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Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
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Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
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Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Why Italy (Spain not far behind) and why South Korea!
South Korea carried out tests on many more people – a large multiple of tests anywhere else. This enabled them to locate centres of infection and carriers and isolate them. Taiwan also did an excellent job. Both countries had learned from the SARS virus, which affected them. Don’t know about Italy. In terms of strategy, the polar opposite case to Taiwan is the UK, which has gone from few tests to even fewer and is relying on “social distancing” to slow down the spread of the virus but seems to accept the possibility that 80 per cent of the population will eventually get it. The theory seems to be that this will confer natural immunity and the numbers getting ill will be spread out over time so the health service will be able to cope.
Time will tell.
Actually, I do not see signs of measures to increase social distances in the UK. The government seems to be relying more on large number of people getting it leading, possibly, to immunity. Reckless strategy in my view; the main aim may be to avoid the collapse of the NHS which has been starved of resources by successive Conservative governments as well as by the PFI strategy of funding infrastructure projects. The latter means the transfer of large amount of funds from the NHS to the private lenders of the money for the projects, the banks.
Now we the British citizens pay with our lives
The new brand of “conservatives” whose pregnancy began just after WWII are best summarized by Margaret Thatcher’s “loud” statement, “there is no such thing as society.” Scary enough when taken this way, out of context. Even scarier when taken in context.
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’
Sound familiar. It’s Barry Goldwater. But interestingly, not Ronald Reagan. It’s Newt Gingrich, but not G.H.W. Bush. The most cynical version of it is Dick Cheney. It is full devotion and obedience to one of the oldest mythologies in western civilization. The myth of individualism. See “The Myth of Individualism, How Social Forces Shape Our Lives” by Peter Callero. My own favorite “attack” on this myth is a 1931 article by American historian Charles A. Beard, “The Myth of Rugged American Individualism.” Where Beard, as an historian, writes, “It is becoming increasingly evident that the conception of society as made up of autonomous, independent individuals is as faulty from the point of view of economic realism as it is from the standpoint of Christian idealism. Our fundamental philosophy of rugged individualism must be modified to meet the needs of a co-operative age.” Or we can just borrow a term from psychiatry to describe it, sociopathy.
So long as we’re propagandize to live based on the notion that only individual to individual help given solely voluntarily is the only form of acceptable help, incidents like those with the current pandemic will become more severe and more frequent. Till eventually the US and perhaps the UK simply collapse. Or stand only as the play thing of some autocrat.