Page 71 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

measures. In the UK during the war, the top income tax rate rose
to an extraordinarily stunning 99.25%! [67]

At times, the sovereign power of the state to tax translated into
tangible societal gains in different domains, such as the creation
of a welfare system. However, these massive transitions to
something entirely “new” were always defined in terms of a
response to a violent external shock or the threat of one to come.

World War II, for example, led to the introduction of cradle-to-
grave state welfare systems in most of Europe. So did the Cold
War: governments in capitalist countries were so worried by an

internal communist rebellion that they put into place a state-led
model to forestall it. This system, in which state bureaucrats
managed large chunks of the economy, ranging from
transportation to energy, stayed in place well into the 1970s.

Today the situation is fundamentally different; in the

intervening decades (in the Western world) the role of the state
has shrunk considerably. This is a situation that is set to change
because it is hard to imagine how an exogenous shock of such

magnitude as the one inflicted by COVID-19 could be addressed
with purely market-based solutions. Already and almost overnight,
the coronavirus succeeded in altering perceptions about the
complex and delicate balance between the private and public
realms in favour of the latter. It has revealed that social insurance

is efficient and that offloading an ever-greater deal of
responsibilities (like health and education) to individuals and the
markets may not be in the best interest of society. In a surprising

and sudden turnaround, the idea, which would have been an
anathema just a few years ago, that governments can further the
public good while run-away economies without supervision can
wreak havoc on social welfare may now become the norm. On the
dial that measures the continuum between the government and

the markets, the needle has decisively moved towards the left.

For the first time since Margaret Thatcher captured the
zeitgeist of an era when declaring that “there is no such thing as
society”, governments have the upper hand. Everything that

comes in the post-pandemic era will lead us to rethink

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