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All three of you gentlemen suffer from two fallacies: 1) the fallacy that the public health threat of the virus requires the destruction of the economy 2) the false choice that we must not only accept the deal with all its snares cut secretly by a very few individuals of dubious conservative credentials, but we must pull our forelocks and kowtow to that instrument of our undoing or face political as well as economic destruction.

The establishment Republican party chose economic destruction in the long term for short-term political survival. As Churchill (and representative Massie) might have said, we are likely to get both economic and political destruction.

The statute is not really an economic solution but a political salve. It is both bad politics and bad economics. Short-term, the politics look good. Long term the course is virtually unalterable because the statute will be virtually impossible to repeal. If this were a legitimate short-term economic fix it would contain a sunset clause but it does not and that should tell you gentlemen everything.

Listen!… Do you hear the last hurrahs mindlessly cheering the death of free markets and free men?

“ All three of you gentlemen suffer from two fallacies: 1) the fallacy that the public health threat of the virus requires the destruction of the economy 2) the false choice that we must not only accept the deal with all its snares cut secretly by a very few individuals of dubious conservative credentials, but we must pull our forelocks and kowtow to that instrument of our undoing or face political as well as economic destruction.”

On 1) you are dead wrong...I DO NOT believe the threat of the virus requires the destruction of the economy. But I know the public reaction requires it, and it is ridiculous to attempt to go against the public consensus that the virus must addressed at all costs. It is as wise to do that as it is to stand on a beach and command the tidal wave to go back to the ocean.

And on 2), once you understand that you cannot stand against the tidal wave, you must take what action you can, seek the high ground, in order to come out on the other side with as much intact as you can.

The people, the masses, are driving this action. Go ahead, stand against them, you will accomplish absolutely nothing.

I neither approve of nor celebrate this “stimulus” or anything else that is going on. I suspect every ten or twenty years we will find an excuse to pull one of these and it will get to the point that every time someone gets a hangnail it will require a couple of trillion.

However, at this point I just don’t see the people of this nation having the knowledge and character needed to correct our course. They are utterly convinced on all sides that we can do this indefinitely and trying to convince them otherwise is pointless. This virus stampede is but a symptom of a larger stampede of the unreasoning mob.

I get what you are saying, I just don’t see a way to save the people from their own bad judgment.