"I'm All In": The Trade-Off David W. Jardine "The economy" is not a living being, even though it might, in our imaginations, dreams and nightmares and ingrained habits, appear to be such a thing. It seems to have a will of its own. It seems to have drive, hard-to-anticipate directionality, a metaphorical "mind of its own," shall we say. It is not so much an aggregate of living beings, but a deeply ingrained way we two- leggeds have come to aggregate. It is an arrangement wherein we make a living and that making, itself, drags in the whole of the earth in its wake, even the air we breathe. Some of us even make a killing. So much would have to change if this arrangement were deeply damaged by this current Covid-19 pandemic. We would have to live differently and would, in some way or other, have to find ways through this terribly difficult time. And that difficulty would not, of course, be equitably shared, precisely and especially because "the economy" skews such things in recognizable patterns. That very economy "we" wish to save at the expense of some of our lives. I suppose we have been doing a version of that all along. This is not exactly a product of our economic arrangements, but they are certainly designed on its ubiquity. Stop here. Think. Say it again: I suppose we have been doing a version of that all along, inequitably sacrificing some of us for the sake of some of us, and who is who in this equation is determined by precisely those who have benefitted the most from the arrangements that are make, economic or otherwise. It is not slavery. It is not indenture. Not by name. Thomas Jefferson. "Wage slavery." Interesting reading while you're waiting for Godot. That one of the major ways in which human beings have come to aggregate and interact could be considered worth saving by sacrificing -- passively, but deliberately -- some of those very beings is a very, very strange thing to have come out in the open. It's the dirty little secret of