A by now familiar and in fact quite hypocritical claim permeating the liberal media bubble is that President Trump and the GOP are engaging in a cynical plan to relax shelter-in-place restrictions due to coronavirus and rush reopening the country in hope of reviving the economy enough to bolster the president’s reelection prospects. They argue that in doing so, Trump is placing the economy over lives.
In a recent opinion piece in The Statesman, columnist Jodi Ashbrook makes the rather incredulous claim that “President Donald Trump and some GOP leaders favor tipping the scales to support business over life.” She adds that when Trump refers to essential workers as “warriors” (in a war against a silent killer), he really means that they are mere “cannon fodder.” While this argument sounds self-righteous in the way only a virtue-signaling liberal can muster, it is totally hypocritical.
It is doubtful Jodi herself, who works as a teacher and has been paid while out of work, could survive in her cloistered perch for very long were it not for these very workers. She no doubt relies on the grocery store workers, the delivery drivers, bankers, medical professionals and others who are sacrificing their own safety so that she can sit around and pontificate from the splendid isolation of her own home.
In fact the entire argument that somehow our national leaders are putting the economy above lives misses the point. In fact, the economy is lives. We human beings all have basic needs—food, clothing, shelter, warmth, medicine. Without any of these essential goods, we would die. In our society, the means by which we are able to secure these life-sustaining goods and services is by working, earning money, and purchasing these goods. For most people, their primary source of medical care is insurance from their place of employment. Those who are suddenly out of work are also more likely to be uninsured. For people with critical needs, such as those who require special medications such as insulin, cutting off their insurance could mean they have to make a life or death decision to either spend their remaining savings on food or on expensive out-of-pocket medical costs.
In fact by shutting down the entire country, we may not be saving any lives at all. The goal of the shutdowns was not in fact to save lives, but to slow the rate of the spread of the COVID virus, and reduce the strain on the medical system. Public health authorities feared that mass casualties all at once would overwhelm the medical system and lead to deaths on the streets, or in the waiting rooms, which was politically unacceptable. But now that the curve has slowed in most states, many liberal politicians seem to be gloating in their new-found powers and moving the goalpost ever further. Now instead of slowing the curve, Democratic lawmakers have signaled that they want widespread testing to occur before reopening.
Not only is waiting for everyone in the country to be tested infeasible, it’s also not likely to work. Unless you’ve already been exposed and developed antibodies to the disease, you can easily be infected by the virus a minute after you’ve been tested. So, then, would people have to get tested after every exposure to someone? Contact tracing, another policy trial balloon, is also unlikely to work on a practical level, and in any case waiting for it puts more lives at risk.
Those are the people whose lives are risked by the economic devastation that an extended nationwide closure has caused. Those are the people who cannot put food on their family’s table or a roof over their heads. They are the small businesses who have to lay off employees and shut down, in many cases, permanently. These all represent lives lost. But you won’t hear about any of that from liberal politicians. They hypocritically believe that saving a few lives in one way (social isolation and shutdowns) is worth risking far more lives due to economic devastation.
But if this were really about saving lives, and not promoting a political agenda, we would see it extend to other areas of policy. There are upwards of 50,000 gun deaths in America every year, and yet we do not shut down even one firearms manufacturer. Every long holiday weekend there are hundreds of automobile fatalities, but we don’t shut down the national highways on Fourth of July or Labor Day weekend. Why? Because as a society we make these types of trade-offs all the time. We know that there is a cost in terms of lives lost to car accidents. But the social and economic value of having a robust transportation system far exceeds those costs.
By making the specious argument that the president is putting the economy over lives, liberals are totally ignoring the fact that shutting down the economy for an extended period of time puts far more Americans’ lives at risk. We can open safely and cautiously, but we have to get people back to work and our economy back to fully functioning.
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