43. The moral dilemma of coronavirus entrepreneurs
The
current coronavirus lockdown will have negative consequences for the economic
prospects of most people, catastrophic for some. However, every crisis brings
opportunity, and some people will make a lot of money out of it. Some financial
investors, and specially coronavirus entrepreneurs. As soon as PPE, tests and
other critical goods became desperately scarce, entrepreneurs jumped into the
fold, manufacturing them or, more often, providing access through
intermediation. They are making money and governments and consumers are paying
much higher prices for these goods, with the subsequent impact on public and
personal finances. We are outraged by this. This outrage is incongruous. We
have long accepted a system in which making money is prioritised over anything
else and where many have enriched themselves by exploiting people’s need for
energy, health and sustenance. These entrepreneurs are behaving rationally in
economic terms, we need to change their context to change their behaviour
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Comments
Of course a different social and economic structure would prevent people from benefitting from other’s disgrace and fear (something we all have been profitting from, by the way, while “others” lived in Africa or Bangladesh or in the poorest area of our city), but we humans have always a choice, whatever the structure we live in.
This is very often the case, the strident obviousness of wrongdoers hides in plain sight the virtuousness of the many. We even legislate to control the very few in detriment of the very many (think, for example, the range of personal liberties and comforts given up after 9/11, and how we accept states invasion of privacy in the interest of what is, in the main, a chimera).
My guess is that many who could benefit from the crisis are currently choosing not to do so, many others are working hard to provide real solutions and a few are feeding in a speculative frenzy. Unfortunately, in the short term, those are the first ones we see, through the impact they have.