TIme to Start Things Up

We have dutifully followed the recommendations for older people to stay at home mainly and to keep their distance when going out.  I have encouraged others to do the same. I thought and still think that as an epidemic of a contagious disease from a new virus with unknown characteristics, lethality, and susceptibility to treatment  spread in this country, it was appropriate to give the experts in public health the benefit of the doubt and to do as they said while realizing that with so much not known, we might be overreacting.

Now I think it is time to open the country back up, and for most people to return to normal life – carefully, incrementally, and at different rates in different places. The dire and frightening things predicted by officials and projected in the early models have not happened.   The stated objective of preventing exponential growth in the number of infections – flattening the curve -  has been met.  Results of random tests indicate that such a high percentage of people carry the virus  - often without having been noticeably sick - that the disease’s actual rate of mortality is likely far lower overall than earlier guessed.    Meanwhile the damage to the economy and to people’s lives from the shutdown is serious, growing, and in some cases disastrous. 

We also have more data about  levels  of risk among various types of people. Though things still are not as clear as one would like, the risk of serious harm from covid 19 seems to be small for healthy people under sixty five or so.  Statistics indicate that older people and people in chronically and seriously  bad health have more to worry about and probably should be careful longer. (I don’t know how much that applies to healthy, active older people. I have not seen  enough data on that and plan to be careful until I do.) Inmates of nursing homes, almost all of whom are both old and in bad health, have a lot to worry about. I expect things will need to done differently at nursing homes until a vaccine or some proven, reliable treatments are on the market.

One of the most unpleasant things coming out of the shutdown is what it has shown about the character and desires of some politicians and their public relations flacks in the traditional media. Many Democrats seem to be enjoying this and yearning for their "new normal" in ways that ought to make the rest of us  wary and a little worried. ( I do not mean their  liking a damaged economy because they hope it will hurt Trump. That is just ordinary slimy politics. This is something worse.)  From banning the purchase of vegetable seeds to calling on people to become police informers against their neighbors  to spying on citizens with drones to threatening to close  churches that hold unapproved services permanently to policing  gatherings of relatives in private homes, leftist officials are using  emergency powers in ways that are arbitrary, often idiotic, frequently unconstitutional, and sometimes downright scary.  One hopes  residents of places such as Michigan and New York will be able to make their civil masters  back down quickly after  this blow over. I also hope that people will remember  how much the officials relished bullying them and pushing them around  - often for no good reason -   and do something about it in future elections.

Fun in Semi-Quarantine

It is now starting to look as though the epidemic may not be as bad as people had feared. That is certainly good news and brings with it the hope  for a return to normal sooner than expected. In the meantime, the semi-quarantines go on. 

Humor helps in this situation, and there have been some really good funnies of various sorts about the epidemic.  Powerline, the Babylon Bee, and other sites have done a good job.   Of course they have had good material.  With our politicians and assorted media buffoons  on the case, there has been plenty to work with. (A story about a reporter for the Times who was working from home, slapping a game board out of his kid’s hands for calling it Chinese checkers, screaming at his wife for saying she was ordering Mexican food for dinner when the scientific name is tacos, and being exiled to sleep on the ottoman in the living room, which he explained  properly should be called a small,  low couch was one of my favorites. I’m guessing that was just satire, but you can’t be sure about things like that.)

Foxholes and Pandemics

There is a variation on the old  and false saying that there are no atheists in foxholes going around among leftists that there are no libertarians in pandemics. It is of course nonsense. Most libertarians are not anarchists. They realize that there are enough irrational and unethical people and behavior in the world to make a government desirable.  However they also know that history’s worst  crimes and atrocities have been committed  by governments, that governments are usually inept and grossly inefficient and often harmful and repulsively corrupt, that officials and bureaucrats have perverse incentives and tend to be avaricious and power hungry, that governments fund themselves by extortion, and that no government can be fully trusted to respect people’s rights, and many cannot be trusted at all. While accepting a need for government, libertarians favor having the smallest and least powerful governments and the largest amount of individual freedom possible within a given context.

In normal times officials have no right and should have no power to tell people where they can go, with what sort and number of people they can meet, or when or whether to keep their businesses open. However none of us has a right to be a Typhoid Mary in a restaurant kitchen.  In a major epidemic of a dangerous, very contagious disease, particularly a new dangerous disease  the severity and course of which are unknown, it is not inconsistent with libertarian principles for governments to impose temporary restrictions on people’s behavior to fight it while being as respectful of people’s rights as the situation allows.

Of course governments can and do go overboard and fail to hit the right balance.  Once this epidemic is over, people should look at the facts and decide if what was done was excessive. If it was, laws and policies should be changed to make it harder for the government to do it next time.  For now it makes sense to go along.

Bailout

A few days ago Senator Schumer said that the present economic  trouble is so big and significant that private individuals and organizations cannot fix it, and only the government can deal with it. He was right in one sense, though probably not in the way he meant. Only the government can create money out of thin air in whatever quantity it likes. (It has a monopoly on that and guards it vigorously. Anyone trying to run his own stimulus program by running off a few hundred dollar bills on his color printer would be stopped by our public servants and treated harshly.) That is one of the jobs of the federal reserve.  Also only the government can, so far, float debt seemingly without limit.

 The politicians have decided that the danger of a catastrophic decline in economic activity justifies the cost and risk of throwing two trillion dollars of direct payments and guarantees of (often forgivable) loans into the economy.  Whether they are right or not, the passing of the bill illustrates a couple of things to notice. The people running the government tend to prefer the dangers of inflation and debt to the dangers of deflation and credit crisis. They do not want to repeat the 1930s or anything slightly like it.  Also in this very prosperous country there are enough individuals, companies, and state and local governments without sufficient reserves to go two or three months without revenue that officials thought a bailout was needed. Both are useful information  that can help  tell people something about how to invest and manage their assets  and lives going forward.

Of course a scare like this may convince more people and organizations to increase their reserves and build up emergency and rainy day funds. That would be a good thing.  I do think many people will decide never again to be caught with a nearly  empty pantry or only a few days of basic supplies. That would be a good thing too. One does not have to go as far as the Mormons or the survivalists do to admit that they are onto something.