Look at casualties of shutdown

I’m a lawyer. Let me tell you about some of my clients.

One is a three-generation family of immigrants who have built retail businesses from scratch in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. They now have no income and have had to dismiss 25 employees.

Another is a family who retail clothing. Since the 70s, their business has supported three large families, putting two generations through college. Their business is closed, with the older founders and their children and grandchildren who depend on the single business scrambling for government loans and payments.

Another is a successful business person who has owned several food establishments for over 40 years. He shut his doors for good last month, let everybody go, and is done with doing business in a state that doesn’t even try to support people like him who work 80-hour weeks and employ scores of women and men.

Yet another is a partnership of two women who have grown a business for 20 years that trains and cares for hundreds of kids in Albuquerque. Like the others, their business has been closed by the government. They spend their time trying to find money for their unemployed staff.

All are capable. All are smart. All are concerned about the safety of their staff, their customers and themselves. All can run their businesses with carefully implemented safety precautions. But the government assumes they are stupid, incapable and greedy, and so they must be shut down.

The government’s rationale for its dramatic orders has been the presence of the coronavirus, the lack of testing and the absence of a vaccine. Without more nuanced thinking, the government will have to keep all of these businesses closed until there is no coronavirus, or everyone is tested, or there is a vaccine. Those conditions won’t be satisfied for many months, if ever.

The irony of ‘flattening the curve’ is that while pushing down on the peak, you extend the duration. The effect of this government’s frightened policy making will be to bankrupt thousands of people like my clients, and then bankrupt the government.

The government just extended its no-thought shutdown policy until the middle of May, with no new rationale. That’s what people do when they are afraid and don’t know how to solve a problem: They freeze.