Coronavirus: The Jonathan Swift Solution

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You may recall Jonathan Swift’s bitterly satirical “Modest Proposal” mocking English heartlessness during the Irish famine of 1729, proposing that the Irish should sell their babies as food. Donald Trump and The Wall Street Journal are today’s contenders for a Jonathan Swift Award.

The Journal, egged on by Wall Street worthies panicked about losing their shirts, has been arguing that it’s better to lose a few million people than to damage the economy. I counted five columns or articles making variants of this argument in today’s Journal alone.

One piece argues that the fatality rate is exaggerated—better for everyone to just catch the virus and get it over with. According to the WHO and the CDC, this contention is total hooey.

Another calls for a much more relaxed form of sheltering in place, ignoring the fact that the only way we have for hospitals to catch up with the escalating pandemic is to “flatten the curve” and slow down the spread.

The most appalling of these Swifties is columnist Holman Jenkins, who advocates just letting more people die. Jenkins even invokes long-discredited cost-benefit measures that value a rich person’s life more than a poor person’s and the young more than the old. (Why not just shut down Medicare? We all eventually die and the elderly die sooner.)

These contentions make their way from the Journal, echoed by Trump’s Wall Street buddies, and amplified by Fox News, into Trump’s own pea brain. And he says we can get America back on its feet by Easter, an odd symbolic choice. More likely, by April we will be crucified, by both the epidemic and the plunging economy, courtesy of Trump’s mixed signals and perverse leadership.

As disgusting as these modest proposals are, they overlook one plain fact. If everyone gets sick, we don’t have much of an economy.

In the 1950s when Volkswagens were first imported, the novelty was that the engine was in the back. A joke had it that this was a perfect expression of the German mentality: In the event of a crash, the driver dies but the engine is saved.

Letting the pandemic sicken everybody—including bond traders and hedge fund billionaires—can’t exactly be tonic for the economic engine.

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