Corona Virus Lockdown Truth Bombs

1) The simple fact is that if you want stuff - i.e. wealth rather than poverty... people have to actually Make the stuff. It doesn’t come out of thin air. 

2) It’s nice to think that with a magic wand all we have to do is appropriate the wealth of "the greedy rich" and redistribute it, but the fact is almost all the money they have is invested in the machines and factories that make a modern standard of living possible, and the technology that promises to improve it in the future. Moving it from capital investment to consumption will make everyone poor not rich. They will go out to the shops and spend it, the price of goods and services will shoot through the roof, and we will be worse off. 

3) Spending does not create wealth saving does.

4) If you stop people working for the best part of a year don’t be surprised when everyone is poor in the future. It’s going to take years for people to recover from the poverty, possibly decades.

5) If people blame the on eeeevil capitalism they will end up killing the goose that laid the golden eggs that bought all the privileges they are lamenting having lost from shutting the economy down. 

6) It may be nice to fantasize that some benign gods will come along to take over and run everything in the interests of "the people" (whatever that means) - but we are infinitely more likely to end up looking like Venezuela or Cuba. 

7) If you're not scared of this outcome you should be. 

Governments Are Not Incentivized to Solve Problems

States arose with agriculture, around the same time as slavery. When states were monarchies, it was relatively obvious that the institution existed - like slavery - to separate people into two classes. One that produced, and another one that consumed. 

This fact became intolerable, and people demanded to have a say in how the state was run. They did not imagine that states, as such, were the problem, but simply that they were run by monarchs. They could no longer imagine forms of organisation that did not involve state, but really states are the anomaly. Throughout most of history there were none. They are a logical error predicated on misunderstanding of economics. 

Economics demonstrates that people and institutions tend to act as they are incentivized to behave.

Companies gain wealth from providing goods and services for money, the consumer is king and puts them out of business if they don't deliver the goods. Charities have limited resources and must allocate them effectively if they are to do well in league tables. Even then there is still corruption.

The government is simply not incentivized  to solve problems. First, they get paid whether they do a good job or not. Second, they monopolize services so they can't compare their performance to other strategies and adopt other people's innovations. 

Damningly, the government derives its power from people being poor because the pretext for every government program is "how will the poor get xyz if the government does not provide it". 

If poor people become rich they will just do what middle class people do which is take their kids of out public schools and put them in better private schools, take out health insurance so they don’t need to rely on poorer nhs hospitals, there will be less crime so less need for police, and no poor people to go in the army and fight endless wars in the Middle East. With the diminishing need for social programs because people are rich enough to solve their own local issues, there will be less need for social workers and other social services. Millions of government bureaucrats will no longer be necessary. How can the government even make them redundant given that A) they represent a huge voting block? and B) they are heavily unionized. 

Solving problems reduces the need for government and no one puts themselves out of a need for a job unless they are forced to. The incentive structures are such that government are doomed to fail and basically everything that economic theory predicts you will find from government is exactly what you see the results to be. More and more dependence, less self-sufficiency, people bribed with public funds to support this or that policy, and driven to hatred of one another. 

Private Ownership of the Means of Production confers a Social Benefit

Perhaps the most difficult battle faced by the advocates of free markets it to convince people that Private Ownership of the Means of Production is not some special privilege conferring and advantage to "greedy capitalists" at the expense of everyone else, but that it serves a social function that is beneficial to all.

Private ownership makes the accumulated wealth of the entrepreneur a slave to the consumer - that is - to everyone else. We commonly understand private ownership to mean "for our own use," eg. the use of a toothbrush or a private residence, but in the case of private ownership, what is owned is almost exclusively for the use of others, placed at their service.

The capitalist keeps his wealth only to the extend he continues to use what he has accumulated in the interests of the masses, as they judge them, by churning out whichever goods and services they demand. To the extent he succeeds, his wealth will grow. This is the economy’s way of saying that he makes sure and wise decisions with the capital we have amassed as a society - not wasting them on projects that the public have no interest in paying for. To the extent he fails to do so, those factories, machines and companies that his investments represent will be sold on at knock-down rates to whoever thinks they can do a better job of managing them in the public interest. This allows for the constant re-allocation of capital to those who can best manage it, and engenders the accumulation of more capital over time. As the capital stock increase there is more wealth generation and technological advancement can be expected, and this will necessarily be largely led by the preferences of consumers, not those who actually "own" the capital.