Why I’ve gone from considering them hapless idiots to conspiracists is because this was entirely predictable and was predicted, even by dummies like myself. How could they not know?
/We Broke Everything in the Name of COVID
By John Green
I used to run a fairly large I.T. department. Every few years, we were required to power down the entire computer room while the factory underwent electrical maintenance. It was always a dicey operation to shut down systems that had been running for years. Such systems don’t like having their power cycled off and on. In spite of our best preparations, we never knew if the hundreds of computers, switches, and routers would simply turn back on. They rarely did, and we generally faced days of troubleshooting.
Our system of commerce is the engine upon which our economy depends, and it is far more complex than any computer room. It comprises suppliers, producers, logisticians, and customers all working in coordination, with precise timing. It is a complex ballet of:
Harvesting raw materials
Crafting those materials into products
Delivering products to waiting customers
Who in turn provide other products and services to their customers
And the ballet continues in perpetuity
To assure that products arrive where they are needed, when they are needed, the engine of commerce includes the work of millions of companies and billions of people, working in compliance with millions of standards and regulations. In our global economy, everyone on Earth is part of the system. How’s that for complexity?
To be blunt, we were naive to think it could be cycled off and on at will. Yet when COVID arrived, we started tampering with the engine. Our all-knowing leaders ordered some businesses closed yet allowed others to remain open. They thought they understood which businesses were needed, but they didn’t.
Leaders ordered some workers to stay home yet allowed others to work — designating them essential. They never understood that there are no un-essential workers in the engine. Essential medical workers can’t work without masks. Those masks have to be produced by a factory, which depends on a supply of textiles. The textiles are unavailable unless other factories produce the cloth. Cloth can’t be made unless farmers grow the cotton. All components of the system are required. None is un-essential.
By the way, and circling back to Green’s opening concerning the difficulties of shutting down and restarting a complex, computerized factory, just wait until our nation’s power supply is entirely dependent on on-and-off, unreliable wind power. “Bad luck”.
In 1958, Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation For Economic Education, wrote and published an essay, ” I, Pencil”, concerning the interconnectivity of the world’s economy, and the billions of individual decisions and choices that must be made in order to bring goods to market. Even the dullest schoolchild could grasp its point, yet our politicians continue to ignore, even defy, its lesson.
One can, almost, forgive the public health savants who so fecklessly urged the shutdown of the world; their focus and knowledge is restricted to the laboratory of test tubes and centrifuges; I doubt, when they switch on the lights in their office, that they give a second’s thought to how that electricity came to be there, and available at their command — they probably don’t even wonder where the plastic and metal components for the switch itself came into being.
But our political leaders are supposed to have a broader range of thought. Hell, if they were too lazy to read even a short essay, FEE even put out a cartoon for them. Which most of them ignored, and which the bad guys out there used as a plan to break the world.