Rationing is a sort of coercion, because you can’t really buy your freedom, or hoard all the masks to sell to people for profit. But on the other hand, instead of insisting on rationing masks — we actually initially produced less than two million masks a day in a country of 23 million — but we quickly ramped up the medical-grade mask production to more than 20 million a day. In which case, the rationing is still there to protect the people who are less well-informed or less economically affordable, but then there’s a parallel fashion industry of people wearing pink masks and rainbow masks and things that express themselves.

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