That related back to my post of 17 Apr 20 - 03:54 AM

Both left and right wing agree that there are limits to what you should leave to the free market when it comes to the welfare of the country. I have yet to hear a free marketeer recommending we disband all the military and hire an army when we need one: the market will provide. But I would not be entirely surprised to learn if there were some.

For PPE we have decided to leave it to the market because we simply buy it if we needed it - well, that idea hasn't *quite* failed yet, but it is decidedly teetering on the brink. And we are only keeping it there because we are lowering the standards from what we previously thought essential (Which makes me think of all the "not lowering standards" such as for food and workers protections we have heard around Brexit: when promises hit the real world the promises vanish.   Let's leave that for another time.)

I would say we need a proper assessment of what we really need to protect this country, not driven by such simplifications as "free market" and the rest. I don't think anything good is likely to come out of Brexit, but if we took a serious look at what do we genuinely need to protect the country, rather than making us even more dependent on "the free market" , it is possible something worthwhile could