It’s the Economy vs the Virus.

WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF, AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO. Donald Trump, caps his. 

President Trump is right when he says that the measures we are taking to combat the Coronavirus are not sustainable in the long term. 

I’ve held off writing about the economy because I don’t know any way to do it without scaring people. Even now, I’m going to just skim the top of the trees, so to speak. 

The worldwide economy is basically a Ponzi scheme. It is not, in the long, long term, sustainable. It is based on ever-expanding markets, which are based on ever-growing consumer consumption, which is based on ever-increasing population. That is ultimately an unsustainable economic model. It is a Ponzi scheme. 

At some point in the future, we are going to have to re-think our economics and devise ways to sustain a decent standard of living for all people without constant population growth to fuel it. But for now, our only real consideration is how to keep the economic plane aloft and flying today. 

The economy requires some sort of forward propulsion. Without forward propulsion, the market does what any object in flight does. It crashes. 

Consumers provide the propulsion to the market with our buying and selling. The world wide Coronavirus has stopped consumer activity, which has stopped propulsion in the markets, which has led to a new crash almost every day. 

There is one other element to this that nobody talks about out loud. That is credit. Without credit, the economic engine won’t fire at all. A credit failure would freeze everything, lock up the gears and bring the whole thing to the kind of stop that an airplane experiences when it hits the side of a mountain. 

The government has been spending money that it doesn’t have, digging a debt hole of stupendous proportions, trying to keep the credit pump primed. 

But, as I said, almost every day the market crashes again. And the debt hole the government is in gets deeper. 

There could come a point where government spending cannot prevail. We could have a credit failure. 

Even if we avoid that catastrophe — and every government seems to be doing its best to avoid it — we are going to face a messy mop up when this passes. 

I won’t go into that now. It’s too speculative and I’m hoping we can slide through the needle. But the potential is there.

That is what President Trump is talking about when he tweets about the cure being “worse than the problem itself.” It’s a serious conundrum and it always has been.   

All this goes to the heart of two things I’ve been saying for a long time now. A just and stable government is always the greater good.

We’re in a real mess. The Chinese premier who arrested the doctors who first tried to report this is the single person on the planet who is most responsible for this tragedy. I want to emphasize that I do not mean the Chinese people. They are the victims of a dishonest leader of their government.