Maggie's Farm

I take it for sarcasm, and it makes a good point: Some politician has decided whether what you produce is "essential." Everyone agrees on food; not everyone would agree on the trade-off between booze and whatever News makes, if we could get a straight answer about how they made that call, and how that call holds up after week 6.

"Essential" means "we know people will be put at potentially deadly risk by continuing to come out in public for this, and we can tolerate that risk." What's essential depends on balancing risks. 24 hours before a hurricane we cut off water and power. During landfall we quit running ambulances. The next day we open everything back up as quick as we physically can. Is it risk-free when we open back up? No, but there's a limit to how long we're prepared, e.g., to quit running ambulances, because dispatchers have to listen to the anguished calls for help. Someone's going back out as soon as the trees aren't falling any more.

These job losses aren't as easy to hear on the 911 tape.

Your approach (which I support) can't easily be implemented by government. It assumes that we'll solve the problem individually, among ourselves, the same way we approach economic decisions in a free market. Each person will figure out how careful he has to be, just as though he were post-transplant and immuno-compromised for six months. Everyone else will try to accommodate him within reason. It works because the immuno-compromised are a small minority, and the rest of the world can get on with growing food, etc. It also works because the decision-making is distributed and voluntary.

When the government is involved, it needs simple rules and a recognition that the police force can't analyze each situation for a week. It's the same problem central economic planners face. In the free market, billions of decisions can get made hourly, promptly, and in reasonable knowledge of the facts on the ground, because the entire population is in the decision loop. A central bureaucratic solution has to be rigid and slow; no government is big or smart enough to take on the analysis that a whole population can do. Granted, we still sometimes opt for the central solution, in a big enough emergency, but we're seeing how easy it is for the emergency response to do more harm than good, and how hard it is to return to the giant, uncontrollable, confusing, fuzzy process of individual choice. Why else does it so often take catastrophe and revolution to repair the error of slipping into socialism?

This is not an easy solution, but I hope we'll see migration from the states that do this right to the ones that don't. News Junkie, if you could re-locate to Texas you could open back up right now. Time will tell whether Texans later wish they'd opted for more job losses instead of a resurgence of disease. I'm hoping, of course, that we'll restore jobs and be able to deal with the level of infection. My assumption is that the infection is now past the point of hoping it won't march through the entire population, and it's only a question of bearing the losses we'll bear, while avoiding crashing the hospitals. If that's going to happen anyway, it's best not to destroy jobs, too. But it won't ever be easy seeing people die, or hearing the fatal diagnosis ourselves.

AVI is hardly an Ivy-League trust-funder. He recently retired from work at a state psychiatric hospital, but went back to work during the lockdown, a fairly scary thing to do, and not economically motivated.

I say this though I'm generally at odds with him about the justification for most aspects of the lockdown in most parts of the country.