Never get high on your own supply

America’s Dumbest Senator (TM), Wisconsin vacant suit Ron Johnson, has an op-ed in which he defends an offer of nothing to victims of a pandemic and depression his party has already made far worse than it needed to be:

For example, a recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine based on serological testing showed that the number of Covid-19 cases could be six to 24 times the number reported. Applying these estimates to the most recent U.S. case fatality rate (CFR) of 3.6% yields an infection fatality rate (IFR) between 0.15% and 0.6%. Oxford’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine has been predicting an IFR for Covid-19 between 0.1% and 0.41%.

The nine-year average IFR for seasonal flu in the U.S. is 0.13%, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The IFR in a bad flu season (2010-11) was 0.176%. I am not playing down the tragedy of the coronavirus. But there is no need to continue broad economic shutdowns with fatality rates in these ranges.

Treatment is improving, as evidenced by the reduction in case fatality rates. With a growing list of better therapeutics and the development of a possible vaccine, one can imagine a more optimistic economic future that doesn’t require another $1 trillion in debt-financed spending.

Sure, and I could have imagined going to my high school prom with Winona Rider, but at some point one should probably consider material facts. As Eric Levitz observes, among the many obvious problems here is that we’ve already run this experiment in many states with absolutely catastrophic public health and economic results:

This last point is the most patently mad. Johnson derives his dovish estimate of the virus’s death rate from a JAMA study suggesting that asymptomatic coronavirus infections may be an order of magnitude more prevalent than previously understood. If we pretend this is a proven fact, then it would indeed mean the coronavirus is less lethal than previously assumed — but also that it is even more contagious than we’d realized. A virus that is just a bit deadlier than the flu but exponentially more infectious would be a much bigger public-health problem than influenza! We know COVID-19 is capable of killing 140,000 Americans in the space of four months. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have been infected with coronavirus without realizing it does not render those 140,000 people less dead. So assuming that we all value the lives of senior citizens, it is not clear why Johnson believes the average individual rate of survival from coronavirus infection is a sound metric for determining whether economic shutdowns are justified.

Regardless, the notion that the present economic crisis is rooted in overly restrictive coronavirus-containment measures is itself wildly delusional. In April, Johnson’s reasoning was reckless; today, it’s hallucinatory. We already ran the senator’s desired experiment! Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona reopened. Their economies rebounded for a few weeks, then COVID-19 cases surged, consumer demand fell, businesses started failing, and state governments were eventually forced to stall or reverse their reopenings to preserve hospital capacity. Texas’s economy isn’t suffering because its (Republican) political leadership overreacted to an overhyped flulike virus. It is suffering because that leadership cannot force consumers to shop or eat out when a potentially fatal infectious disease is running rampant in their communities, nor persuade voters that allowing the infected to overrun hospitals is an acceptable price for sustaining business as usual.

Johnson’s belief that “We have nothing to fear but fear (of a virus that has already killed 147,000 Americans) itself” is a winning argument testifies to both the power of motivated reasoning and the strong incentives that ideologically committed conservatives have for denying the reality of a crisis that admits no “small government” solution.

The rest of the piece is worth reading too. As I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again, a Republican Party that was purely venal would be a massive improvement over the current one.