It's no use the travel industry continually complaining about restrictions on their businesses due to Covid. The world has changed with the advent of pandemics and certain processes, procedures and even entire industries simply have to change and adapt to the new paradigm that has been forced on us.
To ignore this is to fly in the face of reality and disregard what successive strategic threat reviews over the last 10 years have shown governments - that the number one threat to them is now pandemics and the fact that what were previously isolated epidemics are now becoming pandemics, precisely because of the manner in which we travel so much more frequently and much further.
Of course, the knock-on effect of making international travel more difficult is a positive for climate change - in every cloud there's a silver lining.
Perhaps one solution would be for airlines and the like to charge far more for their services so as to enable them to operate normally but have a reserve to see them through times of pandemic. Obviously, many would simply pocket the extra charges, so they would have to be funnelled to special reserves that are enforced and protected by statute - like pensions are. Yes, charging more would reduce travel, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
When all's said and done, it's now incumbent on all industries to make themselves pandemic-proof. One thing is sure - we can't simply carry on as normal and ignore the problem. A second thing is also sure - that the problem will be ignored - that's how market capitalism works; it is driven by the market and the market doesn't have a brain, nor does it like reserves, as they're not profitable in the short term.
Perhaps we simply need higher taxes to cover all bases in terms of pandemic reserves, but that's not a vote winner, despite it being necessary and pragmatic. Then there's the problem that money put aside by government for one purpose can so easily be used for something else - like (ahem...) campaigning.
It's a fact of life that while profit is privatised, risk for entire industries has been nationalised and, time after time, governments (i.e. the taxpayer) has been required to bail out industries considered too big to fail.
Unfortunately, we in the West are beset by short-termism. That's the main problem of a focus on markets - a return on investment in the shortest time possible. Countries, like China, plan many decades, or even centuries ahead. But there again, votes aren't a consideration in those plans. That's why totalitarian countries were able to contain the spread of Covid so much better than democratic ones.
As an aside, I learned the other day that China had problems manufacturing traditional, deactivated Covid virus vaccine precisely because they were so efficient at containing the virus - there simply weren't enough Covid infected patients around from which to harvest the virus.
Should it be a case of simply a binary choice of totalitarian or democratic, or could we accommodate the best of both systems in a synthesis of horses for courses? There is an arm of Parliament that is not dependent on votes and could be put in charge of long-term threat planning within a command economy model. I'm talking, of course, about the House of Lords.
However, people are almost totally resistant to being told what to, do or what is necessary, by those who are not elected. Brexit has shown this starkly. Our fixation with democracy and democratic accountability is hampering progress on some of the most existential and important issues facing us, like pandemics and climate change.
What do you think?
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