Fair warning, rant incoming... in light of the narratives we’re hearing from the job creators. Bear with me while I try to work this out.

My whole life I’ve been told that capitalism revolves around heroic entrepreneurs, creating value and wealth..

..and driving the progress of history’s most evolved civilisation.

As we all know, we’ve just been hit by an exogenous shock. A bug which has forced us to put business on hold for a little over a month. A cessation of labor, productivity, consumption, speculation.

Now, given the story of the cleverness and dexterity of these mighty entrepreneurs, we’d be forgiven for expecting them to have a contingency, right? Something aside for a rainy day... that they’d be resilient to a storm and ready to lead us on the path back to prosperity.

They have after all, in exchange for this great service to progress, convinced us that 1% of them should be allowed to pocket 22% of global GDP in return for their services. And that we should subsidize them them our lining planet and our children’s futures in exchange.

But they don’t have anything aside for a rainy day. They don’t practice the ‘fiscal responsibility’ they demand of governments. They pay it all out in dividends. Spend it on mansions, yachts, travel, and other baubles of wealth. And then they want us to bail them out.

With our labor, our safety and our lives, with the public purse and with the continued exploitation of sacrificial zones, both human and nature.

Abridged: where is the fiscal responsibility in the private sector? Let’s bail out from the bottom this time. Richard Branson and co can sell their islands to save their enterprise.

These are the same people who have driven an Austerity narrative. Demanding fiscal responsibility from sovereign nations who issue their own currencies. At the expense of immense human suffering. Including the situation we now see in underprepared health systems.

These people can’t issue their own currency. They should be expected to have reserves to weather a storm in an era in which science earns us we will face many unexpected storms.