The Price of Doing Business: The Staggering Economic Clarity of a Pandemic
It is something in America to argue economics.
The very act of beginning a discussion about reforming our system and who it benefits, the broaching of the possibility of a better, more human future, is enough to send the entrenched and wealthy elite class to their ivory towers to wait out a potential revolution. In this election, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s common-sense economic reform policies were met with near-histrionic wails from billionaires decrying “class warfare” and others openly weeping on live television. Her early momentum, and Senator Bernie Sanders’s successes in the nascent primaries, was enough to begin a conversation about reform that was predictably tinged with apocalyptic undertones.
Now, a few days into the public phase of the coronavirus epidemic, the economy is now a focus as the stock market is in free-fall as the sickness has comprised logistics around the world and is prepared to wreak untold havoc on its way to potentially becoming a global pandemic. In America, business is suffering even more so as Donald Trump’s response has disastrous. He’s openly lied about the threat of the virus, gave an embarrassing press conference he was obviously unprepared for, and handed over control of “messaging” on the subject to Mike Pence, who, as governor of Indiana, contributed to an HIV outbreak that ravaged the state.
In the Era of Trump, spectacle conquers information and earnest debate, so information and discussion of just what this illness is, what it might do, and what it means for society are falling by the wayside. The panic in the stock market - replete with doomsday graphics on the cable news networks that love, love, love to show the selloff as a live-action disaster with running numbers - has also obscured a conversation we absolutely must have: that our economy is not only a contributing factor to a growing pandemic, but that its inherent instability endangers us at all times.
For a virus to thrive it needs bodies.
A threat like coronavirus has to jump between bodies in a desperate race to survive and grow. The more bodies, the more victims, all the better. It’s like a wildfire that has to continue burning. And nothing, absolutely nothing, provides more opportunity for a pandemic to grow than the American economy.
Since the reign of Ronald Reagan, who was a puppet for market forces he couldn’t even begin to hope to understand, our economic system has been toppled and rebuilt to serve those at the top and to exploit everyone else. “Reaganomics,” as it’s called, was actually the design of a group of right-wing economists who sought to undermine the system of oversight that had saved the United States during the Great Depression. Prior to that moment, our economy had been a runaway train on the constant verge of derailment, that calamity destroying the lives of the American people and benefiting those who were able to profit off the train right up until the moment it hopped the tracks.
In the wake of Reagan’s Revolution, and the globalization of our economy that Bill Clinton oversaw as a center-right president seeking Republican and independent votes, our economy has become an accelerated exploitation machine that has seen the wealthy perfect their ability to get the absolute most out of every worker while providing the absolute least amount of resources, a sadistic magic trick made capable by their total domination of the market and the continual insecurity of employment.
Top-down economics has created a system of immense wealth and inequality and has all but separated the American people from the health of the stock market or the economy, in so much as they benefit little from its rise but are absolutely destroyed when it inevitably derails. The truth is even harsher when the trick of exploitation is investigated as Americans are denied the benefits of healthcare and economic stability, meaning they are more prone to put off necessary medical treatment and more susceptible to pandemics like coronavirus. Because they are insecure in their employment, and more than likely do not have the benefit of generous sick days, they are more likely to come to work sick and infect their coworkers and anyone they might come into contact with.
Add to this decades’ worth of work by healthcare providers, Republicans, and the wealthy elite who have dedicated their lives to stopping any progress in reforming healthcare and have focused on denying Americans care in the pursuit of profit and growth. These actors, and many, many more who have either enabled them or carried their disinformation, have created a tinderbox absolutely ready to erupt should the right virus or pandemic catch fire.
Of course, this change in economic perspective, namely the emphasis on wealth accumulation over progress in the name of actual people or the betterment of society, has so twisted the narrative of modern life that something like the potential of a global pandemic and its massive death totals becomes an economic problem instead of a human one.
Coverage has hinged around the affect on the stock market rather than the human toll because the economy is now the window through which we see our world. When debate emerges about possible reforms, or the ability to make people’s lives better, there is hardly a moment before the question is asked how much it will cost or what it might do to the economy. There’s never a follow-up, however, as to why the first priority must be the numbers on the television screen.
The uncomfortable truth is that we have been chained to an unstable machine that has little to do with us besides its threat to explode, or rather, the inevitability of its explosion. By looking first at economic impact, and denying that it is an intentionally unreliable and unstable system, rather than an EKG of society or a running account of how life is working or rather not working, we are making clear our priorities. The accumulation of wealth is much more important than the lives of people. It has always been so, but never is it more clear than in the midst of hypercapitalism under the threat of pandemic.
Make no mistake, this crisis was both created by and made worse by the economic system we are currently suffering through. Every day that passes is another where economic inequality means the infection will burn and grow in size and scope. It is a disaster created by our conditions and enabled by our conditions. And watching it burn its away around the world will only make clearer how a lack of concern for people enables suffering, but how little the benefactors of the system actually care about people.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. His most recent book is American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. He is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast and serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University.