“End the lockdown now!!!” some guy wrote on Colombia Reports’ Twitter. “Why?” I asked him after 15 hours of confusion.
I have been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for the past 28 years and have no health insurance. I don’t stand a chance against a virus that causes a respiratory disease.
I’m all for restarting “the economy,” just as long as it doesn’t kill me. I’m a human being, not a cog.
“Ending the lockdown now!!!” is clearly the idea of a knobhead who wishes me dead or understands even less of economics than I do.
Here’s the thing, if I die my landlady stops receiving rent and she would have to cut down on whatever she was spending while being stuck with the maintenance of her real estate property.
Two families I am provisionally feeding will starve.
If you ask me, the economy as we knew it is dead as a doornail and chances are the Colombian government is bust.
Ending the lockdown now isn’t going to miraculously boost oil prices or resuscitate businesses that have already died or will die because of the global economic situation.
Fifty million Colombians and this Dutchman are fortunately still alive, we have production capacities and consumption needs.
Economy
Colombia’s government wants to restart its manufacturing plants without there being a demand. Without preventing any factories’ bankruptcies, President Ivan Duque’s latest brilliant idea will end up killing I don’t know how many people.
Another idea that’s being coined is to pump money into the oil industry while prices have collapsed and reserves are all but depleted. Disregarding the fond memories we have of Colombia’s oil sector, investing in this makes even less sense.
The government is improvising while people are starving and will be dying.
I’m sorry for the factory owners and the oil tycoons, but I believe we should use whatever money and manpower we have to provide food security and healthcare. Dead people make shit consumers.
I also believe the construction sector should be as much of a priority as food security and healthcare.
Unless we kill people, there will always be a market for housing and food. Both the food and the housing industry additionally provide jobs and create other demands.
A guy I know, a brilliant businessman who was creating a LED company when the demand was there, is currently distributing personal protection equipment (PPEs).
He made this switch, I assume, because at the moment there is a huge demand for PPEs, not LEDs.
Most importantly, PPEs save people’s lives and dead people don’t buy LEDs, just like they don’t need food or housing.
We must snap out of this futile attempt of holding on to what used to be “the economy,” it’s dead. The situation is such that I believe we should go back to the basics and secure “the production and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money.”
If we act on this basic understanding instead of trying to resuscitate dead businesses, we won’t just be saving lives, we will stop killing the economy.