A lot of the drama you’re seeing on Twitter between the right and the left regarding the economy will never be resolved because most liberals have deontological views and most of the non-liberals do not.

I am more of a consequentialist myself, obviously. To be clear, I think that test and trace is the way to go regarding Covid-19 and that we shouldn’t restart the economy just yet. My point is that if we wait three months, that there will be no economy left to restart and ~20 million or so deaths from that alone are likely (no, I do not care what economists say; as usual, they are wrong).

However, the liberals, with their deontological outlook and their hatred of any thought experiments, cannot recognize the real world has absolute limitations in almost all cases and that wishing that it weren’t so does nothing. It’s like risk: it can’t be eliminated, but it can be shifted.

Rank and file Republicans only care about the stock market, though. The liberals are absolutely correct to claim that they don’t care if your gramma dies, because they don’t, as long as the stock market goes up. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. The issue is that after a certain point — and I think it’s about three months — economic relations break in a way that cannot be mended. There will be no repair, only destruction. The economy isn’t a Windows 95 machine that can be rebooted when it crashes. It doesn’t work like that at all.

The Kantian categorical imperative was always a nice idea that doesn’t comport with brute reality. And we’ll get to see just how badly it works soon enough. Most of you won’t like it much.