A Modest Proposal for dealing with Covid-19 economic fallout

We still have time to take Swift action

Think of the children.

With mass quarantine measures and sheltering-in-place affecting more and more cities in the US, people are increasingly starting to ask the tough questions: How long is this going to last? What is it going to do to the economy? How many years will it take to recover? The answers are bleak. And yet it seems that we are stuck. Everyone from Bill Gates to Dr. Oz is telling us that all we can hope to do is “flatten the curve.” Are we just doomed?

I think not. After all, the virus is not crashing our economy — we are crashing it ourselves, on purpose, by closing shop. What if instead of a massive shut-down that will likely cripple the economy for years, we take a much simpler and less disruptive approach— and do nothing at all.

“Tens of Thousands could die”

The main argument that people use to justify extreme action is that without it, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people could die. But that can’t be our only criteria for action, since millions of people already die in the US every year for all kinds of reasons. And while no one us wants one of our loved ones to perish, we as a society need to have some kind of accounting in place. After all, we do not ban…