What our billionaires are willing to sacrifice

Imagine, for a moment, a deadly pandemic that had all the same characteristics of our current crisis but for the fact of who it affected most. Rather than the oldest members of society, picture an outbreak that targeted children; where schools, rather than nursing homes, became viral hotspots; where rather than the prospect of losing parents and grandparents, we were all contemplating the devastation of our youngest family members dying.

Then imagine a school of thought developing that maybe it was for the best. Maybe some kids — a lot of kids — had to die in order to achieve the greater good, which was to keep the economy moving. The cure can’t be worse than the disease, they’d say.

It sounds impossible to imagine. It shouldn’t be. That argument is equivalent to the one currently on offer from a large and growing segment of commentators, not limited to the online fringe, but even coming from once-respected outposts — for instance, the Oval Office.

Only the sick and elderly are affected by the coronavirus, according to this argument. Can we really afford to shut down the economy to protect just one subset of the population?

This was best illustrated in a truly surreal Bloomberg News story last week that had billionaires fretting about the state of the economy and wondering aloud whether it would really be so bad if a few people had to die to prop up their stock prices.

“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc., said in an apparently on-the-record interview.

It would be bad enough if these were outliers, but these are industry leaders and powerful politicians, including, of course, the president of the United States, who wants the country up and running by Easter. And he’s far from alone. What started as a far-out theory has moved into the mainstream, and it treats the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people as an acceptable loss if it means the economy continues to expand.

This is a value system that decides the worth of people’s lives based on their earning potential. Older people don’t contribute a whole lot, under this thinking, and can serve as a drain on society’s resources. No big deal, right?

I had a former boss who used to chastise us on the editorial page for taking positions that were inarguable. “So you’re saying we’re against child abuse,” he’d say. His point, which was a valid one, was that if no one is arguing the opposite, then whatever point you’re trying to make isn’t as strong as you think it is. Of course we’re against bad things. Who isn’t?

It would have been reasonable a week ago to put “We should not condemn hundreds of thousands of people to a painful death” into that category. Who is going to argue the opposite?

The answer appears to be a sizable swath of our nation’s captains of industry, plus more than a few politicians. “I think there are lots of grandparents out there who would agree with me that I want my grandchildren to live in the America I did,” the lieutenant governor of Texas said, adding that if it meant sacrificing lives in favor of the economy, he’s all for it.

In the view of sane people, the country is shut down because the danger is real and the worst-case scenario is already hitting places like New York City, still just a short train ride away. Most of us, too, are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our parents and grandparents — or, for those of us who have one of those underlying medical conditions, ourselves.

And the solution on offer wouldn’t help anything anyway. Open up the economy, send people back to work and you open the door to apocalyptic overload at hospitals across the country. That is a guaranteed disaster for the economy, and it doesn’t involve any directive from the governor.

Until the public health experts say otherwise, the hunkeringdown at home must continue for whomever is able to do it. There is no alternative, just as there is no avoiding the economic disaster the coronavirus will cause, one way or another. That may be inconvenient to the president’s reelection chances, but it’s the reality we’re facing.

In the meantime, we all have a better understanding, if one was needed, about what exactly our business leaders would be willing to sacrifice in order to stay ahead.