President Trump is being criticized for hoping the great quarantine can end by Easter. People are saying lives are more important than money. It is true that lives are more important than money. But this criticism shows a lack of understanding about economics. The question of when to end the quarantine is really a question of lives versus lives; what kind of a risk of death and suffering we would rather face.
The United States has been blessed with a high standard of living and a low death rate compared to most nations in the world. We have so much wealth that even the poor in the USA are better off than the middle class of many other nations. This wealth is not an accident. It is here because Americans are more productive. We use our God given minds, time, and resources to produce more goods and services per person than most other countries in the history of the mankind. More goods and services don’t just mean a more comfortable life: they mean no one needs to starve to death in the USA; they mean more healthy and nourishing food is available; they mean medical services unavailable in much of the world are available to even the poor in America; they mean we can travel to get medical help; they mean we can travel to help others in need; they mean we can access emergency first aid services; they mean we have more access to friendship, relatives, neighbors, and opportunities to exchange the love and social interaction humans need to thrive. All these blessings mean people who would otherwise die earlier will live longer. And the longer the quarantine continues, the less of them we will have.
Fewer resources do not just mean a lower standard of living. In practice they mean more people die sooner. Lonely people lose their will to live or have no one to be sure they are taking their medication. People in remote areas die because they cannot get to medical care in the city soon enough. The quality of diets decline, and more people die of ailments sooner because they lack proper nutrition. Less sanitation is available, and more contamination occurs. With less abundance, there is less charity available to the poor.
As resources diminish, socialists in America will claim the solution is more government control and rationing of every aspect of life. If they get their way, we will have even fewer goods and services. Central planning is inferior to the market in making allocating resources, so misallocations occur more often, resulting in shortages of desired goods and services and surpluses of what no one wants. Incentives to produce are reduced, sometimes savings and production are even penalized, so productivity declines. More government regulation means more obstacles to the efficient production of goods and serves and the free flow of people and material, so more declines in production occur. Socialists always try to overcome diminished resources and to punish the wealthy by inflating currency. This in turn makes the elderly (who live on savings) poorer. When people resist these results, powerful governments use force to suppress decent. In the end, socialism kills indirectly as well as directly.
At present, it may well be that the medical benefits of the quarantine outweigh the cost in human lives. But make no mistake, keeping the economy in lock down will have its own cost in human lives. At some point that cost will be greater than letting the virus run its natural course. In a fallen world it is never a question of if we will die, it is always a question of when and how.
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