The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus brings to the scene a crisis never seen before, highlighting the incompetence of government activities in most countries. The pandemic is not an unexpected or inadvertent event; it is instead an event that we were warned about without paying attention. The neoliberal victory, which converts neoclassical economic theory into ideology; austerity, on the battle horse of those who tried to “starve the beast”; and the economizing of all the components of human sociability, which builds the assumption of the redundancy of democratic sociability and government intervention, coupled with the reduction to a minimum of the State and its powers, were the perfect broth to provide erratic and incomplete answers to the Great Recession, starting in 2007, and completed the ruin in the face of the SARS-CoV-2 emergency that, at the end of 2019, appeared as an emblem of the many things that the government does not solve. This article sheds light on the deliberate institutional anemia in which the pandemic emerges and the lessons that we could do well to consider.
Part of the book: Resilience and Realities