Notes from a Committed Pessimist

These notes aren’t mine. They come from a friend who doesn’t use social media of any stripe and who doesn’t mind me quoting him online. He just wants to keep his anonymity. I’ve made slight edits for clarity.

“What the last three-plus years has proved, to me at least, is that there is no effective opposition to the political paradigm that really gathered steam once Reagan was elected in 1980. I just think we’re seeing the fulfillment of Reagan’s nostrums about ‘big government’: that it always makes things worse and that government itself is the problem. People have been drinking that Kool-Aid for forty years. The Democrats are certainly complicit in this.

“And now that we’re facing a life-or-death crisis, there’s loud disagreement on what the nature of that crisis is. Is it a public health emergency? An economic collapse? It can’t be both, apparently, so we can’t even talk about how to address the pandemic holistically. The U.S. population is split into warring tribes, both hoping enough of their group survives to win the next skirmish in November. The conservatives rely on reducing the number of people who participate, while the liberals… well, what do the liberals do exactly?

“I’m a retiree now, but because I passed most of my working days around economists I can’t help noticing that we don’t hear much about laissez-faire economics…