Pondering two things: 1. that it’s the middle classes who are going to suffer the most in this economic downturn, ie all those whose wealth is primarily based on paper/electronic memory. Those who have actual title to land, and those who have marketable (practical) skills, will get through. 2. Those middle classes have not just not (necessarily) done anything wrong, they will, in fact, often be those who have actually done things ‘right’ – they are the ones who have saved/ got proper mortgages/ invested ‘wisely’ – been virtuous – and so on. So there will be rather a lot of righteous anger coming from that quarter before too long (weren’t these the people that voted for the NSDAP?)

But that also got me reflecting on a scene from Atlas Shrugged – a profoundly flawed book, but fascinating and not without insight – when the authorities have come to John Galt to force him to rescue the system. They rig him to an electrical generator in order to torture him, but when it fails Galt is the only person who can repair it…

Rorschach: “The world will look up and shout ‘Save us!’ And I’ll whisper ‘No’.”