Coronavirus and why politicians do What They do: Beelzebub's Deal

Who doesn’t want to live forever?

Imagine you wake up one day your favorite image of the devil is there, next to your bed, ready to offer you up a deal:

You can increase your chances of living for another 30 years. But in return, there is a price. The price is this: People you don’t know will suffer. Your friends and family will be OK, but there will be terrible mass suffering that you caused by taking the deal.

Or you can refuse the deal. This doesn’t mean you die today. But it means you don’t get the 30 year warranty. What do you do? Take the vague promise of living 30 more years? Or roll the dice and maybe die earlier?

I think most people who consider themselves good people would refuse.to take the deal, because to take it would be valuing your well-being over the well-being of a huge number of people. 

Unfortunately for us all, then, politicians mostly don’t consider themselves good people. Or they’re not reflective enough to see that they’re not. Because, with respect to the Coronavirus, they’ve basically taken Beelzebub’s corrupting deal. They’ve chosen to shut down the economy, ruining countless lives in the process, on basically the hunch that by doing so, they’ll get to live another day. 

How so? 

There is still precious little research that we can rely on to say that Coronavirus is appreciably more deadly than, say, your average year of Influenza. Yeah, I know, those early death numbers coming out of Italy were scary, but they were numbers and not statistics. That is, you need denominators to make sense of those numbers. 10000 dead? That sounds bad. But how many people had the virus and lived? How many had the virus and never even got sick? No one knows. To this day, no one knows in Italy, or in the US, or in any other country. Because the kind of random population testing required to know those sorts of things has not been carried out.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with Coronavirus as an adult “boogeyman” who lives in the shadows and is somehow a menace. But not a menace that we can quantitatively rank. Is it worse than a normal year of the flu? Good question. Is it worse than the worst year of flu in recent history, i.e. the Hong Kong flu of 1968, which killed (normalized for today’s population) 150,000 in the US alone? Probably not. 

And we didn’t shut down the economy for that one. And the world got on with it. And today, except for immunologists, no one even remembers it. 

So we know that Coronavirus is a bad thing. Any deadly virus is a bad thing. But is it so bad, relative to other bad viruses that we can't just take it as part of life? The jury is out, but the more data we get, the more it looks like, no, this is just another SARS virus. It will disproportionately kill the old and infirm, but for the rest of us, it will just mean a few days or a week or two out of work. 

Or at least, that’s what it should have been. Back to the devil’s deal. Here’s the politician’s calculus: If I do nothing, I may get sick. And, who knows, maybe I have an underlying condition (the result of too many free lunches with the lobbyists, perhaps) and I could even die. I don’t want to die. If I shut down the economy, I increase my chances that I won’t die. Well, not by much, because viruses are patient things, and they get to most people eventually. But, who knows, maybe a cure or vaccine will get discovered before I have to deal with it. So I can close down the economy, easy-peasy. Why wouldn’t I? It benefits me, and, of course, it’s always all about me at the end of the day. (Voters are just pesky ants who need to watered eventually so that I can get re-elected). If I close the economy, I won’t lose my job. It’s a Federal job, and those never, ever (ever) go away. So I have nothing to lose. Yeah, let’s shut it all down, boys. 

Of course, there is that little matter of everyone who isn’t on the Government dole. Yeah, they may all lose their jobs. But hey, let them eat cake. 

So that’s what you have: Those with no chance of losing their jobs making laws to put everyone in the private sector out of work, out of business. "It may hurt the peons in the private sector, but as a Federal worker, I’ll be just fine. And I may live a little longer."

"And if I don’t, well, I still will have my job and my juicy pension."

It’s why they shut down the economy so easily. And it’s why you and I will suffer. In other times and in other places, they call this tyranny.