Turn on the tv, go online, or listen to the radio and the drumbeat is the same: “We are up against the wall with this virus and must do all that we can to defeat it.” Left out of the harangue is the presence of another wall. It is just as real. It is the societal one containing 99% of life. We are about to crash headlong into it as we avoid the illness and any accompanying deaths.
Is it wise to put the social and economic part of life – our society – in an induced coma for a prolonged period, till the utopian near-zero infection rate is attained? The goal, like the communist one of a classless society, is a destructive impossibility; one fraught with social and economic collapse. In a real coma, muscles and body systems atrophy. Bans on funerals, weddings, prayer services and communion, Little League, outings to the park, everything that makes us fully human, will leave a scar. Zoom is no substitute for flesh and blood interaction, as some of us may grow too accustomed to the social isolation. Will social isolation become the new normal for more of us?
In addition, a months-long timeout from work is a headlong dash into an economic wall. Skills and the work ethic atrophy. Businesses close, many forever. Many of us will be thrown into a long period of unemployment. The single-minded avoidance of a disease will mean the defeat of the illness at the cost of the livelihoods of millions. What are the health effects of wrecking the personal lives of millions? Imagine it.
Looking to the federal government to paper over the growing hole in production (the stuff of business) with, literally, make-believe money is an excursion into the mind of a child. You can’t divorce the growth of the money supply from the growth in the production of wealth. Dumping truckloads of money to fill a hole in production will only make the money worthless, if it doesn’t break the financial back of future generations. We replace the virus monster with two other monsters: a gargantuan national debt and Venezuelan inflation. Now that’s another real, unavoidable wall for you.
Even the economic guru of the Democratic Party, John Maynard Keynes, counseled against what Democrats, and the collective wisdom (?) of DC, habitually do: spend, spend, spend. Keynes advised governments to save in good times and spend in bad. We don’t save; it’s spend, spend, spend regardless. We’ve got the back end of his advice down pat, and pretend he didn’t say anything else.
The situation has taken on the characteristics of totalitarianism. My wife and her sister were returning a couple of days ago from California (for a very good reason, trust me) and confronted a sign on the door of a gas-‘n-shop in a lonely quarter of the California desert near the border with Nevada. It read, “Anybody shopping without wearing a mask will be arrested.” Stopping the coronavirus means complimenting the Communist Party of China with the adoption of their approach to governance.
The wall of illness and death isn’t the only one that we face. Crashing into the wall of our social life and economic realities is just as real. Those economic cinder blocks, in particular, can’t be made to magically disappear in the same manner as the first half of Keynes’s advice. Apparently, I was wrong in thinking that the belief in magic was on its way out with the Scientific Revolution.
RogerG