Reports from Australia of the country running out of toilet paper. At which point a newspaper publishes a special edition with some blank pages to be fundamentally comforting. We can think of a few columnists they could have reprinted to the same effect but all the same, a jolly jape.

One point we might take from this being that the bathroom cupboards of the nation have more storage space in them than the warehouses and supermarkets of the supply chain. That’s why filling up the one entirely empties and more the other. This also being generally true - it’s a standard observation that the petrol tanks of the nation’s vehicles have greater capacity than the entire supply chain. If everyone wholly tops off their tanks then the petrol stations run dry.

Even, that one of the advantages of this market and capitalism idea is that our larders no longer contain months of supplies, we’ve contracted that out.

It’s also possible to make a more forceful point. Venezuela famously ran out of toilet paper. Not for a few days, propelled by worries over disease, but for years, from nothing more nor less than bad economic policy.

Newspapers couldn’t fill the gap as there wasn’t the newsprint. The only paper there was an abundance of was the currency, that being in pieces too small to be put to the most practical of uses. Which gives us a useful conclusion.

Socialism is worse in its effects than a pandemic which might kill the odd 100 million of us*. Which sounds a little harsh until we recall that last century’s attempts to impose socialism also killed 100 million as well. Thus we really do have to say that it’s worse than a pandemic, don’t we?

*Spanish ‘Flu did.