The economy is not a machine that can be turned of or on. It’s an ecosystem. It can grow in places. It can die in places. You can’t “freeze” it “just for a month” or whatever. People still need goods and services. They MUST find ways to provide for their needs.

You can punish them for it, and force them to live on savings for a while, or to borrow. But sooner or later they’ll have to pay those bills. So then what—harsher measures? More & more intrusive & burdensome govt controls over their choices? Punish, punish, punish till they obey?

Yeah, we can all hold our breath for a while. But that is exactly what we’re doing. We absolutely MUST be prepared to let them engage in economic productivity—& a lot of it—to work off the debts we’re racking up here.

People point to 1919 & say “hey, there was economic recovery after the Spanish Flu!” Sure there was. Our economy was much, much freer then. Today, we have so much obstructionism to economic growth, & both parties are deeply ideologically opposed to what economic growth requires—

free trade, low tariff barriers, reducing licensing & zoning regs, &c—that I very much fear what is to come. Long term, sustained command-and-control, wasteful govt make-work projects, inflation, cartelization, “common good” substituting for the Constitution—all that stuff.

It is of course absolutely true that “doing nothing” or “letting people die” would be extremely bad for the economy. I have yet to encounter a single person who advocates either of those things.

Rather, in every other thing we’ve ever encountered, decentralized decision making through individual choice and innovation has proven itself superior to addressing challenges than one-size-fits-all top-down govt command & control.

Also, it’s simply not possible to set the threshold of acceptable risk at zero. The only way to accomplish that would literally be suicide. The only viable option, as the AEI report says, is to ease into reopening swiftly while maintaining safety controls. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/

But the idea of telling Walmart it can’t sell makeup or cutting off people’s water or sending the national guard after people and all this stuff I keep hearing is just not called for. Most of all, the attitude that it’s wrong to worry about the economics or that we can worry

about all that later—damn that’s dangerous—has got to stop. A scorched earth strategy, let alone a nationwide one, is much more than just risky, it seems to me.

Here’s my fear: what happens when people get tired of being bossed around by these officials telling them their needs aren’t “essential,” and start violating the law? Do we send people with guns after them?