Sorry, Donald, You Can't Grab an Economy by the P*ssy
How Trump's Plan to Reopen the Economy is Going to Backfire Into Both Economic Depression and Human Tragedy
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Just how easy is it to reopen an economy? Consider, for a moment, the following.
"They were not exactly rushing to embrace their new-found freedom in Liberty, Missouri…Missouri's Republican governor, Mike Parson, decided to press ahead with his plan to allow businesses to reopen…But there was not a customer in sight."
The moral of the story?
Let's think about Trump's plan to reopen the economy. He thinks that you can order a whole economy to reopen…like magic. Say the word, and hey presto! All's well. This way of thinking is based, like everything else Trump does, on bullying, bluster, intimidation. He thinks he can abuse it back into line, a thing which he controls, dominates, which he can order and command around, using fear as a cudgel. Trump is trying to treat the economy the same he treats everything, from business to politics to…women.
Tyrants and dictators of every kind — from Soviets to Nazis — have long tried to whip whole economies into line this way. And they've discovered that something else happens: it backfires explosively. And so Donald Trump, one of the great fools of history, is about to learn one of its great lessons, too — the hard way. It goes like this (and pardon my French).
You can't grab the economy by the p*ssy. (And no, you shouldn't grab anyone by their privates.)
If you find yourself offended by this turn of phrase — so am I. I'm not the one who came up with it. Yes, it's vulgar, and disgusting. And it gives us a window into the mind of a man whose obscenity is so grotesque that my words surely fail to do any justice — so let his.
Exactly what I predicted not so long ago is now already taking place. That's not to toot my own horn — it's to draw out a crucial lesson in the economics of depressions. That lesson is this — and it's simple. You can order people back to work, but you can't make anyone spend, invest, buy, acquire, consume. "There was not a customer in sight." See what I mean? You can think of it this way, if you like. You can cross someone's boundaries, try to control them, molest them, even, as in "grab them by the…" — but in the end, you can't make anyone date you or like you or love you. So it is for economies, too.
The GOP, by and large, has already fallen into line with the Soviet logic that you can simply…command an economy to reopen. So let me sketch out a little parable of why you can't — and how trying to reopen the economy now will only go on backfiring volcanically, into (yet more) depression and mass death.
There you are — you've been ordered "back to work." Fine — you reopen your small business, hesitant, cautious, even though there's a feeling deep in your gut screaming that it's the wrong thing to do. You have a payroll to meet. Maybe a dozen people, maybe a hundred. Then there's your own salary — what little, like most American small and medium sized business owners, you take.
So you hitch the door wide open. Maybe you play some music, to waft through the spring breeze, to entice customers in. There's just one problem. There are no customers. Not that first day, anyways. By the next, there are a few — but nothing like there were before.
What do you do now? You feel a surge of fear making your stomach numb. What if this goes on, day by day?
Like most small and medium sized businesses — like most Americans — you exist month to month. Maybe there's a tiny well of reserves, if you're very, very lucky. But without a steady flow of customers — like there used to be — you're sunk. You don't even need your customer base to shrink by half, since you exist on the edge anyways. You're not making a profit margin of 50 or 100 percent — maybe just ten percent. So a ten percent fall in customers? For you, that's ruinous.
You hope. You pray. The days roll by. But your customer numbers never return to what they were pre-Coronavirus. Day after day, your shop, store, establishment is…empty. Bone dry. You begin to panic now. It's been a month — and now you're teetering on the edge. Another month? You'll be bankrupt — and broke, personally.
You begin to run discounts and sales. You buy a few ads you can ill afford. And still, the customers don't lighten your doors. You're lucky if you see two a day — where you used to see twenty.
Worried, frightened, you begin looking for support. Maybe this government agency or that one can help you. "LOL," they say, when you reach out to them. Or maybe, "We're so sorry," sympathetically. But there's nothing that can be done. The economy's "reopen", now. It's your responsibility — and your fault — that you don't have customers. Hey, they say, we're not here to help you anymore — what else does "the economy's open again!" mean, after all?
Trying to navigate this red tape, you've lost precious time you didn't have. That next month — the one that makes or breaks you — is coming to a close. In desperation, you let people go. Ten, out of a dozen. 90, out of a 100. Of your most trusted and closest employees. People who's baby showers and weddings you've been to, who've become friends, and maybe neighbours. You tell them sorry. You feel like you've let everyone down. Have you? But what else could you do? Better to employ two people or ten — than close down shop.
And yet even that has bought just a week or two of time, maybe three or four. Disaster — real and lasting disaster — is now just a step away. And still the customers don't come.
Before you know it, you're in some lawyer's office. Signing bankruptcy papers. Your head's spinning. Where did it all go wrong? What happened to your dream — that successful business you'd worked so hard for. It took a decade to save up, to invest, to launch. Now it'll take half a decade to liquidate, unwind, to finish the grim proceedings of business and personal bankruptcy both. And after that? You vow never to put yourself through that again.
And sitting in that lawyer's office, paneled with wood, watching your life go down the tubes, you, you figure it out. Here's what's happened.
You were ordered to go back to work. You opened up your business again. But even a President couldn't order people to spend money again.
What had taken place? You remember reading, night after night, grim headlines, about skyrocketing death tolls. And you realize that reopening the economy too soon had caused the virus to accelerate. It had surged, in small towns, in little cities, in nowhere places — and in big cities, large towns, and famous places, too. Reopening, people began to spread the illness again. Even if there were "distancing measures" in place, the infection rate was still higher than before. And because the logic of pandemic is exponential, the toll grew every single day.
That had made people afraid. Genuinely afraid like they'd never really been before. Why risk it, most thought? Why risk the life and health of your family, loved ones, kids, parents…just to get that beer, burger, handbag, coffee? Was it really worth it? Sure, for a hardcore fringe of people who seemed to Donald Trump's personal elite army of idiots — it was. But for the average, normal person? Going out seemed much like a death sentence. After all, they'd already been ordered back to work — so being a customer, too, by night, by weekend, seemed even more dangerous, raising the risks of infection to extreme levels.
And so people stayed home, en masse. When a husband went to work, he made sure his wife and kids stayed home. When a working mom went back to the office, she made sure that stay-at-home dad really stayed at home. Bang! Your customer base had simply fallen apart. As a perverse consequence of trying to order an economy to reopen. It couldn't be done this way at all. You could never, you realize ultimately, grab an economy by the p*ssy.
Let me put the moral of my little story in simpler, more technical terms. An economy is not a hierarchical institution you can command. Trying to reopen it now, before the death toll has even peaked, will only cause the virus to spread faster and further. The exponential logic of pandemics will…exponentiate. A predicted 3,000 deaths a day will become 5,000, or maybe 7,000.
What do you think people will do when mass death is occurring around them at a terrifying pace? Go out and have a beer like everything was fine? Of course not. They're going to hunker down at home. They're not going to spend a penny they don't have to. They're going to buy whatever basics they need in the least risky ways possible, which means Amazon and Google and Netflix and so forth will win big.
But everyone else? The heart of the American economy, which is small and medium sized businesses? They'll be eviscerated. They will suffer lasting damage. The cure will be worse than the disease.
As they reopen, but there are no customers, many will go bankrupt. Millions of them. The employees they lay off will be laid off permanently — not just furloughed. That shock is going to cause what economists call "hysteresis" — today's short-term unemployment as a result of the pandemic will turn into long-term unemployment.
What jobs will people have left? Ultimately, technofeudal ones — delivering Instacart groceries for tips today, Amazon packages tomorrow, driving an Uber by night. People will turn to scattershot techno-labour to make ends meet. But of course this glorified Victorian style piecework barely pays enough to make ends meet. So who'll be able to save? Invest? In starting up a little business of their own again? In pursuing their dreams, and employing a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people, at that little microbrewery, bakery, shop?
Bang! Now twin tragedies have been caused. On the one hand, because the economy's been commanded to reopen too soon, the virus has accelerated, which has spiked the death toll into the figures of historic tragedy — maybe half a million are now projected to be needlessly dead. But because the virus has accelerated again, consumption and investment have cratered. That, in turn, has caused a wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. The Coronavirus Depression has now been made very real. It lasts a decade or so — at least it's scars do. And all for a very simple reason.
You can't grab an economy by the p*ssy.
That's how you might think about the world if you're a Donald Trump, or even his ardent followers — an American Idiot, who thinks that you can solve every problem with bullying, threats, intimidation, and violence. But you can't. Especially not the problem of a depression. Fighting a depression depends on restoring confidence — and to do that, people and businesses should both have been given long term support in the form of income guarantees, debt should have been frozen, and safety nets should have been dramatically expanded. Then, maybe, just maybe — people might have felt confident enough to venture out again, and spend, as the virus began to recede, naturally, freely.
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But that is the point. Freely. You can't use fear as a cudgel…to stave off a depression…which is made of fear in the first place. Adding fear to fear only adds fuel to depression's flames. Depression's true enemy is the opposite of fear, confidence, optimism, well-being.
When you order an economy to reopen too soon, people might even obey you, in the way they reluctantly have to. But you cannot order anyone to feel confident, good, optimistic, or hopeful again. You can't order anyone to go buy a coffee, meal, beer, present. You can't command them to invest, spend, buy, acquire. You can't order something like an economy back to business. Stalin learned that lesson the hard way, and then China did. And now, ironically, America is.
Instead, what you do is add disaster to catastrophe. In this case, by accelerating the spread of a deadly pandemic, you cause the very depression you hoped to avert. And that, my friends, is going to be Donald Trump's legacy: the double tragedies of the Coronavirus Depression, and the hundreds of thousands of needless dead beside it.
"Here lies a man so brutish and ugly and foolish he tried to grab a whole economy by the p*ssy — only to set off a chain reaction of depression and mass death."
What an epitaph for history to write for you, huh?
Umair
May 2020
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