This is how austerity works. What does this story have to do with austerity, some people might ask?
Read it again and tell me: do these policies make it more or less likely that people would go to the hospital instead of seeking home remedies or online treatments? Would you take an elderly relative or a small child to that hospital? Well, that’s the whole point.
Far fewer children are in public schools today than they were before COVID. Far fewer people seek medical care because they don’t want to be locked up and isolated. “Normally, I’d go to the hospital for this but these days. . . you know,” is a phrase I’ve been hearing from normie acquaintances. “I never thought I’d even consider anything but a public school for my kid but these days. . . you know.”
The Soviets knew how this worked. You simply need to make the free service you offer so low-quality, so intolerable, and so fraught with humiliation and hurt that people will find a way to do without it.
OT (partly): A truly great essay on how Jurassic Park (the movie) is a perfect allegory for what’s going on now (and hints of what’s to come).
https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2021/10/20/welcome-to-jurassic-park/
Short version: In Jurassic Park, an eccentric billionaire “spares no expense” in his quest to build a real dinosaur theme park. But for him that means spending huge amounts to make a complex, and ultimately delicate, interconnected automated system with no redundancy (efficiency!). And he spares far too many expenses when it comes to human beings who do the work to keep things running and who he regards as inferior to technology. Sound familiar yet?
One of the aggrieved human beings does something the system is not built to deal with causing cascading failure in the delicate non-redundant computer system which lets the dinos out of their pens with unfortunate affects for the entire park…
Basically we’re at the point when the interconnected system is just starting to break down… one part here which leads to another part over there….
LikeLiked by 2 people