[Note: I had technical difficulties with an earlier version of this post]
Yesterday’s post on lockdown socialism was unusual for me, in that it was not aimed at persuading someone who might disagree. Let me approach the topic by trying to make the best case for the other side.
If I were a lockdown socialist, I would argue as follows.
1. We want people to engage in less economic activity, because we believe that will save lives.
1a. If we allow people to patronize restaurants and other businesses, they will spread the virus quickly, many people will require hospitalization, the health care system will be overwhelmed, and people will die because they do not receive proper treatment. So we have to order people to shelter in place.
1b. Lockdowns might accomplish even more. That is, perhaps they will stop the virus altogether. Or they will give us time to develop a successful treatment or even a vaccine. Or they will give us time to set up and implement a “test, track and trace” regime that will contain or even stop the virus.
2. Because we want everyone to comply with lockdowns, we have to make sure that they do not suffer privation. Therefore, we have to send checks to every household so that they can afford necessities, we have to make sure that people are not evicted from their homes for failure to pay rent or mortgages, we have to bail out key industries, we have to protect banks from failure, we have to make sure that hospitals obtain funds, and we have to compensate state and local governments for their expenses and the revenue shortfall that will fall on them from lower tax collections.
Assuming that this is a fair steel-man argument, here are my counter-arguments.
I am more worried about (2) than (1). That is, we might need to continue the lockdowns, but we absolutely have to stop the socialism.
I consider it unlikely that government restrictions on economic activity are saving lives as of now or going forward. I do not believe that in the next 2-3 months we can develop a vaccine or implement a successful “test, track and trace” program. It would be extremely risky to try to hold out in hope of (1b).
That leaves (1a). Bear in mind that temporarily sheltering in place will not stop people from getting the virus. It will only enable some people to get it later rather than sooner. And the main supposed benefit of this is to better enable health care workers to cope with those who get very sick. But I think that we could avoid overwhelming health care workers without government orders.
People don’t want to get or spread the virus. They are not going back to the pre-virus normal. If the government lifted all restrictions tomorrow, one can be relatively optimistic that people will not make it easy for the virus to spread.
Note that by the same token one must be relatively pessimistic about the economic outlook. We will continue to experience extensive economic dislocation that government officials are powerless to prevent.
Although some people will behave recklessly, many people will try to follow most or all of the following protocols:
–the 6 foot rule; not greeting people with handshakes or hugs
–the 20 second rule for hand-washing
–avoid being in a confined space with anyone for more than a few minutes
–avoid indoor shouting or singing
–keep windows open and stay away from air conditioning vents
–wearing masks or other face coverings
I refer to these protocols as Bubbameise, a Yiddish expression that translates as your grandmother’s superstition. All of them sound good in theory, and I recommend following them. I am encouraged that a few “case cluster” studies of people in a region who have had the disease are able to track infection back to personal contact, as opposed to touching doorknobs or other surfaces. I note that Asian countries, where many people wear masks in public, have done better than Western countries, where many people do not. For this particular virus, the Bubbameise have not been rigorously tested and proven, and they may never be. But they stand a good chance of helping to contain the virus.
Even if individuals are reluctant to follow the Bubbameise, most businesses will want to do so to protect their workers. Many stores may follow a policy of “No masks, no service.”
Even so, there will be sharp declines in some industries, notably travel, tourism, and mass-audience entertainment. That gets me to the socialism issue.
To deal with economic dislocation, what we need most is capitalism. That is, the signals from prices, profits, and losses, will get people out of patterns of trade that are no longer viable and into patterns of trade that are sustainable.
I have proposed offering loans to every household and business so that those that are still viable can resume operation. I also favor giving relief to particularly hard-hit households, provided that the relief is paid for by tax increases on the rest of us.
The socialism that I object to consists of
–rewarding people and businesses who do not build up reserves during good times.
–not being explicit about the tax increases that are needed to provide relief, instead trying to pretend that everyone is getting a check and no one is incurring any liability
–putting the Fed in charge of capital allocation.
In 2008, a relatively minor sector of the economy–housing–brought the entire financial system to its knees. That was because we had evolved a system of privatized profits and socialized risks that was bound to be fragile. Instead of changing that system, we reinforced it with bailouts. And we are doing the same thing now.
When we provide relief to households that need it, there is no reason not to increase taxes on the rest of us (or to reduce government spending elsewhere). We do not need any more deficit spending for “stimulus.” Our economic challenge is not a lack of spending. It is the need to shift workers who have been dislocated by the crisis into more viable economic activities.
Finally, as Luigi Zingales and John Cochrane have pointed out, the Fed is now doing capital allocation. That is socialism by any definition.
I know that the term Lockdown Socialism is inflammatory. But I am afraid that it is a fair description of what is taking place, and I want us to face up to it and understand the dangers of the approach we are taking.
I agree with everything you have said in this post. However when put so starkly I also believe that the political cost of trying lockdown without pretending the costs of such can be magicked away by “money printer go brrrrrr” means that our choices are actually vastly constrained.
Thanks for both yesterday’s piece and today’s.
If you watch any documentary about Italian hospitals during the height of their crisis, believe me you will be concerned about overwhelming the health care system.
The most efficient way to support the health care system would require a form of wartime socialism — i.e. being able to send a patient anywhere in the state which had an open bed, and forget about the monstrosity of out-of-network billing.
It might require a type of Hospital Finance Corporation, with vast financing authority and the ability to act quickly. It might require assistance from other states. (Italy suffered because Germany did not help.)
I share the distrust of lockdowns. But there is a role for coercion here, as in all wars.
I have a slightly different take on #2. Given the situation we’re in, I think the compensation by government is appropriate. If someone has a business and one day the govt bans it’s customers from going there than there should be some compensation, both to the restaurant and the employees who are now out of work.
To me, the fact that there’s no fair way to dole out the money is just evidence that an extended lockdown is a horrible idea, not an indictment of the concept of compensation.
You can’t just talk about “the government” giving compensation. Compensation goes from some people to some other people. Maybe the people who are applauding lockdown policies ought to be the ones compensating the people who resent them.
The way to understand compensation would be in a Coasean framework. Those that most benefit from the lockdown should compensate those most hurt by it. That would suggest, for example, paying for the economic relief at least in part from reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits since the elderly are big beneficiaries of the lockdown. (No, I don’t think that would fly politically. It just makes sense economically.)
Interesting!
Wouldn’t the elderly benefit more by a targeted, well-funded strategy of ‘sorting + isolation.’ This strategy would target the elderly and who those who have major risk factors (obesity etc). Although there still would be a lot of voluntary social distancing among other groups, there nonetheless would be much more economic activity than there is under lockdown; and hopefully less political strife. The elderly, too, benefit indirectly by more economic activity.
With respect to the restaurant, my anecdotal experience was that they were practically empty before the local and state governments shut them down. Also Open Table reservations tanked before the lock downs. I’m sure restaurants in Sweden are suffering during this time, too.
But even if you could make the case that the pain their feeling is entirely due to forced shut downs, shouldn’t the localities and states be responsible for compensation? Why is this the responsibility of the federal government?
You are not making any arguments here. You just dismiss the steel-man arguments you have just made without explaining why.
“People don’t want to get or spread the virus. They are not going back to the pre-virus normal. If the government lifted all restrictions tomorrow, one can be relatively optimistic that people will not make it easy for the virus to spread.”
True, and as a result, millions of jobs are not coming back right away. Those workers also will get hungry soon, won’t they?
“To deal with economic dislocation, what we need most is capitalism. That is, the signals from prices, profits, and losses, will get people out of patterns of trade that are no longer viable and into patterns of trade that are sustainable.”
Won’t this take longer than it takes for the affected families to run out of money, and start to starve?
“I have proposed offering loans to every household and business so that those that are still viable can resume operation. I also favor giving relief to particularly hard-hit households, provided that the relief is paid for by tax increases on the rest of us.”
A huge chunk of the economy won’t be viable until a vaccine or treatment is widely in use. The viable don’t need our help. There is credit available to the viable already.
Giving relief to the hardest hit by tax increase means a substantial delay, when that help is needed now, and it also means you believe this new set of burdens can be financially reconciled between those with money and those without through tax policy. I don’t think so.
I get that MMT is normally dangerous, but the very features that usually make it a bad idea make it the only rational choice now. Money is created instantly, and the burden is not extracted through the normal painfully complex process of tax collection over time, but rather by instant dilution of the overall money supply. It is rapid, and it spreads out the burden as efficiently and wide as possible without forcing a granular reconciliation of encumbrances by everyone. We know we don’t have time for that, and we know that if we try, the failures will pull down the healthy parts of the economy. The solution to pollution is dilution.
I think you just need to accept the fact that we can’t instantly shift to lock down capitalism so quickly. Capitalism can’t reorder itself this fast.
Bingo. When the entire restaurant industry vanishes overnight and tens of millions of barely-employable people need a way to make rent, the timescale for capitalist innovation is a few orders of magnitude slower than the timescale for social collapse.
Socialism in this case may work like a ventilator- it won’t make us better, but it might keep us alive long enough to pull ourselves together. But the odds aren’t good.
Just a minor quip:
“Many stores may follow a policy of “No masks, no service.””
Won’t happen because you will see (as you rightly should) discrimination / ADA lawsuits flying out the woodwork. Many people CAN’T wear masks for respiratory disorder reasons and every “mandatory” mask order I have seen acknowledges that. Nor am I required to disclose to you my medical status (I.e. a store can’t discriminate against me because I’m skinny and they think I have cancer nor make me prove I have cancer before shopping).
Given that no business in their right mind is going to deny customers without masks, they will simply be considered the equipment of retail shrinkage. Unfortunate but a cost of doing business.
It’s also the same advice I give “reckless” people though I take objection to your belief it’s reckless to not wear a fishnet stocking over your mouth. If stopped by a business remind them people with respiratory disorders are exempt without claiming you actually have one. If pushed remind them it’s illegal discriminate on medical conditions (especially non-contiguous ones) and you can’t be forced to disclose your medical records to them. If pushed more lie and say you have one and, if they make you try to prove it raise a big stink (and contact can attorney). If cop doing the questioning don’t lie as that may get you into other issues, simply remind them the same without the claim and challenge afterwards in court the illegal stop (they had no reasonable suspicion. It’s not reasonable to assume all people have HIV because most people engage in sex).
You are free to stay home or engage in superstitious behavior. You should NOT be advocating businesses deny people basic necessities like food because of your belief in them nor advocate denying the same to people with actual legitimate respiratory conditions.
If a business can’t keep out a person with COVID because that would be illegal discrimination, then “The law is a ass, a idiot.”
A person without a mask doesn’t have Chinese Flu. The law presumes lawful behavior hence the presumption is a person without a mask is they have a medical disability which prohibits their wear. Same reason we require wheelchair access even though you might be able to walk fine and are just being lazy. We don’t require you to PROVE you need one prior to using the handicap button.
See that is what folk are missing here, this isn’t Typhoid Mary. We are depriving people of their liberty for NOT being sick.
So it’s okay for a state or local government to say that you can’t go into a store without a mask but it would be illegal for the store manager to say you can’t come in without a mask?
I repeat Mr. Bumble’s opinion of the law.
The state doesn’t, every mask order lists exceptions for various people such as medical issues, under age five, police, etc. But to run with your strawman, sure. The government is generally allowed to discriminate whereas businesses, no. Not saying I agree with it but I’m also not so heartless I feel people with heart failure should be mandated to sleep on the street and starve.
Requiring a mask is not morally equivalent to “people with heart failure should be mandated to sleep on the street and starve”. Not even close. So far away one couldn’t give COVID to the other with a monster sneeze.
Please stop. You really don’t have your facts right.
https://www.eeoc.gov/facts/adaqa2.html
“The ADA expressly provides that a public accommodation may exclude an individual, if that individual poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others that cannot be mitigated by appropriate modifications in the public accommodation’s policies or procedures, or by the provision of auxiliary aids. “
People that have no communicable disease do not pose a public safety risk. My heart failure does not pose a risk to you while I buying food. I guess with your magic disease detector though you can see I have Chinese Flu instead of heart disease. Is that a add-on module to gaydar?
You are making very confident claims about a law that is in reality pretty murky on this particular narrow point, “does the direct threat exception apply, during a pandemic of disease severe enough to warrant emergency restrictive measures, to individuals who are not confirmed or suspected of being infected, but for which it is impossible to exclude the possibility that they are presently contagious with a deadly virus that is extremely communicable?”
This is especially true when a dozen more emergency exception guidance announcements are being issued every day. In past epidemics, all kinds of exceptions to normal ADA rules were allowed. Usually you are not supposed to even ask employees about their own health or the health of members of their family, but during a pandemic, you can. And you should!
That could apply to customer screening too. “You need to wear a mask to come in.” – “I can’t wear a mask” – “Ok, I can’t deny you if you aren’t a direct threat, however, in a pandemic, I am allowed the opportunity to screen you for whether you are a direct threat, and I’m going to need you to wait outside for an hour while I have someone get in PPE and set up a blood-donation cubicle to ask you questions privately. Or you could just tell us what you want and we’ll bring it out to you, or ship it to you.
Also, there are other potential lawsuits. Owners of public accommodations also have legal duties to protect 1. other customers, and 2. under OSHA, their own employees. These regulatory “stuck between a rock and a hard place” situations pop up all the time, and you can’t assume that one consideration will win out over the other.
I wish I’d said that.
Follow up: EEOC just said the direct threat exception allows employers to screen and test employees for the virus and to not let them into work until clear results. That’s on top of EEOC allowing testing for fevers via scanner last month.
“No mask no service no exceptions” rules will probably be ok too, though again, one can’t be confident about anything just by looking at ambiguous text because the answer is up to human decision makers wielding interpretative power.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-work/u-s-civil-rights-agency-says-employers-can-test-workers-for-covid-19-idUSKCN2253HO
This is why I read the comments.
EEOC doesn’t apply to customers. Once again how to you plan to do this in a non-discriminatory manner that isn’t targeting somebody based on your perception they have a disability. Are you advocating I can refuse to serve people my gaydar flags on because I think they might have HIV?
Shelter at home says that it is not unreasonable to assume we all have the disability of carrying the COVID-19 virus.
This seems to me like a very half-hearted attempt at steel-manning.
For starters using a term to describe your opponents that you yourself concede is “inflammatory” gets you off the rails right at the beginning. Those who support the lockdowns do not think that “we have to make sure they do not suffer privation.” They recognize that almost everyone is suffering from some form of privation. They are trying to alleviate the worst privation.
Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans support the current level of lockdown for now. Very few of them consider themselves to be socialists. Most consider the term to be pejorative. The true socialists certainly do not think that we need to send financial support to “every household” regardless of wealth. Right wing politicians are trying to steer most of the relief funds to their supporters and left wing politicians are trying to steer most of the relief funds to their supporters. Same as it ever was.
Too much damage to private businesses and too much suffering by individuals could easily undermine the popular support that currently exists for capitalism. I don’t pretend to know where the optimal level of government support is for preserving popular support of capitalism but a better effort at steel-manning would acknowledge that as a goal of the lockdowns.
I believe this is the key problem. No serious effort seems to have been has been put into seeing what practices work and what does not.
In the absence of this information, many, and perhaps most people will be extremely risk averse, and support lockdowns, shelter-in-place, do not travel, do not associate, and such restrictions.
What needs to be shown is that a less restrictive solution exists. That “nobody leave home!” offers no tangible upside to “leave home carefully and using best practices” But… I don’t see any information to suggest wide scale research is being done to establish probabilities of infection in various situations. I don’t understand why not.
These necessary probabilities could be done both through observation (tracking real world cases and exposure) and through controlled lab experiments (how much virus is present on surfaces and in air at various distances and for how long vs. how much is typically necessary to make someone sick). Obviously they are going to be estimated results that might not be 100% accurate, but this would give us good information about what’s safe to do and what’s not.
I would give some “stipulation” arguments. Such as:
1. Even if Lockdown Socialism is justified in theory, Inept-Lockdown with Printing Press, Crony-Socialism is what we get in practice. The better the Lockdown, the less the need for the Socialism. The better the Socialism, the more politically and fiscally sustainable “hard but quick / rip off the band-aid” lockdown strategies would be. But the first thing to remember whenever USG is involved is, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
2. Even if we had competent Lockdown Socialism, that still comes at a price, and that cost is still too high given the benefit.
My major quibble with your response to the steelman:
“People don’t want to get or spread the virus. They are not going back to the pre-virus normal. If the government lifted all restrictions tomorrow, one can be relatively optimistic that people will not make it easy for the virus to spread.”
But it’s certainly not 100% of people, and my view is not even 50% of people.
Our land is for heathens, we can’t be like Sweden. It takes more than a nudge, to tell folks they can’t budge.
It is infuriating that we are still as unnecessarily ignorant as we are about many aspects of the virus. But one of the few things we now know well is the profiles of people likely to get really sick.
“At risk” people are going to be scared and thus tend to self-isolate and engage in those “folk mitigation strategies”.
“Low-risk” people aren’t going to do any of that. The hazard rate for them is probably lower than all kinds of things they do without hestitation every day. They’re going to try to go back to normal the minute legal penalties no longer operate, and they are going to spread the virus around everywhere to everyone who doesn’t stay away from them.
The way we know this is that lots of low-risk people are already acting like that. Heck, even plenty high-risk people in high-risk places doing high-risk activities are *still* acting like that. On twitter you can still find pictures of NYC subway riders going maskless despite the order. How many more would go maskless without the order?
Plenty, one can see it in DC. Metro only started to ask people to wear masks one week ago, but they won’t enforce it, and have also opted out of getting thermal scanners to reject people with fever. “Metro said that while coverings are strongly encouraged, riders who are not wearing one will not be denied transportation. Metro will not be providing face coverings”
I am an “essential” and recently was downtown and saw most people boarding mildly crowded buses and metros without masks or any kind of gatekeeping besides some dirty looks and nudgy announcements and posters. Most young people without masks.
Again, I am against the lockdowns as they have been implemented, and I think it might be for the best for all low-risk people to get infected quick. But I still don’t find it plausible that there will be a cultural and behavioral sea change with regards to viral caution such that most everyone will try hard to avoid getting and spreading it. A large portion of the population wouldn’t do anything differently than they were doing two months ago.
How much would low risk people do it if sensible policies were enforced? I think you are right, but I think if local governments started enforcing best practices, behavior would change quickly.
The enforcement of anti-virus rules strikes me as fundamentally unserious in the same way as most gun-control proposals. Blanket restrictions are imposed on the law abiding and ignored by the law-breaking in lieu of enforcing much more narrowly tailored restrictions that do not limit the freedom of the average person.
I’ll put this as simply as possible: low-risk Americans will behave exactly as they did pre-crisis, unless they are forced by law or market pressure to do otherwise. And I doubt the market pressure.
We are trying to make a forecast of culture, behaviors, and social psychology.
That’s pretty hard, and I think the only thing you can do is lean heavily on traditional ideas about general patterns of human nature.
Now, that might not help us very much if we all faced similar risks, since you couldn’t leverage strong patterns of big differences between subgroups.
But, in this case, we can, because the difference in risk is truly enormous.
Here is the number you need to know:
99%
Of those who have died, that’s the percent who were older than 35. People under 35 face no significant additional risk. They don’t even have to be particularly healthy, just not top-10% unhealthy.
Here’s another 99%. Excluding infant deaths, that’s the percent of deaths of people from 1-35, from Feb 1 to now, which have been due to things other than the virus.
If you go up to 45 – about half the country on either side – you get something similar, both are 97%. Which is still really low.
Let me put that differently. If infections were equally distributed by age, then the viral mortality rate (close enough to “general risk level”) for those above 45 vs those below is over 30 times higher. Over/under 35? 75 times higher.
If you go down to 25, the number is 99.9%. From undergrad to emeritus, the risk goes up *one thousand fold*.
But consider the NYC “Underlying conditions” data. For under 45s, 81%-98% of cv19 deaths had conditions. So now, what’s the risk multiplier from above, for healthy people under 45 without conditions? 100x? More?
The point is that there is a truly incredible generational split here. Half the country is being locked up to protect the other half of the country, who could be locking just themselves up, while the young (a) all get immune quick, and (b) keep running a big chunk of the economy.
This isn’t a Hansonian-medicine situation in which “we don’t know which half”. Young people know it too well not to balk, or to voluntarily sacrifice and self-police for the sake of older generations. That leaves you with ‘involuntary’, or forget about it.
People also tend to pal around in their own age group, and will copy what is normal for their peers. Young people aren’t going to be scared, and even those who are won’t want to look scared, and will feel pressure to conform. Young people will want to socialize face to face and show off those faces to each other, for all the usual reasons.
And you aren’t going to stop them, unless you’re willing to arrest them.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your response, but I don’t really disagree. I do disagree with the extent to which you think people will not voluntarily comply, but in general I’m saying that the government desperately needs to enforce the rules that need to be enforced.
And, I think after an initial adjustment of people being ticketed and turned away from public transport for being unmasked, etc. the problem would largely go away.
People don’t want to get or spread the virus. They are not going back to the pre-virus normal. If the government lifted all restrictions tomorrow, one can be relatively optimistic that people will not make it easy for the virus to spread.
Yes, this is the key. After all, the airline industry is not shut down — you can still buy a ticket and get on a plane. But almost nobody is doing so. Similarly, at this point, you could permit indoor, sit-down restaurants to open and almost nobody would patronize them (assuming you could find staff willing to work in them). Businesses that inherently feature close crowding with strangers are going to remain extremely unpopular, especially with the vulnerable or risk averse.
Could be, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. The airlines are empty because there’s nothing to do once you get wherever your going so why go.
Nearly everyone I associate with is more than ready to start hitting the restaurants and bars once they’re open again. Hard to know, of course, if we’re the exception or the rule. However, lots of people do realize how negligible the risk is for people without any risk factors.
The airlines are empty because there’s nothing to do once you get wherever your going so why go.
I don’t think that’s it. For example — a well-off doc I know just left for Phoenix to stay a few weeks (until he can resume his non-emergency medical practice). He’s going to stay in his condo out there and hike and play golf. And he and his wife are going to drive the 1500 miles, not fly.
Gas is 99 cents a gallon in Oklahoma City. Never been a better time to drive, if you don’t care about stopping anywhere.
I offer a different steel-man – let’s call it cast-iron-man set of arguments: (This applies to places that have made pretty reasonable rules, NOT to Michigan who seem to have gone pointlessly overboard….)
1. As we make these rules, the best information available is of very poor quality, and with that poor information we are reacting late to a pandemic that might plausibly kill hundreds of thousands or millions of us. That has happened before. Botched testing and the reality of less than ideal pandemic preparations make this worse. At the time we make these rules, we do not know facts that others will know on 21 April.
2. Our society is large and heterogeneous, and many people cannot follow the simplest of advice (hand-washing isn’t a new idea….) AND There is strong evidence that when health-care systems are overwhelmed, the fatality rate goes up. And from #1 we have some reason to fear the fatality rate MAY be very very high. So NOT overwhelming the healthcare system will reduce the integral of mortality over time, even with only current treatments. And it buys time for medical knowledge to improve (e.g. lie patients on their sides – it often seems to help.) Treatment WILL get better with time simply because our healthcare staff isn’t stupid. This is independent of development of new technologies. Given time, output of basic supplies will catch up. There are examples of this from history (see WWII)
3. To get people to spread out enough to slow the contagion enough to matter, we must use relatively blunt instruments – no instructions more than 5 words long. This is not about getting Dr. Kling to follow good practices – it’s about getting the large swaths of our society who cannot understand or execute on those practices. It’s also about changing social and economic pressures on the huge part of the population who have little flexibility in their lives – the people who can’t afford to stay home.
4. Aside from morals (which we actually have), and election consequences (which we very much care about), the obvious reality is that if we don’t support people heavily in the “shelter at home” phase, it will collapse. The worry isn’t people being too close at the parks, it’s the formation of an entire informal economic system over which we have no influence. In other words, without massive support, “shelter at home” cannot be sustained, period.
5. The combination of 1+2+3+4 leaves us no choice but for massive creation of claims on output (money) and distribution of said. Yes, we basically have no choice but to pay people to stay home, since if we don’t, they will be unable too, period.
The complaints about socialism, fed allocation of capital in the economy, and so forth are legit, but given what we knew in the past, and the path we have taken, this is the best “we” can see to do now. Remember that “we” is a fractious collection of disfederated jurisdictions with competing political structures.
We will have more time to unwind socialism (which has also happened before) and try to repair the damage from our current measures, than we had and perhaps have to deal with the pandemic. There is no plausible path in which there is not massive damage, one way or another, to our political economy.
Instead of “lockdown socialism”, why not adopt a property-rights approach to the pandemic? See, e.g., my Mercatus Center op-ed here: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/why-covid-19-lockdown-orders-require-just-compensation
“ I also favor giving relief to particularly hard-hit households, provided that the relief is paid for by tax increases on the rest of us.”
So Kling opposes “lockdown socialism” and instead advocates normal, everyday democratic socialism a la Sanders and Denmark in light of the lockdowns? I think that this terminology is genuinely confusing, as “socialism” is a word very frequently used to describe taxing some people in order to transfer resources to others, which Kling seems to approve of. So it doesn’t seem to be the “socialism” that Kling is arguing against. Maybe “crony capitalism” would be a better term? Bailing out unviable businesses seems like a bad idea, but it also seems like a phenomenon that the descriptor “socialism” doesn’t really fit.