Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

It’s The Bureaucratic Mindset That Is Killing Us: Over-Credentialed, Entrusted With Too Much Power, And Dangerously Incompetent.

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he New York Times on Tuesday reported: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.”

These numbers, many millions of infections, hundreds of thousands of deaths, were ones that “health officials” had been spreading through a sensation-hungry media for some time. Together with a poll question that framed the choice just so, they had already helped produce another set of numbers: “Voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.”

This, the Times crowed victoriously, had stampeded President Trump to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter.

Trouble is, though, these numbers come from just some doctors—they reflect neither reality nor broad medical opinion. They are synthetic products that hide the (often ignorant) assumptions that they reflect, substitute for reason, foster panic, and ruin the country.

The following shows how “soft” and hence divorced from reality these numbers are, what it would take to produce “hard” numbers—i.e. ones reflective of reality—and the manner consistent with self-government in which such matters should be debated and decided.

All admit that the numbers that are scaring the sense out of the country are mathematical projections. All projections are based on assumptions about the ever-changing numbers of “confirmed cases” of COVID-19, as well as of deaths resulting therefrom. But few—and here it seems we must include many “health officials”—consider that the latter numbers are themselves “soft” and tell us next to nothing about how much, how little, or what kind of dangers the virus poses to us.

Certainly, they give no guidance about what restrictions any of us should apply to ourselves, never mind what the government should do to the country.

How’s that? Because the number of “confirmed cases”—meaning cases that have come to the attention of the medical profession—tells us nothing about the number of people infected. Nor does that number tell us what happens to the gamut of those infected. Nor is the number of deaths “hard,” because it does not distinguish between those who die of the virus and those who die merely with it (that is, they might have died even without it).

To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers. Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses, that will feed more models and more disputes.

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

But we don’t know how many of these asymptomatic people there are. Hence, meaningful epidemiological testing must include a random representative sample of the population, regardless of whether they are presumed to be infected or not. The numbers resulting from monitoring what happens to the health of individuals in this sample over a few weeks would tell exactly what percentage of people in each category and subcategory suffer what consequences from whatever contact with the virus they happen to have.

As it happens, a sizable chunk of such data is about to come into existence. The virus is rampant among the 5,000 or so personnel aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. Everyone aboard is being tested. By the time that is done, as the ship sits off Guam, and it returns to the United States, we will have a good idea about the rate of infection and some factual notion of what happens to those infected—at least among the sailors’ demographic group.

The question of lethality is not resolved by mere counting of individuals who test positive and die. We have some data showing that COVID-19-positive people who suffer from certain diseases are likelier to succumb than others who suffer from other diseases or who are otherwise healthy.

Sorting out causes of death is properly a medical judgment. The doctors who are scaring the hell out of the country in general might better spend their time using their medical skills to sort out the virus’s specific consequences—and recommending what currently available drugs may keep the sick from dying.

President Trump, as well as the governors of some states, have been stampeded out of their common sense into shutting down the country until further notice. The bureaucratic-media complex has done this on the supposed basis of medical authority. But the doctors have not been speaking as doctors on the basis of knowledge of the human body while offering cures or even palliatives. No. Their judgments are based on speculation about the meaning of mathematical models.

They are not acting like good doctors but rather like bad politicians.

Fauci showed how thoroughly he and his cohorts have subordinated common sense to bureaucratic authority. Having strenuously campaigned to deny the usefulness of hydroxychloroquine, having been confronted by the fact that physicians on the front lines of the battle against the virus are using it themselves, and having been asked whether he—were he to come down with illness from the virus—would use it, he weakly conceded that he would but only as part of an approved study. He cared less about describing what the drug can do and can not do than about affirming his agency’s and the FDA’s prerogatives.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Decisions affecting each and all of us rightly belong to ourselves directly and indirectly through elected representatives. Congress and the legislatures should be making decisions on the basis of open debate and recorded roll call votes.

Surely, President Trump’s low point came when he supported bypassing roll call votes in the passage of a $2.2 trillion bill as part of his and other executive officials’ decisions to shut down the country. Making decisions on the basis of meaningless curves and bureaucratic authority rather than through open debate about hard facts followed by roll call votes is not just undemocratic. It’s stupid.

Integrity is Not Negotiable. Neither is Classical Composer Alma Deutscher’s Fidelity to Her Music

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This series began with Great Athletes, human achievement in general, and how it is rewarded or punished by society. Our later post titled Mediocrity Worship tacked the other way. If envy is leveraged to punish what is good, what happens when mediocrity is rewarded? The answer boils down to objective versus subjective values, and their consequences.

Henry Rearden and Simone Biles achieved their ambitions by pursuing objective values, through independence. They expanded their consciousness, and invented new standards for a steel alloy and a gymnastics routine, respectively. Their goals and self-respect were unique to them, and deserved an objective system for scoring and rewarding success. By choosing conformity, Peter Keating and Bernie Madoff opted for the approval of others; their self-respect was derived from the subjective whims of their masters. Favorable press and beating the market were their respective rewards, until they turned to dust.

The difference between the former pair and the latter is integrity. In Ayn Rand‘s philosophy, integrity is much deeper than the honesty of fair dealing or the trust of keeping promises. It is the integration of one’s mind and body, the unity of actions and convictions, of rational and steadfast principles for living. In her breakthrough novel The Fountainhead, Rand created such a character in Howard Roark. In 21st century Western art, the classical composer, pianist, and violinist Alma Deutscher is a wonderful example.

Twentieth Century Malaise

According to a March 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial, “Something terrible happened to classical music during the 20th century. The great preponderance of classical music written over the past 75 years is deliberately opaque and aggressively ugly.”

This observation about classical music also applies to 20th century political and educational institutions, and is rooted in the dominant philosophy of  the 19th century. The rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Nazis in Germany, and the Communists in China ultimately meant the starvation and murder of nearly 200 million people. This can be directly attributed to the ideas of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. As Rand explains in her novel Atlas Shrugged, their mindset demands that “Nobody is right or wrong, we’re all in this together.”

Alma Deutscher faces the same relentless pressure to conform to their subjective values, and refuses to offer herself as a human sacrifice,

Lots of people have been telling me that I have to compose music that will reflect the ugliness of the modern world. I don’t want to do this. I want to compose music that I find beautiful.

The Wall Street Journal continues, “Some recent composers have resisted the tendency to equate serious with dissonant or difficult – Arvo Pärt in Estonia, the late Dominick Argento in America. But none have done so in quite the guileless manner of English composer Alma Deutscher.” For example, in an interview with CBS Alma says,

I love getting the melodies. It’s not at all difficult to me. I get them all the time. But then actually sitting down and developing the melodies and that’s the really difficult part, having to tell a real story with music.

Composing beautiful music that tells a real story harkens the listener back to the 19th century, the Age of Reason, and ethically superior era of great Romantic art. Its artwork integrated the other branches of philosophy and reflected society’s guiding principles. Yet its morality of self-creation and capitalism came to a crashing halt with World War I. Great art is difficult to produce in a values-deprived culture, and classical music became “atonal, obsessed with shock value, and incoherent.”

Free Will or Fate

Art tends to  express a culture’s philosophy, and it can be the volition of free will or the determinism of fate. Great art can inspire emotions and cognitive development, and illustrate moral principles that guide decisions and actions. As Alma tells us, abstract concepts are complex,

The difficult bit is to sit down with that idea, and to combine it with other ideas in a coherent way. Its easy to throw a soup of ideas that don’t make any sense together. To tweak it and polish it, that takes ages.

Like Howard Roark has clients in order to build, Alma Deutscher has an audience in order to perform her original solos, sonatas, and concertos. It is her fidelity to the integrity of beautiful, inspiring, classical music that make her a singularity. As Roark instructed the Dean of the architecture college that expelled him,

The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose.

Regarding conformity, Deutscher refuses to acknowledge the subjective morality of our postmodern world. “While her critics don’t fault her for a lack of technical sophistication, they dislike her music for the same reason audiences love it. They object to its traditional tonality, its straightforward emotional appeal, its refusal to acknowledge the repugnance of human life.” This has no effect on her,

People loved it. The audience stood many times. They were elated, uplifted. What matters is what the audience thinks. What the critics write, I don’t read it anyway, doesn’t bother me. I see the reaction of the people. They say what they mean.

Or when asked by his tormentor, “What do you think of me?” Howard Roark replied, “But I don’t think of you.” What Deutscher and Roark have done is expose the smallness of their detractors. By refusing to accept the arbitrary premise that human life is repugnant, they refuse to accept as guilt, their own existence. They refuse to accept that their freedom to create masterpieces is predicated on subservience to the public good. Their integrity is non-negotiable.

Cinderella Story

In an interview with CBS News, Alma relates about one her musical heroes, “Of course, I love Mozart and I would have loved him to be my teacher. But I think I would prefer to be the first Alma than to be the second Mozart.” When asked, “So you improved the cadenza of Mozart? Well, yes” she answered. About her opera Cinderella she says,

I think that it makes much more sense if he falls in love with her because she composed this amazing melody to his poem, because he thinks that she’s his soul mate, because he understands her.

With her, Howard Roark laughs.

Why Ayn Rand Laughs – Talented and Dedicated Workers Keep Our Polite Society Humming Along

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This article was originally published in February 2019 because productiveness is a fundamental human virtue. During this year’s sudden and worldwide suspension of routine human interaction, some categories of work are being recognized anew. Essential to everything we take for granted, talented and motivated people work. Its who we are. The satisfaction of a job well done is an important part of our compensation.

In her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, philosopher Ayn Rand imagined the consequences of men and women of the mind going on strike. While the main protagonists are manufacturers, the strikers included artists, physicians, managers and skilled trades. In the novel, they have another thing in common. They no longer sanction their own victimhood at the hands of the failed regulatory state. 

In the month prior to the 2016 presidential election, Poetic Justice Warrior Mike Rowe gave an interview with outdoorhub.com and was asked about voting. His recommendation was,

Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with Economics in One Lesson. Develop a worldview you can articulate and defend. Test it with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy.

And don’t vote until you do this. Voting is not a duty anyway. The message is stunning, and perfect. Rowe is saying that economics is life and moral philosophy is essential. As the Poetic Justice Warrior Society Manifesto says, “Our lives are spent accumulating knowledge, learning from mistakes, and establishing principles for living that can only be altered through rational consideration, empirical evidence, and solving contradictions.”

Dirt Is Not The Enemy

Rowe’s opinions about education and work are nearly identical to those of Booker T. Washington. Washington taught his students skills for honest work, making a living, becoming prosperous, and integrating into mainstream society.

Rowe’s hero was his maternal grandfather who “dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, and mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician.” His grandfather’s education never ended, and the value he brought to himself, his family, friends, and community are inestimable. This is what entrepreneurs do, and no bureaucracy could plan it. And Rowe has dedicated himself to this work ethic, and to self-creation with his iconic television show Dirty Jobs.

The thing that makes ‘Dirty Jobs’ different is that it doesn’t highlight the drudgery. Instead, it highlights the humor. In order to make ‘Dirty Jobs’ authentic, I really can’t be overly informed. It’s a very tricky business paying a tribute to work, because TV is very bad at it.

Rowe’s genius is making abstract concepts simple. “Dirty Jobs is maybe the simplest show in the history of TV, with the possible exception of The Gong Show.” He does it by establishing fundamental principles, “I can say the willingness to get dirty has always defined us as a nation, and it’s a hallmark of hard work and a hallmark of fun, and dirt is not the enemy.” It’s the economic way, but the political way is our dominant philosophy, and the currency of the political class is complexity. To them, everyone needs a public university indoctrination. As Rowe explains,

The idea that a four-year degree is the only path to worthwhile knowledge is insane. It’s insane. You’ve got a lot of very, very smart people standing by waiting for somebody else to do the work. Not a recipe for long-term solvency in my opinion.

As a result, there are millions of well-paid career opportunities in America waiting to be filled. As poetic justice would have it, Mike Rowe is doing something about it, he is offering scholarships to individuals who aspire to life-fulfilling work in the skilled trades.

S W E A T

The one size fits all solution of the political way, such as obscenely expensive college for all, avoids reality, and has consequences. Rowe calls this the skills gap. Revolutionary teacher Maria Montessori believed that education should develop the mind of each child, the purpose is for them to develop principles that will guide their actions. In many cases this means an alternative path toward productive work. According to the Mike Rowe Works Foundation website:

Skilled workers keep our polite society humming along. They are entrepreneurs running successful businesses. They are happy people who have a positive work-life balance. They don’t resemble workers portrayed in the media.

Not only is Rowe educating America about the 7 million high-paying vocational career opportunities awaiting human minds, his scholarships are available to anyone who meets some simple qualifications:

We’re looking for aspiring workers who will work smart and hard. We don’t focus on test scores or grammar. It’s about people who share our values and understand the importance of personal responsibility, delayed gratification, and a positive attitude.

But its not quite that easy; there is the Skill and Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo (S.W.E.A.T.) pledge for these Poetic Justice Warrior apprentices. The first pledge is “I believe I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I am alive. I walk the earth. I live in America. Above all things, I am grateful.” The last pledge is “I believe that all people are created equal. I also believe that all people make choices. Some choose to be lazy. Some choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.”

The Greaseman Cometh

In March 2017 Rowe released one of his famous The Way I Heard It podcasts, and used it to pay tribute to other individuals who are worthy of gratitude. This is what Poetic Justice Warriors do.

In the podcast Rowe read an excerpt from Lawrence W. Reed’s book Real Heroes. In it, he tells the story of a skilled laborer, inventor, and entrepreneur named Elijah. He was a young man who worked as a greaseman on America’s early railroads, and the son of a slave who escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad. Why does Mike do this? “I’m addicted to paved roads, working electricity, and flushing toilets.” Life is good.

“Danagger Coal was late in delivering fuel. He could not help it if some of the superintendents and foremen had quit him without reason. Men who had been with the company for ten to twenty years. It was only one day’s delay. It caused three days delay in the run of fifty nine carloads of lettuce and oranges. When it reached New York, the lettuce and oranges had to be dumped into the East River.”

Now is a good time to imagine: What if those who work inside the cab of a big rig or delivery van, an ICU or urgent care clinic, a plumbing, mechanic, or HVAC toolbox, warehouse or supermarket, went on strike? National and social media ingrates would accuse them of price gouging, and their sanctimonious celebrity patrons would descend helplessly into A World Lit Only by Fire. 

Crisis and Leviathan is Why We Need Modern Poetic Justice Warriors Like Robert Higgs

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Defense Production Act Coordinator Peter Navarro claimed during a live TV interview on March 29th that “we know exactly what we need” to reduce the spread of the Wuhan Virus and treat infected Americans. He continued, “We have to expand and repurpose our industrial base.” It gets even better, “We have to make sure we’re able to make the medicines we need, the medical equipment, and the supplies. That’s going to create millions of jobs for this country.”

Superficially, this makes sense. After all, the shallow surface is where most public discourse takes place, thanks to compulsory progressive education and national media nitwits. As political economist and Poetic Justice Warrior Robert Higgs explains in his vital 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan,

The most important legacy of the New Deal is the now-dominant ideology of the mixed economy, which holds that the government is an immensely useful means for achieving one’s private aspirations. That one’s resort to this reservoir of benefits is perfectly legitimate.

In the spirit of the public good, it would he helpful to give Navarro’s comments some depth. Beginning with, “we know exactly what we need,” is typical collectivist fantasy. With all due respect, he was speciously correct – for the few seconds prior to the next segment of the broadcast. It featured a new 3D printed ventilator being developed independently at Rice University. While the proper use of ventilators is very complex, this one will cost $300 to produce compared to $10,000 for Navarro’s government approved machines.

To “repurpose our industrial base” is simply authoritarian economic planning, right wing and left wing. Its only a matter of degree. Navarro’s purpose is to “make sure the components are there when we need them.” This sounds good to passive minds, but who or what is “we?”

To the progressively schooled listener it means “the public good.” To active minds, it is evidence of coercive government overreach. The tactic is merely bucolic and ambiguous language to mask the primary purpose of concentrated decision making. As Higgs continues,

To take – indirectly if not directly – other people’s property for one’s own benefit is now considered morally impeccable, provided that the taking is effected though the medium of the government.

Yet Navarro’s poorly trained economic mind claims omniscience over the manufacture and distribution of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and protective gear for health care professionals. Never mind that it is in short supply because of legacy government intrusion in nearly every aspect of American health care finance and delivery. Combined, they show little regard for specialization, division of labor, and price discovery that are fundamental achievements of Western civilization.

As Higgs explains in his 2002 essay titled The Rise of the West,

The individualism of Western culture, and the political fragmentation of the European peoples in the high Middle Ages, fostered the institutional and technological experimentation by which entrepreneurs could discover how to make labor and capital more productive.

“Going to create millions of jobs” denies reality, government can only create government jobs or get out of the way. Yet this phrase is prized by both left-wing and right-wing political minds, and disregards the real job creators. Economic minds understand employment as Say’s Law, or the Law of Markets – production creates its own demand. It is the foundation of all rational economic theory, and Higgs’ example of economic reality,

Europe’s governments that made life difficult for traders tended to lose their business, and hence a tax base, to competing jurisdictions. Such losses motivated rulers to curb their predation and to allow businessmen room to maneuver.

As illustrated by the Atlas Society, the novel contagion fomented in bat caves in China, ferried to Wuhan’s wet markets, festered in human hosts, and was fostered by its ultimate guardian – the paranoia of China’s totalitarian regime. While Western civilization is built on the solid footings of the scientific method (reason), free markets (purpose), and self-creation (pride); for the East, not so much. As Higgs relates,

In contrast to Europe, businessmen in China suffered an inescapable clampdown. In the Islamic world, an imperial government failed to protect private-property rights. The Soviet empire likewise embraced the imposition of one big bad idea, central economic planning.

In today’s 21st century America, the Crisis is the Wuhan Virus, and the Leviathan is our political, media, and education institutions. However, it’s different this time. Pretend for a second that you’ve never heard that before. During the previous one hundred years, the Leviathan created economic crisis and prescribed economic solutions rooted in the Keynesian myth of aggregate demand, supported by its nonexistent multiplier effect.

Today however, the solution for the epidemic includes castration of supply-side of economic activity. You know, the side that prevents poverty, despair, and death. This stark reality is deeper than a health crisis solved by urgent “flattening the curve” public policy, social distancing, and hygiene. It is the suspension of Constitutional rights and human life-sustaining purpose.

What’s disturbing is the willingness of so many people to accept the repeal of their personal liberties based on projections using unreliable data sets. As Robert Higgs observed,

Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

Media pundits are also vulnerable. Considered predominately right-wing, FOX News is pushing massive government spending to replace individual livelihoods by using the left’s own rationale for social justice: “through no fault of their own.” On the surface, this makes sense because of the government forced shutdown, but ignores the deeper economic and philosophical damage, and merely robs from past and future productivity.

A market’s price discovery mechanism is too complex to mess with, and the longer people are denied the freedom to produce, the longer it will take to rebuild supply chains. The emotional and financial damage to millions of Americans will be inestimable, and is being pumped by shows like CBS 60 Minutes who seem to take pleasure in the demise of the West. In contrast, local news outlets are reporting stories of civil disobedience in their medical and business communities against FDA hegemony, and having wonderful outcomes.

As poetic justice would have it, this pandemic is a lesson in the proper role of government for defending individuals from the clear and present danger of epidemic disease. It is also shining a bright light on the superiority of free-market health care delivery, the generosity of a society rooted in personal liberty, and the ability of minds unleashed by economic freedom to solve any problem. Here, Higgs invokes the combined genius of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises,

Like all who inherit the Lockean tradition, Mises believed that a strong but limited government, far from suffocating its citizens, allows them to be productive and free.

The popular Western interpretation of ‘crisis’ in the Chinese language means opportunity. Will the breakdown of health care regulations wake America up to their disastrous effects, or we will ratchet up a more powerful Leviathan? Teacher Lisa VanDamme gives us the principled answer, “Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions; of the great discoveries of science and what they made possible. These are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.” As Poetic Justice Warrior Robert Higgs advises,

The two issues call forth moral considerations. They involve not questions of what is technically better or worse. Rather, they involve good and evil. Those who propose to deal pragmatically with such questions are doomed to fail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

End The Shutdown Now.

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The shutdown of the American economy by government decree should end. The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people—individuals, families, businesses—must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives.

Neither the Trump administration nor Congress has the legal authority to shut down American life absent at least baseline due process. As Judge Andrew Napolitano recently wrote, business closures, restrictions on assembly and movement, and quarantines are not constitutionally permissible under some magic “emergency” doctrine. At a minimum, the federal government must show potential imminent harm by specific infected individuals at some form of hearing or trial.

These due process requirements are not suspended.

State and local officials may claim, or even possess, lawful police powers to shut down their communities. We offer no analysis of such powers or claims under the myriad of state constitutions and authorizing legislation. But they should resist exercising these powers. The governor of Virginia, in particular, deserves admonition for unilaterally imposing a lengthy period of virtual house arrest.

We do not know, and cannot yet know, how many Americans will become sick or die from the virus. We do know that predictions regarding infection and death rates are highly unreliable. Even actual deaths attributable to COVID-19 are not so easy to count, as Italy has discovered. Age, general health, and comorbidity are difficult variables to assess, and people may die “with” the virus but not “from” it. It is also very difficult to assess the lethality of the virus relative to previously known types of flu and colds.

To date, COVID-19 deaths in the US are far fewer than deaths in ordinary flu seasons or from past pandemics such as the H1N1 virus. This understanding is critically important to put the virus, and the government response to it, in perspective. Even during past pandemics, depressions, and world wars, Americans went to work.

In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat helped the world understand the “seen and unseen costs” of state policies. It is simple to see how quarantines and lockdowns will slow the spread of COVID-19. It is critical, but not so simple, to see the costs and harms caused by the economic shutdown.

Only then can we rationally understand the tradeoffs involved.

How many Americans suffering from other illnesses cannot see a doctor now? How many Americans will lose their jobs, their life savings, their retirement prospects, and their incalculable feeling of self-worth? How many will succumb to depression, drug or alcohol abuse, and suicide? How many will lose their homes, divorce their spouses, or suffer abuse? How many will never recover in their careers? How many small businesses, including the vital ones of doctors, dentists, and veterinarians, will vanish from your community? How many young people will “fail to launch”?

Worse still, will grocery stores and gas stations remain open and stocked? Will crime spike? Will the American social fabric, already thin from politics, tear apart?

These questions are not rhetorical. All of these things happened, to a degree, following the Great Recession of 2008. They will happen again—very soon—if we fail to act immediately. Tomorrow, on April 1, millions of Americans will not pay rent or mortgages. Millions of small businesses will shutter, just as many large employers such as Macy’s, Kohl’s, airlines, and hotels already have. Millions of service workers are unemployed already, but many more jobs will be lost. The effects will cascade.

There is no conflict between humanitarian and economic concerns; in fact they are flipsides of the same coin. A poorer America will be a much less healthy America, one more vulnerable to future illness and disease. Technology, modern medicine, and market actors can address a virus; already we see entrepreneurs producing cheaper ventilators and doctors using cheap generic drugs with very promising results.

This local, bottom-up approach is the only effective way to confront the virus. The federal government, as we see now and have in the past, is comically incapable of competence in times of crisis.

On a fundamental level, freedom really is more important than security—or, in this case, an illusion of security. We all demonstrate this in our personal lives every day, from flying to driving to riding bicycles, to consuming unhealthy food and drink simply because we like it. Security has never been the sole or even primary goal for a country born in rebellion.

Government cannot decide what aspects of our lives are essential or nonessential. The American people cannot simply sit at home and wait for government checks written on funds that government does not have.

End the shutdown.

Here are 4 Big Social Changes That Will Follow After The End Of The Coronavirus Panic.

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No-one can predict the future, other than to be sure things will change. Here are 4 developments we anticipate will occur following the disturbing government suppression to which we have been subjected during the coronavirus panic.

The majority will completely stop listening to and believing in government.

In the coronavirus pandemic crisis, we have been ill-advised and misled, and confined and suppressed and coerced and controlled. By the time the virus panic is over, millions of economic lives will have been destroyed, with collateral damage to mental and physical health, friendships, families and other relationships, institutions, and business loyalties. Our faith in many things will have been damaged. One of those things is government.

Faith is an irrational belief in the truth of a proposition irrespective of evidence to the contrary. It is not boundless or endless. The more the believer’s faith is contradicted by reality, the greater the test. Government – using the term to mean the institution, irrespective of which political party is at the helm at any point in time – has asked us to believe that they are justified in shutting down the economy on the basis of a wildly erratic interpretation of wildly erratic data. It has asked us to pledge obedience to mad scientists posing as experts. It has asked us to accept draconian limitations on our movement, our socializing, our working and earning a living and our freedoms in general. It has threatened military action and legal action.

It’s hard to discern a motive for this destruction. Probably, governments prefer greater control over a diminished system than less control over a thriving population. 

But it seems rational that intelligent people will now cease to believe a single utterance that comes from government, whether the executive, legislative or judicial branch. That they could mislead so deliberately as to drive a highly productive and highly civilized populace into depression and dysfunction must be viewed as shocking. Evil is a word that’s hard to use with accuracy, but it may fit.

The consequences of a loss of faith are impossible to predict. But change in the arrangements of the society and the polity are inevitable. Loss of faith in the dominant and hegemonic Catholic Papacy centuries ago led to the Reformation and a cascade of positive, civilization-advancing changes. Perhaps we can anticipate similar breakout progress when the people sever the cord of faith binding them to government.

We’ll all stop believing in data and models.

A central feature of the pandemic phenomenon has been the prominent role of data, models, and modelers. There is an increasing modern pretense that there is no limit to the amount and type of data that can be collected to shed light on wicked problems. Once collected, the data can be processed to identify patterns and trends. Once processed, it can be plugged into so-called models, riddled with assumptions about the unknown and the unknowable, and these models then claim to predict the future.

Our faith in these models knows no bounds. We believe we can predict how many coronavirus deaths there will be 10 days from now. We believe we can predict the warming of the planet’s atmosphere 10 years from now. We believe we can predict the extinction of species and the rate of growth of the economy.

But, of course, we can’t. And the reason is well-known, albeit ignored or suppressed. The quantification principle of modeling does not apply in human behavior. Every human is different, every individual reacts differently to changes in the environment and context, everyone makes their own arrangements, every value judgment is subjective, emotional, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. Value judgments precede behavior, and so behavior is equally unpredictable. Human populations are not subject to modeling.

Exacerbating the problem, the models are voracious for data – “big data” is preferred, but not necessarily good data or relevant data or accurate data. In the coronavirus panic, we do not know how many people are infected with the disease, or how communicable it is. We do not even know the death statistics, since identifying COVID-19 as a notifiable disease results in people who died with conditions that included COVID-19 being recorded as dying of COVID-19. In every single instance, that piece of data may or may not be accurate. Or, as we used to say, truthful. The projections of the models are worthless at best, misleading at worst, and provide the fuel for government misbehavior.

The credibility of models and modelers has taken a fatal blow.

We will start to press harder for the dismantling of regulation, and reverse its hitherto unstoppable growth.

A telling observation about government behavior in the Coronavirus crisis is that, at the same time as imposing their draconian new restrictions, they are finding the need to rescind their previous draconian restrictions, those given the name of regulation. For example, it is regulation that limits the number of firms that can produce masks and ventilators. But the government’s panic pronouncements increase the demand for masks and ventilators. Government belatedly recognizes that it is its own regulatory restrictions that are causing the bottleneck, and increasing anxiety among the populace. Since the last thing they can accept is social disruption and disobedience, they quickly relax the regulations to open the bottleneck again. 

This realization that regulation is anti-productive, restrictive and damaging may be enlightening, at least to the governed if not to the government bureaucrats and regulators. We can expect a surge of anti-regulation sentiment and protests, and a welling up of support for anti-regulation activists.

We’ll abandon cities.

Governments and politicians love cities: concentrated locations of regulation, control and surveillance. Housing control, wage control, zoning control, educational control, health control, and mobility control are all concentrated and exaggerated in cities.

But cities have turned out to be critical culprits in the pandemic. Close living quarters, cramped mass transit, teeming office buildings and apartment buildings, crowded sports and concert venues, and poor sanitation combine to create virological time bombs that are now exploding. 

Smart people will start making better trade-offs. Perhaps more will move to the greater separation afforded by suburbs, working from home or commuting solo despite the urging of urban planners to crowd into mass transit. Perhaps apartment buildings and their crowded, virologically suspect elevators will no longer be so attractive. Perhaps more people will seek jobs – or start companies – that don’t require an urban anchor. Perhaps many will permanently abandon live sports and concerts in favor of digital remote participation that, quite possibly, will enhance the experience rather than diminish it. 

Happily, we can expect the decline of the city as a prerequisite for social and economic interaction.

A Politician Admits: We Were Wrong. Sorry To Have Ruined All Your Lives.

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Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, is moving up in the betting odds for getting the Democratic presidential nomination, even though he is not running. The reason is that binge-watching newshounds have noticed something about his comportment during this crisis. He seems just slightly struggling to know what’s true. Sometimes he is even honest.

Consider this. On Thursday March 26, Cuomo dared question the orthodoxy that has wrecked countless businesses and lives. He revealed what actual experts are saying quietly all over the world but had yet not been discussed openly in the endless public-relations spin broadcast all day and night.

He said the following:

“If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say quarantine everyone. I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people was probably not the best public health strategy because the younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection. “

Further:

“What we did was we closed everything down. That was our public health strategy. Just close everything, all businesses, old workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people. Every school closed, everything.”

It’s true that anyone following the unfolding fiasco and the gradually emerging data behind it knows that Cuomo is right. The response has not been modern and scientific. It has been medieval and mystical. The theory behind the policy has been nothing but a panicked cry of run and hide before the noxious gas gets you. Lacking reliable data – which is the fault of the CDC and FDA – we replaced knowledge with power.

In the end, this fiasco is an epistemic crisis. As Ed Yong has written in a beautifully detailed article for The Atlantic, “The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure.” Even the wide acceptance of social distancing as a norm, however much it helps curb the spread, presumes this absence of knowledge. Stay away from everyone as much as possible: a slogan that reveals how little we know.

And yet lacking that knowledge, the politicians, cheered on by the media, acted in ways that have fundamentally wrecked life as we knew it, all in the course of a couple of weeks.

The massive knowledge gap was filled by a cascade of predictive models made possible by modern statistical packages readily available by subscription to any member of the clerisy. If this, and this, and this, and if this and this and this, then ENTER. Out pops what appears to be a precise presentation of our future under the following conditions, along with an overlay of embedded cause-and-effect assumptions about certain policies followed or not followed. Day after day we were bombarded with such predictions, and we paid close attention because we had little in the way of actual on-the-ground facts that have been available to us in previous disease panics.

It then became the perfect storm. Risk-averse politicians deciding to do something, anything, to avoid blame. Bureaucrats doing what they do best, which is telling people no, you cannot innovate, you cannot produce, you cannot distribute. Local tyrants stopping price gouging and therefore preventing the price system from working. A howling media famished for eyeballs, ears, and clicks. A public panicked about disease and death. An egregious dividing of people into essential and nonessential. Policy snares, tangles, missed opportunities all around.

The cacophony of information chaos has been palpable, unbearable.

All the while, a few knowledgeable experts have been trying their best to weigh in and get some slight attention for rationality. My heart, in particular, goes out to the esteemed Professor John Ioannidis who has been exposing fake science based on bad data his entire life and has been previously celebrated for doing so. He writes as often as he can, while still trying to be as precise and accurate as he can. Apparently such high-end people have a private email list in which they share observations and data, while doing their best to bring calm while civilization is falling apart.

His first salvo appeared March 17. God bless The National Post for publishing Ioannidis’s latest exasperated piece.

At the moment, we are enacting extremely severe measures in an effort to do something. However, we have very little evidence-based data on how to guide our next steps. We really don’t know where we are, where we are heading, whether our measures are effective, or if we need to modify them. There is a possibility that many of our aggressive measures could be doing more harm than good, especially if they are to be maintained in the long term. There will be major consequences in terms of lives lost, major disruptions to the economy, to the society, and to our civilization.

At this juncture we need to act swiftly. At the same time, we need to act equally swiftly to collect unbiased data that will tell us how many people are infected, the chances that someone who is infected will have a serious outcome and die, how the epidemic is evolving in different settings and places around the world, and what difference we are making with the measures that we’re taking. This information can make a huge difference and there is a lot that can go wrong if we don’t have the right data.

This has been an acute situation. At the same time, collecting reliable data should not take time and should not halt our decision-making process. Getting information on representative samples of the population is very easy. It has been done in Iceland, where they have a cohort covering most of the national population looking at samples that have been provided. They see that they have an infection rate of 1.0 per cent, and up until now only two people have died. So, out of the 3,500 infected people in Iceland there have been two deaths, which corresponds to an infection fatality rate lower than the common flu. Of course, some people may be infected later, but nevertheless, these estimates would be very different compared with the original claims of case fatality rates of 3.4 per cent that were circulated.

At the same time, we have other pieces of evidence that the number of people who are infected is much larger compared with the number of cases we have documented. In most places, with few exceptions around the world, we are just testing people who have substantial symptoms who have come to seek health care or even to be hospitalized. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The Iceland experience and other data from Rome and Italy where entire city populations were tested shows that the vast majority of people are either completely asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic in ways that you would not be able to differentiate from the common cold or common flu. This information makes a huge difference while we are proceeding with aggressive measures of social distancing and lockdowns that may have tremendous repercussions, especially in the long term.

As the song says, stop making sense.

I write on Saturday morning March 28, and right now there are two contrary strains about to collide. On the one hand, you have scientists reducing their death-rate predictions further and further, lopping off zeros by the day. On the other hand, this is accompanied by appalling levels of despotism, even to the point of National Guard checkpoints at state borders and restrictionson what you can buy even at “essential” stores. This gigantic gap between emerging professional medical consensus and appalling policy ignorance is revealing as never before the practical impossibility of scientific public policy.

Then you have the cascade of unintentional and unexpected outcomes of the rush to coerce. It began with Trump’s disastrous block on flights from Europe that sent millions scrambling for tickets and led to an unspeakable crush of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at our nations’ airports, contradicting the demand that people social distance just when the virus was revealing itself as highly contagious. The very opposite of intended results!

That’s just the beginning. I doubt seriously that the political class in this country, as low a regard I have it, set out to destroy all that we call civilized life, instantly generating millions of unemployed workers and bankrupt businesses all around, not to mention a pandemic of utter hopelessness on the part of vast swaths of the world’s population. Still, this is what they have managed to achieve. This is what their pretense of knowledge – as opposed to actual wisdom – has unleashed on the world, with incalculable human cost.

As for economics, are we talking recession? Depression? Those words indicate cyclical changes in business conditions. My friend Gene Epstein suggests another term for what we are going through. The Great Suppression. There will be months, years, and decades in which to more clearly observe the countless ways in which the supressors piled error upon error, blockage upon blockage, to add to the grotesquery.

What truly should inspire us all right now are the grocers, pharmacists, truck drivers, manufacturers, doctors and nurses, construction workers, restaurant workers, service station attendants, webmasters, volunteers of all sorts, philanthropists, and specialists in a huge variety of essential professions who keep life functioning more or less. And let us not forget the “unessential” people (it’s an incorrect and vicious term) who have innovated ways around the Great Suppression to continue to serve others, keep the rent being paid, and food on their tables. They are the means of salvation out of this mess.

The market, hobbled and bludgeoned, still loves you.

As for the politicians, Andrew Cuomo has admitted some of the error. In a much-welcome change, he has even deregulated medical services. There’s just a hint of humility and humanity embedded in these statements and actions. We need more of that, vastly more, if only to contribute to calming things down long enough to gain some perspective, and, hopefully, some eventual realization that in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” a virus should be regarded as a disease to mitigate and cure, not an excuse to bludgeon life on earth as we know it.

The COVID-19 Models Are Inaccurate. So Are The Climate Change Models.

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It wasn’t long ago, just in recent days, in fact, that we were being told the coronavirus was going to kill more than 2 million Americans. But some researchers are indicating the forecasts of doom were driven by faulty models.

What then, are we supposed to make of the models that have been fueling the global warming hysteria?

The forecast used to predict 2.2 million U.S. deaths and 510,00 deaths in Great Britain was produced by Imperial College in London. It is “the epidemiological modeling which has informed policymaking in the United Kingdom and other countries in recent weeks.”

OK, but is the information reliable? Epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta is doubtful.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” he said in the Financial Times.

Gupta’s team of researchers at Oxford believe both the hospitalization and mortality rates are much lower than the worst estimates, and immunity is more widespread than previously thought.

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed from professors of medicine at Stanford who said “projections of the death toll” reaching 2 million to 4 millon “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for” a number of important factors.

We can’t say for sure which model has it right. Will deaths be in the millions? Or will coronavirus be less lethal than the seasonal flu?

But we can say that at least one of the models is wrong.

So what does this tell us about the climate models that officials keep telling us are evidence that man is overheating his only planet?

The lesson is that we shouldn’t put our full trust in the global warming alarmists’ claims. But then independent thinkers have known for some time the climate models are far from perfect:

  • Six years ago, Reason’s Ronald Bailey noted that “most temperature records show that since 1998 the models and observed average global temperatures have parted ways. The temperatures in the models continue to rise, while the real climate has refused to warm up much during the last 15 years.
  • In 2017, Bailey reported that, according to a “fascinating new study” in Nature Geoscience, “climate computer model projections of future man-made warming due to human emissions of carbon dioxide are running too hot.”
  • Last year, John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Hunstville, told the British Parliament “an early look at some of the latest generation of climate models reveals they are predicting even faster warming. This is simply not credible.”
  • Also last year, author Guy Sorman wrote in City Journal the models used by United Nations scientists cannot “explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age.”
  • Climatologist Judith Curry has also said the models “seem to be running too hot.”
  • Christy’s university colleague Roy Spencer, a former NASA climate scientist, says “global warming projections have a large element of faith programmed into them” because “we have no idea how much warming” is caused by carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas the political left has chosen to vilify.
  • A little more than a year ago, climate researcher Patrick J. Michaels noted the authors of a paper published in Nature Climate Change “show that the aggregate models are making huge errors in three of the places on earth that are critical to our understanding of climate.”

Despite the healthy skepticism from scientists who have been studying the climate for decades and have held prominent academic positions, the Democrat-media powered narrative never sleeps. But that’s what we expect from those who are ever searching for a crisis to take advantage of.

 

Sweden Is Betting Against Draconian Restrictions And In Favor Of The Free Movement Of People And Goods.

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The lights are going out all over Europe, the U.S., and increasingly the rest of the world. Borders are closing, cities are shutting down, and governments are imposing export bans. It looks like one of the first victims of the new coronavirus is globalization.

The World Bank has estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the economic damage from epidemics usually comes from aversion behavior, not from disease, deaths, and the associated loss of production. This time, due to the massive scale of the shutdowns, that cost is going to be much bigger.

Perhaps not in Sweden, though. It’s hard to predict even the next few hours or days, but it is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.

With beautiful exaggeration, Bloomberg News reported that “Swedes Try Laissez-Faire Model in Controversial Virus Response.” Sweden did not do this out of libertarian zeal, but because of a tradition of listening to experts and health authorities, who thought it better to track individual cases within the country than to shut everything down. When everybody is awaiting the latest epidemiological data to make decisions, there is less room for political grandstanding and strongman rhetoric.

There is also a case to be made that the culture of personal responsibility and interpersonal trust makes it easier for the Swedish government to leave the ultimate decisions to the people. When the public health agency recommends working from home and avoiding unnecessary gatherings, most Swedes abide by it, even without putting police on the streets and imposing stiff penalties. That leaves necessary room for local knowledge and personal needs. Individuals, organizations, and businesses can go ahead anyway, if their particular situation makes it especially important that they remain open or move around freely.

And by the way, it might help that Sweden is a country of introverts, famous for distant relations between generations. Swedes did social distancing before it was cool.

There are reasons to fear that this near-consensus toward cordoning off whole nations will strengthen an already ongoing global reactionary impulse against the movement of people and goods across borders. If we can’t find our way back to an open world after this, our reaction to COVID-19 will hurt us even more than the virus. After decades of unprecedented progress at combating poverty, hunger, and disease, these trends would be reversed, and we would be even less well prepared for the next nasty surprise nature throws at us.

Despite the popular perception, our best hope against pandemic is continued trade and cooperation across borders. Travel bans are mostly “political placebo” as U.K. health researcher Clare Wenham puts it, and the World Health Organization is advising against it, for the simple reason that COVID-19 is already everywhere, but vital supplies and medical equipment are not.

In fact, one reason why Italy has suffered terribly seems to be that closed borders gave them a false sense of security and made them underestimate the spread already going on within the country.

It is easy to see the political logic behind bans on the export of essential equipment, implemented by countries like Germany and France at an early stage. You have to serve your own population first, right? But it’s the same logic as toilet paper hoarding, and it has the same result. It forces others to do the same, which means that it is not on the market when you really have to go.

During the global food price crisis of 2010–11, many governments banned food exports to secure local supplies. But afterward, we found out that those bans were part of the problem. In fact, they accounted for 40 percent of the increase in the world price of wheat and almost a quarter of the increase in the price of corn.

So even though the world often moves in a nationalist direction during crises, it is exactly the time when we have the most urgent need for international agreements to forego beggar-thy-neighbor policies.

Wealth, communications technology, and open science have made our response to new diseases faster than ever. In a poorer and more closed world, without mass transportation, microorganisms traveled slower but they traveled freely, recurring for hundreds of years, until they had picked almost all of us off, one by one. Today our response is also global, and therefore for the first time, mankind has a fighting chance.

Hospitals, researchers, health authorities, and drug companies everywhere can now supply each other with instant information. They can coordinate efforts to analyze and combat the problem. By organizing clinical trials of therapeutics in many countries simultaneously, they can reach a critical mass of patients they would never have found at home.

The pace of the response has been extraordinary. After having tried to conceal the outbreak for weeks, China announced that it had found a new coronavirus on January 2. Using technologies developed on the other side of the globe, Chinese scientists could read the complete genome of the virus and publish it on a new global hub for medical research in just a week. This information enabled researchers in Berlin to develop a test to detect infections in just six days. This is what we now use to track infected people around the world—except in the U.S., where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on keeping it out and developing a domestic, faulty test, which set back American efforts several weeks.

When someone reveals the mechanism of the virus, researchers and algorithms everywhere can get to work on ways of attacking its weak spots. On March 25, not even three months after China admitted a new virus was on the loose, America’s National Library of Medicine lists 143 potential drugs and vaccines against the virus, already recruiting (or preparing to recruit) patients to participate in clinical trials.

Those companies are, just like our health care systems, disproportionally reliant on immigrant workers. According to the immigration advocacy nonprofit Partnership for a New American Economy, eight out of 10 medical patents from leading U.S. universities are invented by someone born outside of the country. In other words, immigration bans kill Americans.

That is not all. Globalization might even prevent many pandemics from happening. A 2019 study by researchers at the universities of Oxford and Tel Aviv showed that frequent travel between populations makes us catch a lot of bugs, but also increases immunity against new strains. So apocalyptic outbreaks become less likely. This is the reason why previously isolated populations are most at risk—from Native Americans after 1492 to the swine flu in 2009, when 24 of the 30 worst affected countries were island nations.

Human mobility is like a “natural vaccination” says Oxford’s Robin Thompson. The researchers speculate that this might help explain the absence of a global pandemic as severe as the Spanish flu in the last 100 years.

That doesn’t help at all when a virus that previously only affected animals mutates and jumps to humans, like the new coronavirus. Then we have no resistance and it can spread quickly.

But if the researchers are correct, the jet engine has saved millions of lives from pandemics only in the last few decades. And as even Sweden’s governing Social Democrats emphasize right now, the greatest threat to our economy, our jobs, and our health is that the planes stop flying and the trucks get stuck at the border.

That is also worth taking into account before we turn off the last lights.

The Biggest Threat To American Health Is A Shutdown Economy. Don’t Let The Machine Stop.

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As many Americans are now realizing, the worst part of working from home is the unsettling feeling that comes with waiting. Our livelihoods and dreams are suspended, and thoughts turn. We’re seeing Congress react with a massive spending binge that may ultimately do more harm than good and the economy is rapidly cratering.

America has been blessed throughout its history to avoid such widespread upheaval.  We have fought no major wars on our soil since the Civil War. In the past couple of decades, we’ve been through the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as the 2008 recession, but COVID-19 is a different crucible.

Just a month ago we could sleep well knowing the United States was considered the most prepared country in the world to deal with a pandemic. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta revised upwards its projections for the first-quarter GDP growth to a robust 3.1 percent.

Yet today, we’re living in a radically different world. We are watching our economy and stock market crater before our very eyes, which has led many to speculate that we may be in for a lengthy recession, if not a devastating depression during which businesses – large and small – will be eviscerated. Such a threat was unthinkable just two weeks ago.

The COVID-19 pandemic is no “hoax” or laughing matter. Precisely because it, we must get the economy moving again. If we do not, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic risks becoming more destructive in both lives and capital than the disease itself.

Small businesses need liquidity, but that’s only a bridge to an unknown time. The nearly $2 trillion dollar package the Senate is considering as a response to the pandemic is merely a band-aid fix to get the economy and pandemic under control, and it may do more harm than good in the long run.

History is a guide. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt managed to get Congress to pass all sorts of legislation wrapped up in his New Deal, which represented a massive centralization of government at the federal level. The level of intervention undoubtedly prolonged the depression and led to a recession in 1937. The actions Congress is considering now won’t be temporary, no matter how they spin it, because history teaches us that government very rarely lets go of its grip on power.

How do we begin to re-open our economy? Looking at data from Italy, the average age of patients who have succumbed to the virus is 78.5, not the age of the American workforce. A full 99 percent of those who have perished in Italy have a major pre-existing condition. We know exactly who the most vulnerable are, and we need to protect them.

I don’t take this lightly. My parents back in Ohio are within the at-risk category. The truth is, I can’t help my parents if I’m unemployed. We have to open up the economy by mid-April or the consequences will be a lost generation. It will be harder to do so when the news is counting deaths in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands. There are steps we can and must take to re-open our economy in a careful and deliberate manner.

First, we must quarantine and support the old and at risk.

Second, we ensure we have the capability to institute mass testing. This involves not only test kits but the temperature guns that are so ubiquitous to East Asia.

Third, if you are sick, stay home. If you are not sick, you can return to the labor force. Businesses should support flexibility for employees to work from home and care for sick family members.

This is a reasonable, multi-pronged approach to help get the economy moving again, protect the most vulnerable, and buy time to develop the vaccine. We need to learn to live with the virus, however deeply unsettling that thought is. We must think back to Churchill and Great Britain in WWII. As the bombs fell during the Blitz, Londoners were asked to “keep calm and carry on” and return to work knowing the risk.  Moreso, planners during WWII knew that eventual victory would not come without casualties.

We cannot support our elderly and sick if we are mired in a depression. If we wait until August, we risk not having the economy to support our government and our healthcare system. Our healthcare system is based on resources produced by our strong economy. Our government’s ability to function is based on the resources produced within our economy. If our economy stops, our way of life comes to an end.

Once the machine stops, it may take years to bring it back to where it was before this unprecedented situation. It’s a dangerous world, and this is not the time to turn off our economy. After all, China will not stop building its economy.

We will not be perfect in our steps to restart our economy. In fact, doing so will evoke the painful memories of a wartime economy. A vaccine for COVID-19 and a policy solution to our long-term growth and debt issues will come in time. But first, we must take the right steps to restart an American engine of prosperity that will make fighting present and future viruses exponentially more manageable.

Adam Brandon is President of FreedomWorks. 
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