That seems to be the question. Reason’s Jacob Sullum serves up an interesting summary of a recent roundtable discussion at the New York Times magazine, “Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It?”, pointing out that crippling the entire U.S. economy and blighting the lives of tens of millions of young people in order to, largely, preserve the largely played out lives of a pack of geezers (geezers like me) seems unfair to youth. And youth must be served, right?
Sure, every life is precious, but how precious? A month or two ago, people who saying we should let the coronavirus have its way with us and, basically, cull the herd, removing the “unfit”, so to speak, were shouted down as inhuman. But are we really going to let the economy grind to an absolute dead halt for months, a self-inflicted wound deeper than the Great Depression itself? Is that really a good idea? After all, what would be so bad about losing, say, 8% of the 70 and over crowd? Most of us sure ain’t working. We’re drawing Social Security, and, if we stopped, that would be a good thing, right? And if we have any assets, they’d go to our heirs, who, being younger, would probably spend them faster, which would also boost the economy. Sounds like a win win, amirite?
Maybe re-opening things in May is “too soon”. But I wonder if waiting until June might be “too late”.
Afterwords
Obviously, there will be a lot of serious moral issues involved in re-starting, because it isn’t just us geezers who are vulnerable. It’s people with pre-existing conditions, who are disproportionately poor, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic, though there are plenty of poor white folks too. The same groups are disproportionately employed in service jobs, the people who have to stay working to keep the rest of us alive, greatly increasing their chance of infection. If only it were just us geezers, the choice wouldn’t be so hard.
