Empty Shelves

Everything is closed, and all we can do is browse memes online. Plus all memes are about one thing. It's amazing how political you can make a pandemic. But it will undoubtedly have political ramifications, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are reading in so many political causes.

An event like COVID-19 makes me ask a lot of questions about our economy. What are the most important parts, what are it's vulnerabilities. For a while, I was worried I wouldn't be able to work without Chinese factories to make gloves. Now, it's worth wondering what was so important about my job anyway, since I might not be able to do very much of it for a good long while.

And certainly this asks questions of capitalism, but no, it doesn't "expose" it. I've seen claims that empty shelves in grocery stores reveal the flaws of capitalism. If you blame people trying to sell hand sanitizer on eBay as "capitalism" I'll agree with you in the short term, although the empty meat shelves at my Safeway would seemingly be empty under any economic system with basic human freedoms. This critique misses something important though.

These shelves are going to be restocked, and I would predict they're going to be restocked pretty darn quickly. It's bad enough to know that price controls have the same effect in Venezuela as a global pandemic, but that pain doesn't last for a week, it lasts until you remove the price control (which the government has started to do, mercifully). Don't worry, in Canada grocers know they will be paid well if they can restock their shelves, and so they will. Of course you can imagine a different calamity that disturbed supply lines more, but this isn't it. The stores will replenish, and quickly.

Or I'll be wrong about that, and I'll update, like a good Bayesian.