I’ve seen headlines about polls showing that people are afraid of restrictions being lifted too soon. To me, it sounds as if they prefer what I call Lockdown Socialism.
Under Lockdown Socialism:
–you can stay in your residence, but paying rent or paying your mortgage is optional.
–you can obtain groceries and shop on line, but having a job is optional.
–other people work at farms, factories, and distribution services to make sure that you have food on the table, but you can sit at home waiting for a vaccine.
–people still work in nursing homes that have lost so many patients that they no longer have enough revenue to make payroll.
–professors and teachers are paid even though schools are shut down.
–police protect your property even though they are at risk for catching the virus and criminals are being set free.
–state and local governments will continue paying employees even though sales tax revenue has collapsed.
–if you own a small business, you don’t need revenue, because the government will keep sending checks.
–if you own shares in an airline, a bank, or other fragile corporations, don’t worry, the Treasury will work something out.
This might not be sustainable.
Last night I put the garbage out fully confident that this morning garbage men will come by and pick it up (as I write this I can hear a garbage truck down the street). This morning I flushed the toilet and I turned the tap on for a drink of clean water. I barely thought about any of this pre-virus. Now like you Arnold, I wonder about how sustainable any of even these basic services are.
Civilization depends on a lot of unsung heroes doing dirty nasty jobs. It also depends on a lot of people supplying the heroes with the needed equipment.
On my trip to the grocery store the other day it was better stocked then at any point since the crisis began. Items I’ve had a hard time getting are now available, to the point where the only shortage to speak of us of purell and other convenient sanitizer products (though you can still get soap/cleaning products). Also, I’ve ordered something similar to purell on Etsy, we will see what its like when it arrives.
My house is still being built, after a scare where it seemed like construction was going to stop.
I certainly share many of your concerns, but I just thought I would make the on the ground observation that it seems like things have gotten easier not harder the last couple of weeks.
I suspect what you are seeing is the supply lines from inventory have improved- the shock was the sudden high level purchases at the retail level- it took a few weeks for the supply line from inventory to catch up. I wouldn’t count on that inventory lasting much longer unless the shutdowns end.
I have a hard time believing that milk and bread with further out expirations dates represent old inventory.
You really believe bread is made from nothing?
You seemed to imply that there is no new production, but only old inventory being brought to market.
But I don’t see how milk and bread with further out expiration dates could have been sitting in inventory.
Let’s suppose the affects of Covid-19 cause a small but sustained drop in food production — say one or two percent of dairy farmers are laid low by the disease or cannot find affordable help so the cows don’t get milked. The effect wouldn’t be immediately obvious to consumers, but after some time milk prices would rise, perhaps irreversibly if enough farmers were forced out of business. It’s much too early to crow, in other words.
The reality is milk and eggs are being toss because shutting down restaurants have cause an over supply, the same for the fresh produce that use to go to restaurants.
Bill T,
I assure you the garbage will be picked up, the toilet will continue to flush, the water will still run and your basic local government functions will all be there throughout 2020. These services are largely provided via your property taxes and that tax isn’t going away or be forgiven. The sales tax that local governments get is going to go down for a little while but they are a small part of local government revenues. There are also water and sewer fees which more directly support these basic functions of government.
[On this blog, comments provide information, not insults.]
Arnold,
Q: Apart from historical instances of hyperinflation, has ‘avoision’ of economic reality on this scale occurred in previous crises in history? What enables the polity in the USA to ignore reality checks today?
I list my scattered intuitions below; and hope that you will offer your perspective.
• A large fraction of the population (retirees) have Social Security and Medicare (and often other retirement income). Social Security payments are indexed to inflation.
• The labor-force participation rate, at least among males, has declined steadily (and a lot) for a generation.
• A large fraction of the prime-age population already receives means-tested social transfer payments.
• Cognitive elites readily work from home.
• Most teachers and professors are public employees, who have some formal job security.
• Education proceeds online, either synchronously (Zoom) or asyncronously (course intranet pages and email). Although there is greater risk than ever of ‘I pretend to teach, you pretend to learn,’ parents normally care most about education’s baby-sitting function, and are willing to give education a pass on baby-sitting when they work at home or cannot work.
• The working-age population has no experience of stagflation.
• Political discourse has primed many people to think that loans don’t have to be repaid: ‘Cancel student loans.’
• States have figured out how to tax internet commerce.
• Politics always is shaped by social-desirability bias. In a medical crisis, saving lives at the front line becomes strongly salient in social-desirability psychology.
• Sheer uncertainty about key aspects of the pandemic (transmission modalities, prevalence, acquired immunity, seasonality, etc) increases salience of medical dimension and discourages focus on trade-offs.
I’m guessing they are going to cancel a ton of student loans.
Typically they are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, unless you can prove undue hardship, which is hard in normal times.
But it’s going to be easy now. Which is going to encourage a lot of younger people near the margin to file bankruptcy, in hope of not just getting rid of other, minor debts, but erasing the huge one.
The other creditors would prefer the student loans to get cancelled, without the debtors going through bankruptcy, and they are going to lobby for granting relief outside of bankruptcy, on much, much easier terms.
Democrats already want to, and Republicans couldn’t resist at all.
Interesting thoughts, but the whole Federal crew around Betsy DeVos in the Education Department is about a million miles away from cancelling student debt. It is hard for me to see how they would get on board a debt forgiveness program, which is something I favor incidentally.
It’s not up to Betsy Devos, it’s up to Congress and the president. Making student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, or canceling it altogether, would require new legislation. Whether for good or ill, the political forces now seem to be aligned to make such legislation likely.
Am I incorrect in saying that this is widely understood and that is why some states are already reducing restrictions and the federal government’s plan is to begin pushing for them to be reduced in the next two weeks?
I don’t think headlines and polls are valid predictors of anything beyond the tactical utterances of those who create them. I do think they would frequently prefer “socialism” if any form, regardless of its sustainability. But I don’t think they reflect any sort of considered opinion.
People are afraid of the restrictions being lifted too soon as it could swamp the hospital system, leading to reduced healthcare for everyone else.
Many people enjoy the break from work, but I haven’t sensed that people expect it to persist forever.
“…but I haven’t sensed that people expect it to persist forever.”
What about 12 months though? Is there really a money tree that can be shaken for that long a period? That link below is to a real proposal by real representatives. And I don’t believe it would not be a serious proposal if these representatives suspected that this had no appeal to the majority of the public. There’s another that would cancel all rent payments and debt servicing payments for the month of April 2020.
https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/release-representatives-ro-khanna-and-tim-ryan-introduce-legislation-send
There are going to be all sorts of things written to justify what we’ve done to-date and to propose all that there’s more to do. And the people behind these ideas will double down even as society unravels. Because the utter helplessness and dependency behind these ideas will never be blamed/questioned.
“Many people enjoy the break from work…”
Of the 22 million (so far) that find themselves without a predictable means to earn an income any longer, what percentage would you say are enjoying the break? How long will that money tree be able to hold up? Is there different groves of trees where consumer goods and foods grow?
At the low end of the labor market, getting laid off now is extremely lucrative.
You get your normal UI plus $600/week. That’s $15 / hour on just the $600.
At our company we have workers bitching and complaining about why can’t they get 26 weeks or whatever of siiting home watching movies.
Morale for workers and drivers are cratering.
That’s another risk here: why should someone making $15/hour drive your food to your house? they could be at home watching TV, too.
Also, my kids teachers aren’t even showing up for some on-line classes. What are they doing all day? Its already only every other day classes and 30 minute blocks.
In my state hospital traffic in rural areas is so low that around six are in danger of closing. Aside from NYC and Seattle, and for only a week or two, where have hospitals been swamped? My state recently announced they don’t need and are returning hundreds of ventilators. Now the justification for lockdown has shifted from “don’t swamp the hospitals” to “keep everyone safe,” which is the road to tyranny.
An interesting point is that it’s not the whole hospital system, it’s just ER/ICU. Hospitals are shockingly empty, as anything that can be delayed is being deferred, and visitation is strictly limited. A nurse friend of mine had her hours cut to the bone.
This seems like an obvious opportunity for reallocation, to make sure that, however much good cv19 response does or not, it wouldn’t be a question of hitting the wall on those particular health resources.
I asked whether beds and staff could be shifted quickly to boost cv19 response if they were getting tapped out. She couldn’t say, and she’s hardly an insider, but as far as she knew, that wasn’t the plan.
My nurse friend got laid off. She can get work related to COVID, but won’t take it, because no amount of money is worth a death sentence.
Outside NYC, hospitals are dying for business. Getting swamped–covid or otherwise–is not a problem.
We are all socialists when it suits us.
When the guidelines went out to stop all non-emergency surgeries, I am sure that no one expected that to result in hospital layoffs.
Because hospitals charge so much for everything that they do, many of us assume that these hospitals are all sitting on a mountain of cash. After all, it feels like 90% of hospitals have built expensive new bed towers in the last two decades. The money to build those towers must have come from overcharges, we assumed. (at least I assumed)
Now it appears that many hospitals have been running much closer to the edge financially.
I am so angry at ridiculous hospital overcharges that I hope they all go broke. For the fees they want to charge, we should get luxury service and yet I see nothing but mediocrity whenever I’ve visited one. We need to find a way to care for the sick that is not so outlandishly expensive.
David H. Dennis,
Why do you think that care for the sick is so outlandishly expensive? I think current home and auto prices are outlandishly expensive. Please don’t compare healthcare costs with other countries, because what the health consumer pays is not what it costs, because their government pays for the rest and also don’t compare quality of care.
Training to be a healthcare provider is expensive and a lot of unpaid work to be licensed plus an additional cost is the malpractice insurance for the lawsuits if a tired or over-scheduled healthcare provider makes a medical error that could cause harm. What other countries have multi-million dollar medical malpractice payouts?
The lifesaving equipment is expensive, MRI, CT scans, ultrasounds, low blood loss surgery, are not available at WalMart prices. Before this equipment was exploratory surgery with the risks of infection and follow up surgery once the problem was diagnosed. Some people were to ill to have exploratory surgery.
Baffling is that Americans want Niemann Marcus healthcare for dollar store prices.
Nurse Susy,
I think nobody “reasonable” expects healthcare to be both Top Quality AND “free”. (Except the gullible people who actually believe the crap that Bernie and AOC and the rest of the Socialist liars always promise in exchange for votes.)
In a prior life, I worked as an agent in the now-defunct private healthcare insurance market. I was –truly!– trying to find the best deals for clients, who somehow thought I could magically change prices like a used care dealer…
Here’s the deal. Healthcare costs are astronomical. They are FAR, FAR, FAR beyond what is reasonable. Now, before getting upset, I’ll explain. The -reason- that these costs are so wildly out of whack is because of the incestuous nature between the healthcare lobby and government. The system is so broken in so many ways that I honestly don’t believe it can ever be fixed. (I’ll avoid writing a book about “why”.)
Consider this: why is high-quality private healthcare in places like Singapore, Costa Rica, Thailand, and India, so much less expensive than the US? I reiterate: I am talking about high quality, private healthcare, not socialized medicine where quality is mediocre at best. (Lest you turn your nose up at those countries, I will assure you that I have personally seen those hospitals that I am referring to. The US does have world-class medicine, no doubt, but it’s not the only country that has First World quality healthcare.)
I am a capitalist, I loathe the idea of a total government takeover of healthcare by socialists who will utterly destroy it … but read this article and consider if you really believe all of these absurd hospital bill charges are not actually the way that hospital networks jack up the costs (and their profits), because “insurance is paying for it”:
http://revelist.com/viral/hospital-bill-outrageous/5597
When people complain bitterly about healthcare costs, this is why they are angry about…. and rightfully so. The larger system is no longer about healing the sick, it’s about driving profits. I hope you’d agree that is a moral perversion of healthcare.
Honestly, if I meet someone who is considering any kind of significant “elective” surgery (something they can plan out in advance), anymore I’ll tell them to go for medical tourism to get their procedure done in one of those countries I noted above. Not only will they be able to get top-flight medical care at much more affordable rates, they can make a small holiday out of it as well.
Costa Rica and Thailand have lower labor costs.
Singapore probably imports nurses from places with lower labor costs.
Service industries almost always are expensive because of labor. My lawyer charges $350 / hour…I’d use them a lot more if they charged $50, but they want to charge $350.
Half the time, I do the legal research, too. I had a lawyer bitching he has no work…Dude, customers can’t pay you $350 / hour for little stuff they’d like done.
” I think current home and auto prices are outlandishly expensive”
And sadly we are bailing them out to at the cost of renters and people that don’t own cars or buy them cash. It’s annoying me to no end houses prices aren’t collapsing (not even leveling) nor either. 2020 car inventory isn’t getting any newer sitting on the lot with 2021 nearly here yet not seeing prices on 2020 models down at all. Why sell when the gov will bail you out.
A great post capped off with an absolutely brilliant last sentence.
Here in Tennessee the local governments have started to furlough some of the employees who were “working” from home. I imagine tax revenues for every state and local government have completely cratered. The next wave of unemployment is now about to start. And Tennessee is one of a handful of states that actually has a significant sales tax on groceries.
I have observed:
“when tax revenue falls far enough a state can no longer hire enough “police” to enforce lockdown, lockdown will per force end.”
There are of course other hard stops.
I think Arnold’s observation has deep truth, and in particular, suggests a whole class of limits to the current schemes….
I think it arises because people keep forgetting that money isn’t magic capacity from heaven, it’s an allocation of claims on the output of society. Put another way, government may give you money, but the garbage collector, farmer, and truck driver, may one day decide that isn’t enough, you have to do something real for them. This looks much more like traditional human groups that socialists claim to love, but while such groups seem to have much softer accounting, they can’t afford to give nearly as much away for nothing in return.
“… people keep forgetting that money isn’t magic capacity from heaven, it’s an allocation of claims on the output of society.”
Precisely!
Yet I must admit my continuing bafflement that the “Quantitative Easing” that followed The Great Recession didn’t lead to huge inflation.
An intellectual exercise:
A commenter on Althouse, several weeks ago, compared the staycationers ordering all their goods to be prepared and delivered by everyone else who couldn’t as Eloi and Morlocks. My question is this- which do you think is which?
“Fear of others’ freedom” is the phrase that springs to mind. Having exported the tax base of the country to China and having glorified the non-taxpaying, non-dividend paying tech titans like Amazon as a replacement, our tax-exempt think tank geniuses are now worrying about who will pay the bills for them. Fantastic. “Somebody has to exercise a little control over the lazy no-good proles” and right on cue we have the likes of Ann Althouse and Tyler Cowen fomenting a neo-prohibitionist movement arising to make sure no one is having a drink at home.
In a pandemic, the government and politicians are not your friends, the propagandists and talking heads are not your friends, your informer neighbors are not your friends. New patterns of specialization and trade are sometime in the future. You are on your own and have to take care of yourself.
The pandemic is brings us all back to Lord Kames’ to the late first stage, early second stages of civil society. Water, food, and shelter are top priorities and need to be secured. Our ancestors didn’t brew beer and wine because they wanted to get drunk, they did so because ordinary sources of water were dangerous and carried multiple diseases. Beer provides something to drink with calories. If you can’t brew your own, have a good supply laid in and you will be happy when your water faucet runs dry. You might want to start drying a supply of meat. Dehydrators are fairly cheap and you can free up some room in your freezer by taking some of that meat out now and drying it. When the power goes off you will have something to eat when the stuff in the freezer spoils. And if you are worried about your $3,000 a month rent or mortgage, maybe its time to price a doublewide in Texas or Tennessee.
Even when the vaccine appears, the country will still be in thrall to China, the same way that sporting goods store owner was to Tony Soprano. The country is going to be bled to death for the benefit of the elite classes. Yes, it is our fault we let them take over. But, we are not the debtor sporting goods store owner. We only work in the store. There is nothing that says we have to slave away the rest of our lives to prop up the tax-exempt hierarchy. If the elites don’t like a big national debt, let them work in tax paying industries.
Ann Althouse is “fomenting a neo-prohibitionist movement arising to make sure no one is having a drink at home”? Do we live on the same planet?
I was referencing this post: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/04/isnt-it-wonderful-that-folks-are.html?m=1
Admittedly, I may have read a lot into it. Yet, it was another of her posts today, the one promoting a presumptive ban on homeschooling, that triggered me into looking at this from the FOOL (fear of others’ liberty) perspective.
Yeah, I think you read too much into it 🙂
I also didn’t like the tone of the homeschooling post but didn’t think it was supporting a presumptive ban. I thought it was more asking questions than anything else–and seeing how the commenters would react.
School buildings may be closed but I can assure you that many (most?) teachers are working even more hours than before to tradition to this new form of schooling.
Transition, not tradition. Sorry about that
I don’t know. The middle school teachers I know have told me their workload has dropped by a significant amount because classroom management took up so much of their day. They can create an assignment and send it off, then just wait for the students to do it. 4 hours a day and they’re through.
I think it’s going to depend on how much the parents and kids demand of the teachers to be honest.
High school kid had 10 minutes of homework for the whole week. It was all writing and uploaded to a Instructure website that looks like a web forum.
The teacher might have needed to learn a bit about how the software worked but looking at and graded the homework is simple for the teacher. There work is at maybe an hour a day.
My wife is a high school teacher. I watch her work a lot of hours. Many meetings with students, families, fellow teachers. Lots of work recording videos and transitioning the class to the new way. She’s quite busy
“Heterogeneity” doesn’t just describe the variation in who will get COVID and how severe it will be.
“I’ve seen headlines about polls showing that people are afraid of restrictions being lifted too soon.”
It would be interesting to see a state by state and demographic breakdowns of public opinion on this issue.
Ah, but for those with capital…sitting at home collecting coupons on assets the Fed will not let significantly depreciate…is perfectly sustainable. Some people are loving “lockdown socialism” right now.
Effem;
Is your post satire? Or deranged fantasy?
Two observations about “those with capital”
(1) Most capital today is “human capital,” that is knowledge gained through investing in an education; knowledge that is an effective tool to increase the worker’s productivity. If there’s presently some special payoff from investing in such capital, it’s partly that knowledge work can often be done (and paid for) online / from home.
(2) An awful lot of people with investment capital today are watching it get rapidly eroded. If you saved any money toward your own retirement, you’ve likely been horrified at the losses in that fund. You’re hardly unusual.
Fred_in_PA
You interpret people hoping they don’t end precautionary measures to a threat to their health and safety too soon as preferring your favored political bogeyman rather than simply hoping we do it right? Sorry if that sounds totally ridiculous. What’s closer to the truth: almost no one prefers what’s happening now to how things were sans threat and “socialism” and “laziness” are not the threats you think they are.
I just reread the post and he didn’t say anything about liking. He said people were being told all these measures are nothing to worry about; they are simply keeping things from getting worse. They are like taking an antibiotic, not chemotherapy and radiation. And since they look like benefits with no cost, people want to believe it.
Arnold is suggesting there will indeed be costs.
Arnold’s motto is to take the most charitable view of those who disagree. I suspect this will often cause one to misunderstand what may be going on given the realities of human nature.
It may be that many or most Democrats are quite happy to see a great increase in joblessness and welfare dependency. People who are dependent on government payments are crucial part of their voter base. Supporting dependent payments is a way for Democrats to virtue signal and feel good about themselves for their kindness and generosity, never mind it’s with others’ money.
Now the better among them may not consciously wish anyone be out of work, but they are certainly aware of the electoral benefits. And it is very easy to disguise a low motive here; pretend that the reason is health safety.
So the better alternative is to do what? Let the financial system implode again, evict everyone from their homes and apartments when they cannot make mortgage or rent payments because they have no jobs and the unemployment rate is 17% and rising? I don’t think that will make the economy any more productive or lead to higher, rather than lower employment.
Right now, so far as I can tell, the plan should be to ramp up testing and contact tracing capacity, and also to ramp up production of PPE for healthcare workers and at least cloth masks for everyone else. Right now the idea is to keep the virus from spreading too much so that we can switch to non-lockdown methods of controlling its spread when we are ready.
Why the administration doesn’t seem to get that it is in their own interest to ramp up PPE production and testing capacity and instead thinks that they are better served just criticizing governors is beyond me. People will know if they and their family members are employed or not in November, and historically voters punish the president and his party for that. So do the work to get people back to work.
Check out Dr Michael Osterholm on the lack of testing materials, and check out The Grumpy Economist on the lack of a seasoned bureaucracy to conduct mass testing and quarantining.
The upshot is that we will not be ready with mass testing for several months, if ever. We will have to go off lockdowns without the testing regime.
Is this all bad? That is the $64 trillion question.
Why the administration doesn’t seem to get that it is in their own interest to ramp up PPE production and testing capacity and instead thinks that they are better served just criticizing governors is beyond me.
Please stop lying. I know this whole situation is frustrating and the chief executive has a creative attitude toward the truth but the answer is not be imitate his worst characteristics. The administration has, of course, helped in ramping up PPE production and testing capacity. Certainly less than would be optimal and starting later than they should have–but the idea that they do nothing but criticize governors is factually incorrect and not helpful as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, that was hyperbole, but it is still baffling and incredibly frustrating to me that Trump doesn’t seem to believe that his first priority is to use the full power of the federal government to control the spread of the virus while preserving as much of the economy as is possible. So far as I can tell, Trump’s m.o. is to bullshit through any difficulties he encounters as the leader of an organization, and this time looks no different. But surely someone should be advising him that this isn’t possible. Hell, every Republican Senator should be screaming at him that it isn’t possible to do that, as it is their majority on the line.
Why was Trump haggling over prices for ventilators, when the prices aren’t even a rounding error in how much output we lose every day from shelter in place orders and other restrictions? What kind of message did that send to potential manufacturers of PPE, testing equipment, and prospective therapies?
Politically speaking, the administration should have almost unlimited amounts of money to spend to get capacity and to get it as fast as possible. Just imagine how bad it would look for anyone to oppose Trump in doing. Trump doesn’t need to wait for Congress or judges or any regulatory body to make deals to get the things we need, because so long as the plan to get those things is credible, no one can oppose him without being wiped out politically, and even judges with lifetime appointments couldn’t stop the administration. Who would enforce a court order against the administration in this situation if the administration is acting in good faith?
Sure, there are some people in the administration who are doing what they can, but it does not appear that the administration is committed to pulling out all the stops to get the country where it needs to be (i.e. back to work). Where are the rivers of money promised to people who can do these things? Where is the creative deregulation when that stands in the way?
And off the cliff we will go. Just read the comments at Marginal Revolution that linked this short blog post. People really do think it possible to continue like this for many more months. I wrote it several weeks ago now- we are no longer a serious people. We fully deserve what is coming.
1. It probably isn’t a good idea to judge the national character from the responses to one of Tyler Cowen’s blog posts.
2. We should all have some faith in the grinding intersection of balancing safety against economic necessity. The pressure from both sides of this will be intense and quite rigid, and what will come out of this is going to be impressive.
We will grind out our priorities in a high compression way and find out what we need to know, because we have no choice. Every scintilla of economic potential that is safe enough will be exploited and lots of stuff we don’t really need will fall away. There will be no faking it until you’re making it. If you are wrong, you will find out within a few weeks and you will pay the price. Others will hate you. If you are right, you will be a hero. This is markets x 10.
We will not be doing what we are doing now, because we can’t. We will not be doing what we were doing before, because we can’t. We won’t go over a cliff, because we can’t.
The college campuses are shut down, but classes are 100% active.
I am an (older) student taking a traditional math class at UT Austin for Spring 2020: before the spring break campus shutdown, we had classroom lectures on campus and turned in assignments in paper. Now, the lectures are done over zoom and assignments are submitted via computer. This is a stressful, difficult class. We cover difficult textbook material. We aren’t just going through the motions, we have to learn the normal content, do the normal assignments, and take the normal tests (I will have a final exam in May, but I haven’t yet experienced a post-shutdown test/exam)
It’s quite fascinating to compare this experience where the normal professors+students are suddenly forced to do everything online versus their normal online classes that they’ve been offering for the past ten years or so. I’ve taken both as a student and the difference is huge.
If I had my blog platform that people listened to, I’d explore this subject, and ideas for constructive changes. This is a tangent to the big virus issue that’s super important and the focus of this post, but I don’t have anything useful to add on that issue.
This just seems an attempt at shaming those that support the quarantine – something along the lines of “anyone who supports a measured, planned, slow reopening of the economy is really a lazy socialist.”
If it’s not, then why use such a loaded term like socialism? I mean that’s some Fox News-level hyperbole here. Most Perhaps, I’m being sensitive, but I certainly find it ironic that bloggers like Kling who have the luxury of continuing to work safely from home are the ones offering intellectual support for potentially prematurely ending state and local shelter in place orders under the auspices of fighting “socialism.”
I guess the alternative is to just let the virus determine the “winners and losers”, except this time many of the losers will be dead, maimed, and/or economically devastated; but hey, that’s the market for you, right? You got to break some eggs to make the omelette the market wants (except, I’m gonna keep my eggs in the fridge, thank you very much).
I’m really not trying to insult anyone here, but it’s hard to read posts about “lockdown socialism” as anything other than “back to work, commie.”
Also, the line “professors and teachers are paid even though schools are shut down” isn’t entirely true and I think it belies a dismissal of educators and possibly public servants in general. Schools in my state are expected to offer educational services to students. Colleges have moved classes online and very few courses have been cancelled due to the virus crisis.
I hope I’m wrong here, but the whole post seems to have the air economic moral superiority.
My understanding is that we don’t have much choice about getting the virus. The point of the lockdown is to get it later rather than sooner. That makes it demagogic to imply that the lockdown will stop the virus. It will only delay it.
But suppose that delay is a good idea. Then keep the lockdown. But stop the socialism. Stop pretending that Uncle Sam is some independent source of infinite wealth to be handed out to make everyone feel like they can be made whole.
Who says the lockdown will “stop” the virus (as opposed to all the things that can happen if it were delayed such as more/better hospital capacity, more treatment options, possible vaccine, better data collection for important studies, more resources for slowing the spread, etc.)? Who says US is source of “infinite wealth” and who says everyone is to “be made whole”?
That’s just extremely uncharitable interpretation of what’s going on.
My understanding that delay is the point in that the goal is to ensure treatment facilities and testing capabilities are adequate to ease the lockdown and minimize a risk of an overwhelming second and third wave.
Do you still believe there’s not enough data to support the position that the lockdowns have helped? No snark intended in that question. I’m genuinely curious.
Regarding the notion that most people who support the gradual and informed reduction of the lockdown believe that Uncle Sam is going to make them whole, I think that’s an unfair characterization. I’m speculating here, much like you are, but I think most people are very aware that their financial futures are less positive than they were two months ago. Many of them probably want their government to help the minimize the pain and help organize and execute a plan reduce the risk the real (or perceived) risks of the virus. That doesn’t make anyone a defacto supporter of socialism. I can’t imagine that there’s a majority of people out there that prefer the lockdown to their pre-virus life because they’re getting assistance from the government, or can float some bills for a while. By in large, I think they’re freaked out that the debts will pile up and that the the they’ll fall through the cracks in the system once things get back to normal, regardless of the time frame. Is their fear justified? I don’t know, but I don’t think it makes them socialists or MMT adherents to want something other than a “just wear masks” or a “you’re gonna get it anyways, and you probably won’t die, so get back out there now” approach is going to win them over.
Arnold,
People can’t stay home without money. If you think they should be staying home, you have to give them money. I’m not saying you have to defend the entire CARES act. But certainly my friends that are out of work need a check to buy groceries.
So what do you want politicians to do? Do you want the president to announce a big tax increase, starting in 2022, to help pay for all this. Assuming he’s still around and could get it passed. If he did announce a big tax increase, how do you think people would react, assuming they found the prospect credible?
Right now bond purchasers appear to be willing to fund current expenditures at 0%. You can currently be PAID $40 to take possession of the barrel of oil.
“Right now bond purchasers appear to be willing to fund current expenditures at 0%. You can currently be PAID $40 to take possession of the barrel of oil.”
All true. The million dollar question is whether this will also be true 6 months from now. And I don’t see people trying to answer this, which frustrates me tremendously (as it appears to frustrate Arnold too).
Every single investor in the entire world is trying to answer that question. If they had a different answer, prices would not be what they are today.
I can answer that if I believed a massive tax increase was going to be implemented two years from now it would give me even more incentive to walk away from the house we are building rather then go to closing.
Whether we will go through with that or many other possible economic transactions depends entirely on how I think the economy will be going forward. If I think the answer is unemployment and deflation then I’m going to hunker down.
The point is not to get it later rather than sooner. The point is to get the infected count down to a manageable number, then use a combination of other techniques to manage the spread that are much less costly.
We can’t do a controlled burn where 10% of the country is out sick every month for the next 6 months. Once it reached a critical mass well below 10%, it would explode. We wouldn’t have socialism then. We’d have nothing.
You should fear losing control of this virus more than you do socialism.
If you want me to personally stop supporting the ‘handouts’ to people who can’t work without risking infection, then stop
1) Subsidies to large scale farming operations
2) Subsidies to the petroleum industry
3) Massive, bloated military spending
Otherwise, it just sounds like right-of-centre people are suddenly mad that the working backbone of this country finally get to dip their hands into the till alongside the kleptocrats who have been using government funds as a personal spending account for generations.
Yes, this level of spending is not sustainable, but then let’s have a conversation about the enormous amounts of money poured into expensive overseas wars, bailing out banks, etc.
“I guess the alternative is to just let the virus determine the “winners and losers”, except this time many of the losers will be dead, maimed, and/or economically devastated; but hey, that’s the market for you, right?”
Fallacy of the false alternative?
Here is a perspective from Fishtown:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lockdown-rebellion-11587400850?emailToken=93ecfcb7fbbd52fd35530a5ff76cf0d2dFq/NdHwuXhmRquNLAy3SHurY1mV+qbX7CD+7ca6p8yC6bQMsgaj8NKZuMcWIn99rGqbmTT1C4MUwXB7djaHWw%3D%3D&reflink=article_copyURL_share
What I think this reveals is that society has lost the ability to discriminate wants from needs. Until we regain the ability to make those choices and triage their implications, all else is distraction.
Ironic that many of the people who care passionately about ecological sustainability have no idea economic sustainability can be a problem. Doubly ironic because the mechanism is broadly similar: people impose costs without realizing they are doing so or understanding the longer-term consequences. Costs which individually don’t seem large but become big problems when lots of people do the same thing.
Sounds a lot like this description of socialism, except without the work requirement (a least for many)
“First, what is the best the socialists, in their writings, can offer us? What do the most optimistic of them say? That our subsistence will be guaranteed, while we work; that some of us, the best of us, may earn a surplus above what is actually necessary for our subsistence; and that surplus, like a good child, we may “keep to spend.” We may not use it to better our condition, we may not, if a fisherman, buy another boat with it, if a farmer, another field ; we may not invest it, or use it productively ; but we can spend it like the good child, on candy — on something we consume, or waste it, or throw it away.
“Could not the African slave do as much? In fact, is not this whole position exactly that of the … slave? He, too, was guaranteed his sustenance; he, too, was allowed to keep and spend the extra money he made by working overtime; but he was not allowed to better his condition, to engage in trade, to invest it, to change his lot in life. Precisely what makes a slave is that he is allowed no use of productive capital to make wealth on his own account. The only difference is that under socialism, I may not be compelled to labor (I don’t even know as to that — socialists differ on the point), actually compelled, by the lash, or any other force than hunger. And the only other difference is that the … slave was under the orders of one man, while the subject of socialism will be under the orders of a committee of ward heelers. You will say, the slave could not choose his master, but we shall elect the ward politician. So we do now. Will that help much? Suppose the man with a grievance didn’t vote for him?”
–Socialism; a speech delivered in Faneuil hall, February 7th, 1903, by Frederic J. Stimson
I spoke to several friends over the weekend. Not all of it is new news but here is what I found.
A lot of been laid off, at least relative to normal. One has a job but can no longer transfer to be with his wife.
Many have been “half laid off”. The job is paying their healthcare through the end of May and wants them to collect unemployment till then. If the lockdown is lifted by then they will be hired back. If not they are on their own.
It seems to me much of AK’s list appears to be “social insurance” rather than “socialism”. In America the label socialism is routinely misapplied as a synonym for “not our way of life”. In fact America owns many social assets, most obviously, public infrastructure and the Department of Defense assets.
In America the label “capitalism” is routinely misapplied to mean “our way of life” when I think it is more correctly interpreted as a system of ownership. Our way of life has millions of people that have no personal claim on assets. The label is misapplied when it is convenient and self-serving for asset holders to accuse minimum wage workers to be against our way of life.
What can you do? That is how politics is played.
It may collapse in terms of people simply disobeying and opening up, small business, and going back to work.
Young people especially now know they have little to fear.
How you gonna keep em down on the farm once they’ve seen the mortality demographic analysis?
They are going to argue that the easiest, quickest way to reopen is to recognize that healthy people under 40 face very little risk, and so long as they stay away from older folks, they can be allowed to do anything, and the wave will burn through them with fallout more tolerable than lockdown socialism.
The Conservative Treehouse asks, “But what about grocery stores?”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/20/common-sense-and-human-interface-georgia-governor-brian-kemp-announces-phased-reopening-of-business-starting-this-week/