A Modest Proposal

With the dawning of a new month and the as-yet-not-entirely-fulfilled promise of Spring I have decided to combat the melancholy of sheltering in place with some out-of-the-box thinking.  Towards that end, I have resolved to re-examine my core beliefs and embrace the Great Wisdom embodied in the Very Stable Genius (VSG) of Donald Trump and those who were wise enough to recognize from the beginning that he was sent by God to deliver us from liberals.  I am abandoning the principle that one of the jobs of government is to ensure that people have access to certain basic necessities like safe food and clean drinking water, and adopting instead the ethos of the conservatives: if someone is making money, everything else will take care of itself.  And more to the point, if *I* am making money then I must be doing everything right and fuck you.  If you're not making money, well, maybe you should have signed up for Trump University.


The best way to make money, of course, is to create a product that meets someone's needs.  But that by itself is old-fashioned thinking.  Even liberals can get on board with that boring old idea.  In order to really win in today's world you have to go big.  In particular, it's important to recognize the following truths, which should be self-evident to any thinking person:

1.  Donald Trump, VSG has never made a mistake in his entire life.  Everything Donald Trump has ever done, is doing now, and will do in the future, is Perfect.

2.  Everything good that has ever happened to you or anyone you know is a direct result of the wise and bold leadership of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  If you are not falling on your knees daily to praise their names then you are the most ungrateful and undeserving person who has ever lived.

3.  Everything bad that has ever happened is the fault of liberals.  If they had not advanced their bogus impeachment of Donald Trump, VSG, the Very Bad Chinese Wuhan Chink-chink Virus would never have escaped from that shithole country where it originated and invaded our homeland.

4.  Where are the emails?  Where is the server?  Lock her up!

Looking forward now it seems clear that the thing to do is to boldly embrace the power of free enterprise.  Accordingly, I am here to let you in on the ground floor of my next venture.  Like I said, the best way to make money is to make a product that meets a need.  But casting about for people's actual needs is too much work.  The real way to make money is to create demand by anticipating a need that people didn't even know they had.

So what is the thing people need most right now?  A vaccine for the corona virus!  It's probably too late to catch that particular wave.  Lots of people more capable than me are working on that already so there's going to be too much competition.  They key is to create the vaccine for the next killer virus before it arrives, and the best way to do that is, obviously, to create the Next Big Virus.

So here's my business plan: we're going to take the Covid-19 virus and genetically engineer it to make it even bigger and badder than it already is.  We're going to keep this new virus, tentatively dubbed Covid-21, under tight wraps as a corporate trade secret.  At the same time, we're going to develop a vaccine for it.

Now, mind you, we are never going to actually release Covid-21.  That would be highly unethical.  But you never know when an unfortunate accident might happen and people will want to be prepared this time.

How much is advance immunity to Covid-21 worth to you?  How much would you pay to not have to shelter-in-place next time?  $100?  $1000?  If you are one of the people with the foresight to protect themselves, then you could be one of the privileged few who gets to go out while everyone else has to stay home.  You'll get to keep your job, go to the beach, take that cruise (probably at a substantial discount).  If you buy a gift vaccination for your grandparents you might even extend their lives, and all life is precious (unless of course it stands in the way of making a profit.)

But I'm no asshole like Martin Shkreli.  I'm not going to squeeze people for every penny they can pay (although I probably could).  I want everyone to have my product, so I'm going to price it very modestly: just $10 a month, or $100 a year if you renew annually (you never know when the virus might mutate!)  That's still a pretty lucrative business model.  Even with only 10% market penetration world-wide that's still over $50B a year in revenue, almost all of which will be pure profit.  Such are the rewards of altruistic free enterprise.   All hail The Donald who hath showed us The Way!

I am offering you a very exclusive very limited opportunity for readers of this blog to buy an advance subscription to the Covid-21 vaccine.  Supplies may be limited at first so you'll want to reserve your priority slot now!  Don't wait, leave your contact information (or your credit card number) in the comments below, and we will contact you within 24 hours!  And, for the truly visionary and deep-pocketed among you, I am also raising a friends-and-family-and-soon-to-be-immune-people investment round, terms to be disclosed upon execution of an NDA.  But trust me, if you don't get in on this, you'll regret it for the rest of your possibly-soon-to-be-abbreviated life.

Who's in?