Last month (March 2020) there were a couple of influential opinion writers who informed President Trump's approach to the coronavirus at the time -- a public health doctor and a legal scholar. The meme was that fear of the coronavirus was worse than the virus itself. The cure, shutting down the economy, could be worse than the disease, they said. Dr. David L. Katz' letter was published March 20 in the New York Times; he was subsequently interviewed on PBS. Prof. Richard A. Epstein is a legal scholar whose March 16 piece for the Hoover Institute was analyzed in a March 30 New Yorker article.
Individuals who picked up on those opinions were not necessarily polemicists who valued financial stability over life. I was surprised to hear my own financial advisors voice the memes.
Back in March, part of the issue was disbelief. People simply couldn't see what was coming, It was unthinkable.
Then for a change the president pivoted toward listening to his health care advisors, Doctors Fauci and Birx. The predicted number of deaths impressed him. Further, we would not be open for Easter. The shutdown of the economy was extended while we sheltered in place. April was erased.
Subsequently, the number of infections and deaths in the early hot spots increased geometrically before leveling off at high plateaus, due to social distancing. However, the peak had not yet been reached in the less-stricken areas, often rural.
Over 50,000 people in the U.S. have died of COVID 19.
Flattening the curve, though, was only Step 1. Next comes testing and tracking, so the sick and their contacts can be isolated.
But staying the course is not this president's style.
Concerns about the economy are certainly legitimate. Segments of the population became restive. The president saw his political opening. As the end of the month approached, he played both ends against the middle: talking health out of one side of his mouth while revving up protests in states where the virus outbreaks had been the worst and appropriate follow-up was in the works. Free us. Reopen the economy. Or so the mantra went.
The president never planned or organized at the federal level. He said he was not responsible; the governors were, the healthcare workers, the scientists, the business owners (small and large), individuals. Political advantage, not the good of the country, was his lodestar. His politics requires polarization, not people pulling together.
And so, once again, pushback against the scientists and doctors has surged.
Written examples of this range from blatant to relatively subtle.
The column I characterize as "blatant," by Antony Davis and James R. Harrigan for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday, is libertarian in nature, calling out the shutdown approach as an attack on our freedom by using the force of government to control individuals. They play the ethics card -- or, maybe, the "unethical" card -- claiming dissent is being silenced by calling dissenters "murderers."
Note that it has long been a role of government to control the spread of infectious disease.
The more subtle example is by the same paper's "Money Matters" columnist Wes Moss. Last month he is in print as terming the shutdown of the economy an "overreaction." This month, he is praising the state of Georgia and Gov. Brian Kemp as leading the way out of the shutdown ASAP, lest the economy be not only "bent" but "broken." He wants to rely on "individual responsibility" to make the difference. He says the ability for massive testing is months away. He says we can't wait until the virus is completely eliminated -- a straw man, since no one is calling for that. He alludes to the responsibility for businesses in controlling the infection and says business travel may be "different." He calls on "courage, a renewed sense of personal responsibility, discipline and common sense" for a safe reopening.
About the charge that dissent is being silenced as Davis and Harrigan claim: I have not heard anybody say or write that, which is why I called it the ethics card. Not only appear to preempt your adversaries but make them sound unreasonable and mean!
But is the position of Davis and Harrigan unethical?
The whispered sentiment may be that some may die but that's the price of doing business.
That stance is utilitarian in nature, utilitarianism being the greatest good for the greatest number. In Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do, Michael J. Sandel says the problem with that is that only the total amount of good is considered. Individual rights are subsumed in the total and are not a consideration.
People usually register the difficulty with individual rights under utilitarianism, so we instinctively add just deserts to the mix. If individuals in some way deserve a bad outcome, we feel less bad about it. For example, in the "ticking bomb" question, we might find torture okay, but not entirely on the basis of utilitarianism. That is, we might argue that terrorists are bad people and deserve what they get. If, however, it was an innocent family member of the terrorist who had to be tortured, rationalizing torture would become harder.
Although Davis and Harrigan are crying assault on freedom, their utilitarian position actually assaults the rights of those individuals who would be lost to or injured by C0VID 19.
To the extent they are dehumanizing those who are more vulnerable, they may be rationalizing their utilitarianism.
Yet most of our religious traditions do command us to care for the widow, orphan, and stranger, as well as to treat the least of these justly and mercifully. We are to love others as we do ourselves, for goodness sake!
There are ways to open the economy safely. Those ways involve testing and tracking, which Wes Moss holds up as near impossible. But opening the economy willy-nilly is what's making testing and tracking impossible, by radically increasing the number of random social contacts.
Neither Davis and Harrigan nor Moss have made mention of the alleged increase of social ills -- substance abuse and suicide -- that comes with economic depression. A month ago the social-ills argument was often heard. I think it's prudent of them not to make that argument, for two reasons. First, suicide and drug addiction were rampant all the while the economy was going well. The opioid crisis, remember? And don't forget the unprecedented increased death rate among the white working class, all the while the economy was going great guns. Read more about that in this essay-length review of the new book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
Second, although economic depression has been associated historically with social ills, what we have now is something different: a genuine social crisis, medical with economic fall-out. And social crises often lead to a new sense of purpose and to people pulling together. Rather than succumbing to social ills, people are called to be their best.
And here's the rub: how people react depends on how they see what's happening, and that depends greatly on the message their leaders are broadcasting.
Currently the American people are being polarized and played against each other for political gain. Some are being provoked and stirred up by being told that others are taking their freedoms.
When their leaders are challenging them to come together to face a crisis, people can rise to very difficult occasions. Think Churchill or FDR.
The perverse leadership we have today is not only unethical; it is a crying shame.
