Of all the things that we might feel the need to horde in times of crisis, why is toilet paper always number one? There’s very nearly an infinite supply: we’re hardly more likely to run out of TP than trees. Never in living memory have we suffered a deficit, and it’s not likely that we will anytime soon. Unless you work on Wall Street, you probably don’t use more of it when the stock market is down than you do when it’s up. 

Toilet paper scarcity only comes from our buying more than we actually need—when Charmin’s ordinary supply can’t meet our needlessly inflated demand. Ten families buy double their usual haul; the shelves at Wal-Mart become slightly bare. Ten more families panic and double their own ration; the supply becomes even thinner… and on and on it goes. Thus, the Poopocalypse becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, all of this changes if the Dow actually does collapse and our economy grinds to a halt. Though trees remain abundant, Cottonelle can’t pay its workers to fashion them into their signature CleaningRipples™. Yet, if that’s the eventuality against which we’re guarding ourselves, then surely there are thousands of provisions we’d rather stock up on: canned goods, for instance, or guns. Yet it’s always toilet paper.

The answer, we know, is quite simple. Human beings are (to use the technical term) silly. Earning our wages and saving our nest-egg is the easy part. It’s spending, and spending wisely, that presents the greater challenge. And man is a slow learner. God willing, in the next couple of weeks, our government will get serious about curtailing the coronavirus epidemic. The pale hand of Plague will begin to draw back, and consumer confidence will rebound. Millions of Americans will find they have five hundred more rolls of toilet paper than they strictly need. Big Loo will suffer a few months of diminished sales, but eventually the hoarders will burn through their excess supplies, and life will return to normal. 

Such is the human condition. What’s unsettling is that this hoarding instinct isn’t limited to us fearful and trembling hayseeds in Middle America. It’s just as strong, and possibly even stronger, among the lords of high finance in New York City.

♦♦♦

I don’t know why they decided that Monday was the day for an historic 2,000-point drop in the Dow. But they did. After reaping untold trillions from our globalized economy, they suddenly decided to pull out, hoping to ride out the coming crisis on a mountain of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. 

I don’t know why they decided that Tuesday was the day to reinvest, giving us a heartening 4 percent leap after that abysmal 7 percent drop. No doubt much of the rebound was thanks to the Trump Administration’s promise to discuss payroll tax cuts with its congressional allies, which would give consumers even more money for toilet paper. 

Then again on Wednesday morning, the Dow opened to a 800-point loss (though stocks in Dramamine soared). Again, there was no new information. There was no immediate reason to suppose that our supply of oil, or motion-sickness drugs, or even toilet paper is running low. Nevertheless, these skittish investors keep buying and selling on a whim. 

The more they dither and clutch, the more likely it is that their panic will spread to their colleagues. The wider the panic spreads, the more likely it is that the stock market will collapse. For all we know, we’re on track to another Great Depression. 

That’s is the thing about Wall Street: these market fluctuations don’t necessarily correspond to any real threat to our supply of goods. But if financiers happen to think our supply of goods is threatened and they start shedding their stocks, they can actually create a shortage. Again, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our newspapers and magazines will spend the next two weeks discussing this astonishing turn of events, assuming things don’t suddenly become much better—or, what’s more likely, far worse. At the very bottom of it all will (or ought to) be this one fact: Americans’ livelihoods hinge on the frayed nerves of this small cabal of financiers. You may own $10,000 in stocks, or $1,000, or (like me) $0. But if those bulls and bears become startled and bolt over a cliff, you’re going along with them.

I’m not without pity for our Captains of Industry. God help the man who’s expected to connect the millions of flittering dots that make up our supply-chain. We can’t even get a potato from Idaho to Massachusetts without an absurd infrastructure of processing, shipping, wholesaling, and retailing in between—not to mention the Indian tractors, Japanese computers, and German trucks that keep the whole system ticking.

Still, mightn’t that suggest that our economy is too big? Might this not be the case to consider a more localized, simplified economic model? 

Lately, the two principal concerns are a diminished supply of Chinese-made goods (especially medicine) and an oil price-war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Both are relatively easy fixes. We could manufacture drugs ourselves, and we produce more than enough petroleum to meet our domestic needs. Of course, that would still leave us at the mercy of Big Pharma and Big Petrol, which is less than ideal. Yet surely that’s better than being at the mercy of Beijing, Moscow, and Riyadh.

♦♦♦

American capitalism is a bit like Jenga. There’s only so much real value in the economy—actual stuff, like food and cars and toilet paper. The logs are that stuff. 

Historically, we’ve kept our logs packed fairly low and tight. Economic growth was slow: we’d fashion new logs (that is, create more stuff) to keep up with the demands of a growing population. At some point, however, we decided to create more wealth, not by building logs, but by rearranging them. In order to grow the economy more quickly, we began removing logs from the middle and stacking them on top of each other, creating ever-more ingenious and intricate designs. 

Gradually, we ceased to be a log-making economy at all and became a log-arranging economy. We outsourced all our logging to the Third World so we could focus on our clever sliding and stacking. We created greater wealth, which is good. We also made the whole system unstable, which is fine, so long as nobody gets spooked and moves the wrong log.

Yet, human nature being as it is, inevitably we will get it wrong. And, so, the recessions and depressions that have plagued us since the 20th century became self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s perfectly simple: The larger capitalism becomes, the more we stand to lose. As the foundations of our economy become more tenuous, the men responsible for rearranging logs are more easily spooked. That gnawing fear—“It could all come tumbling down at any moment!”—makes it far more likely that some broker’s trembling hand will slip, and it will come tumbling down.

As of writing Wednesday morning, it doesn’t look as though our Jenga economy will collapse just yet. It wobbled on Monday, but most investors wisely plugged their logs back into the base on Tuesday. Come Wednesday, more pulled out, though not as many as before. We can hope the pendulum will slowly lose momentum and come to a rest. 

Those who wavered lost millions, which is just desserts for their selfishness and cowardice. But what happens next time, if more decide to pull their logs out and nobody plugs theirs back in?

♦♦♦

Now we’ve only hit upon the tip of the iceberg. Make no mistake: if the stock market were to collapse, the outcome would be something far worse than the Great Depression.

In the 1930s, America still produced enough of its own logs to see itself through Black Tuesday. For all their faults, the architects of the New Deal understood that the only reason Americans didn’t simultaneously die of starvation is thanks to the “amphibian farmer,” as John Crowe Ransom dubbed him. 

The amphibian farmer is the remnant of the old, pre-capitalist economy. His “water” element is trade: he grows crops, which he sells at market for a modest profit. He then uses that profit to buy little luxuries, like denim overalls or a new plow, which keep the manufacturing sector in business (though business is relatively modest). When the market turns down, the farmer’s profits disappear. But that’s okay: he can simply turn to his “land” element and eat what he grows. “When the books won’t balance, he has only to throw them out the window and go pick some peas,” observed Stuart Chase, FDR’s chief economic advisor.

And yet, today, the amphibian farmer is nearly extinct. Farmers who own the land they work comprise just 0.25 percent of the population, and they mostly grows cash-crops like corn and soy. In fact, less than 15 percent of all Americans are employed in agriculture and manufacturing of any kind. The rest of us are just selling toilet paper to each other, waiting for some plutocrat to fiddle with the wrong log. And here’s the thing about Jenga: it doesn’t end until the tower falls. 

We have two choices before us, then. The first is that we stay the course—hope we die before the game ends, and let our children pick up the pieces. The second is that we start building down.

In my last article, I urged readers to stop thinking about economics in terms of supply-side and demand-side. What we need now is a brand-new (though charmingly antiquated) need–side economics. No moneyman on Wall Street should be able to deprive ordinary, wage-earning Americans of their food and shelter. No fragile despotism in Asia or the Middle East should be able to deprive the most powerful country in world history of basic necessities like medicine and gasoline. 

It will not take a revolution, but a reaction. We don’t need some ingenious new economic theory, but a quiet return to the old way of saving and spending—the one that prevailed before all those brilliant economists decided that wealth should be earned, not by working, but by refusing to work.

We Americans have lately been too much at sea. We’ve grown too fond of adventures in strange nations and trading in their spoils. We’ve become so used to the rising and falling tides that he can no longer recognize a storm when it brews on the horizon. Now our greatest journey lies ahead of us: the journey home.