Recovery hinges on businesses policing peers

Trying to manage the coronavirus pandemic is like trying to throw a saddle on a hurricane. No one easily tames the beast.

And so when Gov. Doug Ducey began reopening the Arizona economy, he was confronted with a photograph of a Tempe bar and restaurant already breaking many of the public-health guidelines he had set down.

Students were jammed together in line and on premises, partying like it was 2018. Groups of young people were quaffing 32-ounce buckets of booze.

Here was evidence that Arizona isn’t ready to reopen.

Ducey scolded the media for focusing on the few businesses that defy guidelines rather than the many that practice them.

And for a reason.

He doesn’t want to play the heavy. He’s the reluctant tyrant. He doesn’t want to create a police state on top of a pandemic, so he’s gone about things in a way more measured than some of his counterparts in other states.

He praised Tempe police for their “lighter touch” with CASA Tempe, educating them about disease protocol rather than throwing the book at them.

Besides, there was no book to throw anyway.

Doug Ducey’s Arizona is a kinder, gentler taskmaster than say Gavin Newsom’s California.

As noted, this pandemic is dangerous because it is twin cyclones turning inverse to one another in a way that makes it impossible to tame each individually. Push too hard on the health side and you harm the economic side. Push too hard on the economic side and you harm the health side.

The complexities are enormous and the governor needs help – a division of labor, if you will, to manage the monster.

In this case, he needs help to make sure restaurants, bars and other establishments take seriously the healthcare threats posed by reopening.

He needs an enforcer, and let it not be the police who have better things to do and are already overburdened.

Let business be the enforcer.

All those chambers of commerce and restaurant and trade associations should be standing up and making sure all Arizona businesses understand their duty to protect the health of customers and the health of the Arizona economy.

Because if those establishments don’t follow guidelines, they will damage themselves.

Defending social distancing guidelines is pro-business and pro-free enterprise. If Arizonans grow too lax and turn eating and drinking establishments into incubi of viral plague (to borrow that glorious line from “The Devil Wears Prada”) guess what’s going to happen.

Lockdown II.

And who does that hurt?

Business.

Lockdown I brought us stock markets losing a third of their value, and U.S. business shuttering to the tune of 33 million unemployment claims.

If our business community can’t demonstrate it is responsible enough to stand up our economy in an intelligent way, in a way sensitive to the enormous challenges we face today; if it us unwilling to take the great pains necessary to protect patrons and workers, it is going to reignite the virus and put it back in charge.

Business needs to lay down the law. First with education and later with firm social pressure. This will be the businesses version of protect the herd – protect all of our businesses.

If certain businesses decide to defy the rules and operate with cold indifference, they need to be ostracized by the business community.

For those of you on the left who say that’s not good enough, we need ironclad laws with teeth to enforce compliance, I say never fear.

If business fails to comply and the infection rate comes roaring back, you’ll get your iron-clad laws.

Another reason for business to play the enforcer.

Now.