Hysteria & Panic: Counting the Cost

Silverfiddle Rant!

“This is not Ebola, this is not sars, this is not some science fiction movie come to life. The hysteria here is way out of line with the actuality and the facts.” *

I surveyed the bare shelves, and my mind kept turning to the working poor with children who perhaps only have a narrow opportunity to shop once a week, elderly and disabled people for whom a trip to the grocery store is a herculean effort of pain and worry...

And they find the store stripped by panicked hordes of healthy, able-bodied people, most of whom could miss a few meals and it would do them some good.

"We have 30,000 traffic deaths every year!  We're ordering all vehicles off the roads to save those lives!"

Heather MacDonald asks if governments' abundance of caution is worth the cost in her article, Compared to What?

Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of .000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to .12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic.

Stimulate What?

Federal, state and local government have crashed the economy by ordering businesses to close and throwing tens of millions out of work.  Now, they are borrowing trillions to bail out the economy they wrecked.

How in the hell are people supposed to stimulate the economy with fistfulls of government cash when government has shuttered all the businesses?

I don't need a thousand dollar check.  I am still working, thank God.

Could government actions have been a little more targeted?  Lasers instead of meat axes and sledge hammers?

Now that the economic wreckage from government panic is in the trillions, here are two actions governments should immediately take:

1.  Unemployment checks to those millions of workers the federal, state and local governments threw out of work

2.  Financial assistance to small business owners the federal, state and local governments ordered shut down

These payments are not socialism.  This is government providing a small remuneration for the harm they caused, and states should foot their part of financial responsibility.  It is easy to decree broad, sweeping mandates when you don't have to pay for the disastrous consequences.


Related:
States Can't Shut Down Non-Essential Businesses Without Harming Essential Ones