The descendants of Keynes and FDR would not normally be found in either the British Conservative Party or the GOP. Reagan and Thatcher must be turning in their graves. Because this week the prevailing capitalist orthodoxy was turned on its head and eye-watering sums of public money were splashed not by Sanders or Corbyn or Melenchon, but by their polar opposites whose whole careers have been built on denouncing the slightest bit of Keynesianism as socialism or even communism.

Unless one believes all three have experienced a Damascene conversion, one can safely say the scale of the bail-out equals the scale of the threat perceived to capitalism itself by the coronavirus epidemic. Donald Trump is getting ready to sign $1,000 checks to “every American.” Macron, under siege and thinking of the Bastille every morning he wakes up, is going to spend the equivalent of 20 percent of France's 2019 GDP to beat this new unseen, elusive enemy.

When the pigs in Animal Farm metamorphosed into the opposite of their former selves, they began to chant “four legs good, two legs better.” For the Holy Trinity, equality was always good, but some would be more equal than others. “Public good, private better” was their mantra.

But the scale of the public health threat posed by the pandemic demonstrates beyond contradiction that private is not better than public, an economy which principally is private cannot meet the needs of the human race when existential dangers arrive.

This is not new, though it may have been forgotten.