Once upon a time my dad was going to his half a steer guy to buy half a steer, and when he got there he got to hear the conversation between the half a steer guy and his previous customer.

The meat guy was telling his customer about his preferred cuts and the other ways the meat could be portioned out, and his customer interrupted him.

"No. Grind it all up."

The meat guy was astonished and explained to the man that he was paying for several choice cuts of meat that would be wasted as ground beef, if that was all that he wanted.

The customer again cut him off, and said, "Do you think I want my kids to find out what steak is? Hamburgers. The lot of it."

Thinking about that when I see groups like ALEC bankrolling the protests to "open the economy".

Conservative economic groups aren't *ignorant* about the second, worse wave of death that will happen due to a premature opening. They're probably not even so willfully blinkered as to believe there won't be an economic cost to them from it.

The price they're worried about paying isn't the cost of staying closed vs. opening up. The price they're worried about is the cost they will suffer if we as a society start valuing the lives of workers over the bottom line, if we ever bail out people the way we have businesses.

They want the country to open up with everything that will mean -- death, destruction, even economic depression -- because they're more comfortable weathering that than they are navigating a country where the alternative is thinkable.

Keeping the country closed down is not a certain path to economic ruin - it could lead to ruin and I hate to say that right now that's where we're headed, but we have the tools to avoid that!

And conservatives are TERRIFIED we will use them.

Opening the country up... that will definitely, 100% lead to economic devastation. We cannot open the country prematurely and avoid a bigger wave of business closings and layoffs, to say nothing of a bigger wave of deaths.

And ALEC et al know this.

That's not what they fear.

What they fear is that we find out what alternatives exist to this. What they fear is that we experience life where we're not living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, hand to mouth.

What they fear is that we learn that we could have been eating steak instead of their scraps.