ice and the men became cannibals. The fuckup was too great for the nation of Shackleton. So they built statues to the cannibals, calling them heroes.