A vital and very serious debate is under way about the dangers of either restarting the economy too soon and risking more Wuhan virus infections, or keeping it shut down for too long and causing severe, lasting damage. No one should think this is an easy or obvious choice.
It's not just a question of balancing "dollars vs. lives" or anything so facile. Lives are also at stake if the economy is damaged too severely. There is a point at which the people who die from a depression would greatly exceed fatalities from the coronavirus.
Just look at all the reports we see about homelessness and hunger, even in boom times. If those reports were at all serious about the magnitude of the problem, then what happens to homelessness and hunger if we plunge into a depression? How many will die? How many children?
What happens to fatalities from crime and social unrest if the economy collapses? The media doesn't like to talk about some of those deaths because they contradict its preferred political narratives, but the types of violence our media DOES obsess over will get worse too.
What about all the people around the world who depend on American generosity for their very lives? What about the production and innovation driven by the U.S. that improves life around the world? We can't help anyone else if we're struggling to repair a shattered economy.
Economics is not just about "making money." It's the science of allocating resources. When the economy is booming, resources are allocated so efficiently that opportunities for profit abound and standards of living increase. In a bad economy, it becomes difficult to get food.
Beyond a certain point - and we are VERY rapidly approaching that point - it becomes impossible for the government to "fix" things with loans or giveaways. There is a point at which our system of resource allocation deteriorates enough to put lives at risk.
Government has only the money we give it, plus a bit of currency manipulation and other chicanery that works much better when the economy is powerful. Those tricks barely work at all when the economy collapses so badly that food and shelter become serious problems for millions.
And we went into this crisis with a mountain of government debt towering over our heads, a fiscal crisis that was inexorably reaching dangerous proportions. Trillions were squandered and stolen. Now we don't have those trillions to spend on a critical issue.
Even worse, much of that money was spent on creating government systems that people came to depend on for their livelihoods. Dependency is going to be a HUGE social problem if we have to put a shattered economy back together instead of merely recovering from a brief pause.
The bottom line is that our economy is all about moving resources with the greatest efficiency, from food and raw materials to human labor. If that system breaks down in a country this size the cost in human lives will be staggering, both in the short term and over years to come.
You really don't want to see what's going to happen to mortality rates over the long term if a depression substantially degrades our standard of living. Breaking news: the very young and very old will be hardest hit.
It's one thing if we're down for 15 days or 21 days, although I think 21 days is really pushing the envelope - but there are people coming at this from the virology end who think we should be down for much longer. The damage from that WILL kill people.
And no, you can't "fix" this by shooting all the rich people and taking all their money. There are no confiscation or redistribution "solutions" that would do anything but make the economic problem WORSE - much, much worse. Collectivism kills, ESPECIALLY in hard times.
We're talking about restoring an economic system. Primitive redistribution schemes that destroy investment and commerce, degrade the trust necessary for any economy to function, and eliminate incentives to succeed would make that task vastly more difficult.
Also, we'll quickly get back to the old problem that redistribution enthusiasts think rich people have piles of cash and jewels stacked in treasure vaults, and that just isn't true. The value of liquid assets that could be rapidly seized is a drop in the bucket of a depression.
And the damage inflicted by seizing it would vastly outweigh any benefits that could be gained by looting everyone who seems "rich" - a definition that would become very fluid as the hunger for quick cash intensified. There are no easy answers here, but plenty of wrong ones. /end
