1/ It has not been a popular view, but I've made it repeatedly, nonetheless. Our reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, namely, the shutting down of our economies without any clear strategy for reopening them has put our society at greater danger than the virus itself ever could.
2/ We risk repeating the same mistakes today, only now the choice is not between the economy and saving human lives. The choice is between property and freedom. politico.com/video/2020/06/…
3/ In both cases, it is our reaction to the things that scare us that should frighten us the most. The 9/11 attacks resulted in ~3K casualties, but our reaction to them resulted in 100K's of deaths, trillions of $ wasted, and the loss of privacy & freedom. aclu.org/other/aclu-tes…
4/ The same can be said of our reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. Historians may well look back and wonder if we did anything more than delay the day of reckoning by protecting the most powerful people, interests, and institutions in society at the expense of everyone else. 
5/ I'm afraid that we are going down a very dark path in America today. We have little experience with real danger. This has led us to develop "a pathological habit of inflating negligible threats.” It may well be the cause of our undoing. rt.com/op-ed/484041-w…
6/ But we've also built a radically unequal society. The killing of George Floyd may have sparked the riots, but the tinder of generational inequities in the accumulation of wealth & power are immense and have been building uninterrupted for four decades. inequality.org/facts/wealth-i…
7/ With each successive business cycle, our leaders have consistently chosen to elevate the rights of property over the civil & political rights of citizens. Our response to economic contraction has been to expedite the recovery of asset prices at the expense of the real economy.
8/ We've lowered lending standards, decreased interest rates, raised debt levels, weakened bankruptcy laws & loosened regulations meant to protect the public from the predations of white collar criminals. ALL of this has weakened our societies for the benefit of a tiny elite.
9/ A liberal democracy cannot survive excessive levels of civil & wealth inequality among the citizenry indefinitely. The inequities must either (1) be rectified through some form of redistribution and structural reform or (2) by way of the government becoming more authoritarian.
10/ When the president says, "I will deploy the United States military" against "the organizers of the terror," we should be frightened and we should all take notice. This is how liberal societies go from being open & democratic to authoritarian & closed.
11/ It doesn't have to be this way. We are not helpless. Neither the virus, nor the rioters represent existential threats to our society. But both carry an important message. Namely, that we can no longer carry on with business as usual.
12/ It's time to recognize that we've taken this arrangement of political economy as far as it will allow. We have endangered the viability of the system. The edifice of the post-war order is collapsing all around us. We can no longer afford to remain oblivious to the danger.
