No “Tradeoff” Between Fighting COVID-19 and the Economy

I want to talk about a so-called trade-off between dealing with the pandemic on the one hand and sustaining or maintaining the economy on the other. We have been told by a vast array of quote-unquote leaders that there is such a trade-off and that we should recommend and enact procedures that protect our economy even at the price of dealing with the disease. We shouldn’t just focus on the disease, there’s a trade-off between the disease treatment and the economic sustaining that we need to undertake as well.

I want to oppose that argument. I want to criticize it and I want to talk to you about the ulterior motives that drive it. First, the criticism we are now in, the second so-called wave of the virus we have learned that over the summer there were relaxations of lockdowns that had been imposed in many countries and we’re learning now that as predicted by many epidemiologists relaxing those lockdowns enabled, allowed, provoked a resurgence of the disease and therefore a renewal of lockdowns. So right away, it is easy for me to say, had we focused more on fighting the disease, we would not be facing a second lockdown which as quite a few have pointed out, is a kind of double whammy for the economy. It’ll be harder for many businesses to weather a second lockdown given how hard it was for them in the first one.

Nobody in their right mind, and that does allow for a few, would argue that we should not have locked down in the first place and those who argue that way are thankfully not taken seriously in most parts of the world. But why did it happen in the first place? Where did this trade trade-off nonsense begin? Well, it comes from the business community. It comes, in short, from capitalists. They don’t want the economy locked down because it deprives them of profits. Let’s be real clear here. Whatever their feelings about Covid-19, they don’t want to lose their profits because there are lots and lots of unemployed people, especially during and because of the pandemic, they’re not worried if some of their folks get sick or maybe even die. There are loads of unemployed people able, willing and increasingly desperate to take whatever jobs might be made available, so the employers know there’s lots of employees around. They’re not going to be short of employees because there’s a sickness among them. Is that an ugly perspective? Yeah, but it doesn’t help to pretend it’s not operating around us.

It is a mistake not to lock down the economy because if we don’t do that, and if this disease persists, and if it comes back in waves, as it is clearly now, doing in large parts of the world, it will have long-term and increasingly deep economic effects and they’re none of them any good. So, it was a mistake to think of a trade-off. The first priority could have and should have been the disease. Fight this disease, keep its spread to an absolute minimum. Yes, pause the economy to do that, pause our personal lives, pause our recreation, pause, and you get the picture, to beat the disease because if you don’t, the disease will come and give the economy repeated devastating knocks.

It was foolhardy to try to rev up the economy again before you had really taken care of this disease, and as long as we don’t have mass vaccines that are effective, and nobody in their right mind thinks that’s going to happen before 2021, until we have that limiting the exposure and limiting the infection and limiting the spread is the number one priority. But I want to return to explaining why anything other than that was put forward. It’s the business community, it’s the employers they want to make profits. They don’t want their activities idled. Profit requires business as usual, workers working, producing more than you pay them to work, so that you can accumulate the difference as profits. And that’s why they pushed to reopen sooner not later. That’s why the docile politicians that do their bidding were out there pushing to reopen the economy we shouldn’t have.

Here’s what we should have done. We should have mobilized our public and private resources to beat the disease and to limit the damage, the long-term damage that the disease was doing above all, and first of all, for the children, for the future of our country, the future of our society. Their educations needn’t have been and shouldn’t have been interrupted. Just like the lives of their parents couldn’t have been and shouldn’t have been interrupted, undone, rendered into impossible conditions inside households. Here’s the way that could have been done and should have been done. Every restaurant that had to close could have reopened as a classroom or as two or three classrooms because that would have given us the extra space to have proper social distancing among the students; and a teacher or two from the millions who were unemployed, the extra teachers to have classes with no more than three to five young people in them. Could have been arranged cinemas, could have been used because they have big spaces for people to sit far enough away to be safe while continuing their educations. The unemployed could have been the teachers and the unutilized spas, restaurants, movie theaters, opera houses, auditoriums of every conceivable sort could have been there to supplement the schools and thereby provide social distancing that would have been a mobilization of the sort you could have and should have undertaken.

None of that is profitable. The government could have sustained the restaurants so that their staffs continue to be paid but were now maintaining super clean super safe school rooms with social distancing. You get the picture. You could have and you should have, and had you done that, you would have defeated the disease’s spread and avoided second lockdowns. The profit-driven capitalist system was the enemy of dealing with this disease in the way that it should have. That’s why they failed to accumulate the masks and the ventilators and the gloves, That’s why they persuaded the government not to come in and buy the ventilators, and the gloves, and the tests, to treat this disease with the seriousness it should have. And you know, when you look at the societies who did that, China, New Zealand, South Korea, even Germany, you see that they mobilized private and public resources and they kept the interference of the capitalist class to a minimum. Not zero, a minimum. And that proved to make all the difference. The sickness is not the pandemic, the sickness is the system.