I recently read the article <a href="https://reason.com/2021/03/11/stop-trying-to-create-a-zero-risk-society-covid-19/" source="Reason" author="Veronique de Rugy">Stop Trying To Create a Zero-Risk Society</a>, which included the following infuriating citation. <bq>Yet, as economist Steve Horowitz recently wrote to me on Facebook, "The reality is that we can never achieve" a zero-risk society, and "the costs of trying to are enormous, in terms of both material resources and human freedom."</bq> Honestly, just fucking knock it off. Nobody wants a zero-risk society. We just want to maybe not have a high-risk society because all the fucking filthy lucre is being funneled into five pockets. That's all. The point isn't to eliminate risk, but not to die or get sick or suffer just for the sake of making a few people rich. It's not that the money isn't fucking around for every other dipshit thing like war or military hardware or cops or giant fucking boondoggles like the stock market and tech companies. Stop blowing smoke up our asses, Veronica. Maybe you call everyone out for wasting money---I don't know, I don't really follow your oeuvre. But it doesn't matter because no-one who matters does. They start fucking whining about the deficit and the debt---just like you do in your article---as soon as the 99% would benefit rather than the 1%. On the other hand, a title like <a href="https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-wealth-covid-bill/?source=feedburner" source="Inequality.org" author="Rebekah"> Billionaire Wealth Gains Could Pay for Two-Thirds of Covid Relief Bill</a> is also supremely unhelpful. I haven't read the article, but the clickbait lede compares two large numbers with no real relation. The money the government is spending actually exists---or, at least, it can create it---while the increased value of billionaires' assets is a phantom temporarily buoyed and wafted about by the hot air of the market. It cannot be transformed into anything useful. It came from nothing and there shall it return, probably sometime soon. It's not liquid. It's useless other than to let them wield power based on its magic might. That works well enough because everybody believes in the fantasy of asset-based wealth, regardless of the underlying asset.