The unemployment numbers are horrifying. The worst since the great depression. Tens of millions of people out of work. Nine million have lost their health insurance. It’s bad out there. The positive spin is that much of this unemployment should be temporary, lasting only as long as the pandemic. But as left financial analyst Doug Henwood notes in a dispiriting analysis, “thousands, maybe millions, of small and mid-sized businesses won’t be able to survive months with no revenue, and so won’t be around to reopen,” plus “second and/or third waves of viral attacks, which are quite possible, would make a quick rebound even less likely.”
If you consume conservative media, as I regrettably do, you hear constantly about the mass unemployment. In fact, they seem to talk about it much more than about the human toll of coronavirus itself. Over and over again on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, for instance, you hear the same talking point repeated: the economy is being killed, people are suffering, and thus everything must be reopened, virus be damned. Here is a representative excerpt from a recent editorial: (...)
Part of the argument, as you can see, is just unfathomably stupid. Governments are choosing to continue lockdowns even though they don’t have many deaths—this sounds like an LSAT “spot the flaw in the reasoning” test. “Why not reopen?” Because—I patiently explain to the editorial board of one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers—that risks massively escalating the transmission of a virus that already kills thousands of people every day. Now, you can make an argument about the impact of the lockdowns on the spread of the virus, which is still contentious among experts, but what you cannot do is simply say “Gosh, the virus seems to be slowing down its spread, looks like all these drastic public health measures were for nothing!”
But I will leave the debate over the efficacy of lockdowns to the epidemiologists who actually study such things. Here I want to draw your attention to a more insidious part of the right-wing argument: the use of joblessness and its effects as an argument for reopening the economy.
The Wall Street Journal wants you to think that “logic” demands we think the following way: if the shutdown has produced joblessness, and joblessness causes misery, we must end the shutdown. It’s simple. But simple thinking is often stupid thinking. The argument is premised on the idea that the economic misery people are suffering right now is the unavoidable effect of shutting down parts of the economy. But that’s not the case: there is a giant part of it that is indeed avoidable. And what the right doesn’t want you to understand is that there is a completely different possible way of thinking about it. Because if you thought about it differently, you might question many of the foundational premises of laissez-faire capitalism. And that would be a very bad thing indeed!
The causal chain is clear: if businesses are required to temporarily reduce or suspend operations, workers will lose their jobs, and if workers lose their jobs they will lose their health insurance and their paychecks. But do these things have to follow from businesses having to reduce operations? No, they don’t. The health insurance piece of it is clearly not necessary—the only reason workers lose their health insurance when they lose their jobs is because the United States has an incredibly dumb way of financing healthcare. If we had a universal government insurance program, nobody would have to fear that reduced employment would have any consequences at all for their healthcare. Britain, for instance, has had a terrible response to the coronavirus under Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, but even though the economic effects of the crisis have been very bad, not a single person there has to worry that they won’t be able to afford healthcare as a result. Britain’s healthcare is nationalized and free at the point of use. So every single worry people have in the United States about not being able to afford medical care is a completely avoidable form of suffering. It is imposed on them by their government due to the prevailing free market ideology. We could get rid of it entirely if we had a National Health Service like Britain does. But we choose to put people in financial distress.
The Wall Street Journal obviously does not want you to think about it that way. They want you to think that the way in which the government has caused your troubles is by imposing the economic shutdown. But that’s not true. The government has caused you trouble by imposing the economic shutdown without introducing the kind of policies that would successfully make a shutdown tolerable. The people of Britain are not out protesting for their government to lift lockdown restrictions. They are overwhelmingly in support of a long lockdown. (Actually, despite propaganda efforts by the right to suggest that Americans are sick and tired of the lockdowns, the public here has been largely supportive of the public health measures taken. It’s just even stronger in Britain.) In part, British people can better afford to be supportive of these measures, because they don’t have to worry that they’re going to lose their insurance if their job goes. (There have been some protests in France, but they have not been because the government cares too much about public health. They have been because their neoliberal government, like ours, does not care about making sure vulnerable people come out of this okay.)
But parts of the unemployment may also be a choice. The United States has done an absolutely abysmal job of protecting people’s employment. The “paycheck protection program” has been an administrative nightmare, funneling money to companies that don’t need it and saddling small businesses with new debt. The government could have simply paid salaries during the crisis, but a choice was made not to do this, in part because people in government have a pathological hatred of “handouts” and would rather other people die needlessly by the thousands than give an inch on their ideology.
If you consume conservative media, as I regrettably do, you hear constantly about the mass unemployment. In fact, they seem to talk about it much more than about the human toll of coronavirus itself. Over and over again on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, for instance, you hear the same talking point repeated: the economy is being killed, people are suffering, and thus everything must be reopened, virus be damned. Here is a representative excerpt from a recent editorial: (...)“after a seven-week lockdown, thousands of New Yorkers are still testing positive and hundreds are hospitalized each day. ‘Government has done everything it could. Society has done everything it could,’ Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. He’s right, but then why not reopen? Americans need to work to make a living, and they want to work. But the longer the shutdowns go on, the more furloughs become long-lasting unemployment.The Journal concludes that “the virus will be with us for a long time unless there’s a vaccine, so we have to learn to live with it and have a functioning economy.” See? “Open the economy, virus be damned” is not an exaggerated description of the position. (The Journal also says that we should not worry about businesses endangering their employees because they have “no incentive” to do so. This is false: if 1) businesses have no liability for harm done to employees—as conservatives would like to see happen—and 2) employees are easily replaced—as they are during times of high unemployment—and 3) endangering them is less costly than protecting them, then businesses have a very strong incentive to endanger employees. The Journal editorial board should be forced to take a remedial economics course.)
Part of the argument, as you can see, is just unfathomably stupid. Governments are choosing to continue lockdowns even though they don’t have many deaths—this sounds like an LSAT “spot the flaw in the reasoning” test. “Why not reopen?” Because—I patiently explain to the editorial board of one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers—that risks massively escalating the transmission of a virus that already kills thousands of people every day. Now, you can make an argument about the impact of the lockdowns on the spread of the virus, which is still contentious among experts, but what you cannot do is simply say “Gosh, the virus seems to be slowing down its spread, looks like all these drastic public health measures were for nothing!”
But I will leave the debate over the efficacy of lockdowns to the epidemiologists who actually study such things. Here I want to draw your attention to a more insidious part of the right-wing argument: the use of joblessness and its effects as an argument for reopening the economy.
The Wall Street Journal wants you to think that “logic” demands we think the following way: if the shutdown has produced joblessness, and joblessness causes misery, we must end the shutdown. It’s simple. But simple thinking is often stupid thinking. The argument is premised on the idea that the economic misery people are suffering right now is the unavoidable effect of shutting down parts of the economy. But that’s not the case: there is a giant part of it that is indeed avoidable. And what the right doesn’t want you to understand is that there is a completely different possible way of thinking about it. Because if you thought about it differently, you might question many of the foundational premises of laissez-faire capitalism. And that would be a very bad thing indeed!
The causal chain is clear: if businesses are required to temporarily reduce or suspend operations, workers will lose their jobs, and if workers lose their jobs they will lose their health insurance and their paychecks. But do these things have to follow from businesses having to reduce operations? No, they don’t. The health insurance piece of it is clearly not necessary—the only reason workers lose their health insurance when they lose their jobs is because the United States has an incredibly dumb way of financing healthcare. If we had a universal government insurance program, nobody would have to fear that reduced employment would have any consequences at all for their healthcare. Britain, for instance, has had a terrible response to the coronavirus under Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, but even though the economic effects of the crisis have been very bad, not a single person there has to worry that they won’t be able to afford healthcare as a result. Britain’s healthcare is nationalized and free at the point of use. So every single worry people have in the United States about not being able to afford medical care is a completely avoidable form of suffering. It is imposed on them by their government due to the prevailing free market ideology. We could get rid of it entirely if we had a National Health Service like Britain does. But we choose to put people in financial distress.
The Wall Street Journal obviously does not want you to think about it that way. They want you to think that the way in which the government has caused your troubles is by imposing the economic shutdown. But that’s not true. The government has caused you trouble by imposing the economic shutdown without introducing the kind of policies that would successfully make a shutdown tolerable. The people of Britain are not out protesting for their government to lift lockdown restrictions. They are overwhelmingly in support of a long lockdown. (Actually, despite propaganda efforts by the right to suggest that Americans are sick and tired of the lockdowns, the public here has been largely supportive of the public health measures taken. It’s just even stronger in Britain.) In part, British people can better afford to be supportive of these measures, because they don’t have to worry that they’re going to lose their insurance if their job goes. (There have been some protests in France, but they have not been because the government cares too much about public health. They have been because their neoliberal government, like ours, does not care about making sure vulnerable people come out of this okay.)
But parts of the unemployment may also be a choice. The United States has done an absolutely abysmal job of protecting people’s employment. The “paycheck protection program” has been an administrative nightmare, funneling money to companies that don’t need it and saddling small businesses with new debt. The government could have simply paid salaries during the crisis, but a choice was made not to do this, in part because people in government have a pathological hatred of “handouts” and would rather other people die needlessly by the thousands than give an inch on their ideology.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
