You have little concept of the allocation of scarce resources, which is to say, the basic study of economics, which is to what I speak.
Everything is scarce in some respect. If the nation’s production was geared primarily toward preparing for the occasional disaster instead of distributed as it is, you would be living in a much less pleasing world lacking many things.
Medical practitioners are using PPE at an unprecedented rate. No one could have predicted this. Had someone insisted that we stock hundreds of billions of masks, that person would have been ridiculed as insane, the system to manage such a supply would have been financially and otherwise onerous.
One of the problems is anti-gouging laws. As it stands, there is little incentive to produce more of anything that is needed. Prices are signals. Right now, there are no signals as to need. Remember, you do not eat out of the goodness of the butcher or baker’s heart but out of their need to satisfy their own interest and they cannot satisfy their own untilthey satisfy yours. During Hurricane Hugo, some people came in and sold ice for the unheard of price of $10 a bag. Other profiteers soon followed. We had ice, if we needed it. The police came along and arrested them for gouging and confiscated all the ice. No one got any ice. No one sought to bring ice to us at any price.
Not long ago, I remember people freaking out that we were not prepared for an attack against ricin. This is very true. We are not prepared to care of everyone as the result of any chemical attack. Were we prepared, we would be even less prepared to combat this virus and if we had hundreds of thousands of respirators, we would lack some other urgent or less urgent need. We cannot be prepared for all inevitabilities because most perceived threats are not inevitable. Remember, some people say all our coastal areas will be underwater soon. Were we putting all our efforts into building walls, raising buildings, etc., for this alleged inevitable threat, we would not have resources for this or any other situation.
So no, we do not have everything we need for everything and I tire of hearing about it. I do not wish ill on anyone. I well remember deciding what to forego to carry enough ammo and oddly, enough ammo was never enough ammo but trade offs are always made and you cannot be overly critical of these tradeoffs.
Senator Cruz is correct. If we were to attempt to prepare for each and ever possible disastrous event, that would be all we would be doing and nothing else.
“You have little concept of the allocation of scarce resources, which is to say, the basic study of economics, which is to what I speak.”
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Yeah, well, I’m just figuring if you write off health care workers in a pandemic, you won’t have anybody to take care of the people who make an economy work in the first place. So you got yourself a real Catch-22. As the healthcare system fares, the economy fares.