Lets start with more familiar territory. Perhaps we are all more familiar with the honor of dying for one’s country.
Die for your country!
After all, we all have a date with our maker. Why not make it worthwhile? Valhalla awaits! Certainly all of us could imagine a situation in which we would gladly give our lives to protect our loved ones, our traditions, our way of life, in the sense of those parts of our way of life that we want to defend. Our country! Of course we would die for our country. Heck, we’d probably even die for other countries too, why not.
But yes, i hear you complaining already. Those motivators for martyrdom, those incentives to “die for the country”, some might be a bit outdated. The Purple Heart is perhaps the oldest military award still given to U.S. military members, but our military exploits are no longer about directly saving the lives of our immediate family and friends, and more about being an “economic hitman” protecting a “racket” while saving the lives of our fellow soldiers. The glamour of sending your child to die in the military is now perhaps more about “protecting our freedoms” in a political and economic sense. Because:
War is good for the economy!
Maybe you’ve heard that one before? What do you think, could war, being good for “absolutely nothing”, and also famously being “hell”, still be good for the economy? Some of us have had this “War is good for the economy™” meme imprinted on us already, and accept it, while others might be thinking something along the lines of: Well not really, that’s the broken window fallacy (that breaking windows improves the economy because of the new income generated by people hiring glass repairmen). Paying larger and larger amounts just because “it’s fun to kill some folks” can’t really be good for the economy can it?
The argument against this broken-window-helps-the-economy theory is that while the window repairmen do indeed make more money, this money would have gone to other people and so this doesn’t represent a net total increase of economic activity after all. However, if we weight the window repairmen as more important the the other businesses that people would have been supporting with their coin had not they had the expense of the broken window, then indeed we see that broken windows do improve the (weighted) economy!! Maths, people, you can’t argue with them.
To accept that war is good for the economy of a nation means to accept that certain people and businesses are more intrinsic and important to the nation than others, and deserve a higher weight in our accounting. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, the companies are simply more important to the USA than any mom and pop store selling fruit or vitamins. Wars indirectly gave jobs to Cheney’s grandchildren’s Mexican gardeners, and these folks are weighted more heavily as part of our nations economy than for example the veterans who asked you for change today, who didn’t get as much of the new money printed for the wars as the Cheney family did. Wars help money to flow to Washington DC’s real estate, not just the five sided homes, and DC is more intrinsically “the USA” than other areas of the country which lost that purchasing power. Hence: “War is good for the economy”. The question of whose economy we are talking about has an implied answer here.
Examine for example the investment iShares U.s. Aerospace & Defense ETF (NYSEMKT: ITA). Clearly this exchange traded fund will make more money for its investors when there is war. In some sense, this is what we mean when we say that war is good for the economy: investors in these companies are going to do better.
Anyone not supporting these companies, including draft dodgers, deserters, short sellers, peaceniks, the far-left (ok ok sorry, I got the memo, we have to call them far-right now), war protesters, whistle blowers, are clearly unpatriotic traitors. With me so far? Great. Lets support the economy.
Healthcare Funding is Good for the Economy!
So lets go then to look at another incredibly important sector of our economy, which we must support if we are good patriotic citizens: the health sector. The medical industrial complex is arguably number two behind the military industrial complex. The AMA, the CDC, and the companies which fund and provide their officials, need us to be sick to enable a very significant fraction of our nation’s GDP. And sick we are! Spending associated with getting sick corresponded to about 20% of GDP in USA even before recent events. Just like defense spending, this is vastly higher than any other country. Big money! Big prizes! And we should be proud patriots and support this Rockefeller funded endeavor, as we do for the war machine. Get sick for your country!
I mean for real, my grandma’s 401k likely has as component dedicated to the pharmaceutical industry as well as some defense exposure. If somebody isn’t doing their patriotic duty and getting sick they are basically taking bread out my grandma’s mouth.
On to the latest coronavirus scare
We all remember learning in elementary school that coronaviruses are what cause the common cold. Of course anyone with kids in school knows that these coronaviruses change quickly and novel ones arrive approximately every 7.2 seconds (7.2 milliseconds in kindergardens), and are often passed on to family. Thus when a particularly virulent strain arrives (naturally or not), there is a great opportunity for many people to get sick and boost the share prices of the health sector and the economy. The patriotic question which should come to mind is: how can we maximize the impact of this pandemic?
One of the first things noticed about this latest coronavirus, which it has in common with all the others, is that those getting sick very often have a deficiency of vitamin D , which one could get from old fashioned activities such as outdoor exposure to sunlight, as has been known for centuries in medical circles. In addition, we know that these things transfer from person to person almost exclusively in indoor environments. Knowing these two rather obvious major factors relating to getting sick from the latest coronaviruses, can you think of a good policy to make sure as many people get sick from them as possible?
Stay Inside!
Right! The most common government initiative taken by those who wish to boost the economy with increased patriotic contraction of coronavirus illnesses was to make citizens stay inside. This was undertaken with great fervor, with parks and other places of potential health such as gyms being closed by mandate.
It has been heartwarming to see how people from different walks have life have united in patriotism and the desire to help the economy by maximizing coronavirus related illnesses. Mass efforts were undertaken to not only keep people inside, but to force them into crowded areas in hopes for increased transmission. Checkpoints at borders increased, and at these places people who would normally go on about their business were brought into closer quarters to exchange viruses. Small businesses that people might pass through in smaller numbers were closed so that people would be forced to go to larger box stores and share communal interior air. Outdoor markets of course were shuttered, these things were definitely not contributing to our important group effort to get as sick as possible. One skateboard park operator in California even figured he could make at least a few more people sick by filling his park with sand, so they would be more likely to have vitamin D deficiency and spend time inside where transmission could occur. Everyone doing what they can, it reminds me of some famous speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do to get sick for your country”.
What about Masks?
OK, so not every aspect of our national effort to get sick worked well. We had high hopes for these masks in their ability to with even a slight blockage of our respiration increase numbers of covid customers, but after a lot of work, the scientific consensus is still unclear. Even the most optimistic of peer reviewed studies only shows a marginal increase in covid customers for places which mandated wearing masks. It’s a pity because we had a lot of hope that this would especially bring in a lot of child customers (the best kind as children almost always have someone willing to pay their medical bills), and so we all put a lot of effort into making kids wear them. However not all was lost, as surely the economic boost from payments to truckers and middlemen bringing the masks in from China was a huge win, while the illness from the plastics and bacteria wafting from metric shittons of used masks nationwide will also count as economic ROI, “mission accomplished”.
Fighting Foreign Agents
Unfortunately, many doctors worldwide pursued an alternative right-wing (did I get it right this time?) agenda, looking to make covid customers healthy again quickly with early treatments. Clearly this is was a foreign conspiracy to sabotage our medical economy. Luckily loyal agents acted quickly and suppressed information about early treatment, spreading rumors about the medications involved and bringing down the fear of delicensure for health professionals who even so much as mentioned vitamin C.
More Heroes
While the struggles of everyday Americans to make sure covid revenues went higher might be heartwarming, some heroics went above and beyond. Of course I am speaking of the injections, that dominant symbol and continual provider of so much income for our glorious fatherland medical authorities. These injections have been such a prolific cash cow for our nation that we name them after the latin root for cow, “vaca”.
It’s important to note here that thanks to the patriotic legislation introduced in 1986, if any parties inject people with injections named for the cash cow, and those people get sick or die, then the parties doing the injection have no liabilities whatsoever. In other words, it is 100% legal to “mess up” and include any combination of adjuvants in the injections, provided they are done in the name of the holy cash cow.
While this operation of wealthy patriotic interests outside the law is unlikely to surprise anyone, it does fit in very neatly with another piece of the legal landscape, namely that corporations are legally obligated to maximize profits. Thus we can immediately see that if certain doses of adjuvants increase the risk of certain diseases, diseases which will put more money into the hands of the corporations producing the injections, then these corporations are legally obligated to include those extra doses of adjuvants in their injections.
Indeed, the true heroes of the day came and pointed out that not getting the injections was effectively a move akin to desertion from the military, rightly treating anyone who refused the injection as a turncoat and a traitor to their nation.
So, lets get back to work comrades, drink our GMO corn syrup and do what must be done for our (weighted) nation. Stay inside!