Gosh, planning an economy is hard, isn't it?

It amuses that it’s The Guardian complaining so bitterly about how the vaccination of the poor world is going:

…as wealthy nations have amassed enough surplus vaccines to inoculate their entire populations many times over, in low-income countries just a small percentage have received even a single dose.

Even with the ambitious booster programmes, there are still plenty of unused doses sitting in the warehouses of western nations.

And:

…there will still be close to 1.4bn surplus doses by the end of March 2022. It’s bordering on criminal that these are not being urgently airlifted to countries in need.

Even:

….that the principal factor driving low vaccination rates isn’t one of supply,

And:

….even when they hit the tarmac, dose deliveries too often arrive unexpectedly, or less than three months from expiry.

Plus:

And the White House has already warned that the US’s donation of Pfizer doses requires specialised syringes that are in short supply – which means many could yet expire in warehouses. Between 18 and 25 countries worldwide are now struggling to distribute doses,

This is government working - or not, to taste - in the middle of a pandemic when government is the necessary actor, even when government is the very reason that we have government.

The complaint is that politics and politicians are somewhere between incompetent dolts and just not very good at doing things even when things really need to be done.

At which point think how badly they mess up the things that don’t have to be done by government - health care, education, the morals of the nation - when they apply those same skills and perspicacity to them.

Of course, The Guardian’s not going to note that given that it argues with their entire worldview but the rest of us should pay attention. We have here, in these complaints, a dual lesson. The first is that planning stuff is really, really, difficult. The second is that the political system isn’t very good at it.

So, we should stop using politics to try to plan our world, shouldn’t we?