An Imagined Economic Shutdown

Even months into a quarantine which has given people who scarcely attempt to think deeply a surplus of time to revisit their wordviews, many people continue to dramatically exaggerate the dangers of COVID-19 or ignore them almost completely.  Philosophy inevitably motivates human behaviors, including behaviors in a pandemic, as worldviews dictate the behaviors of the rational and irrational.  Since many reactions to the current pandemic have minor or major economic ramifications, there have been blatant misconceptions about how the American economy has fared.

Conservatives in particular often claim that the economy has come to a halt and needs to be "reopened," but the shutdown is both temporary and partial.  If the whole American economy was truly shut down, no one would be able to buy or sell anything whatsoever, no matter how "essential."  Anyone who has visited any establishment or ordered anything from an online retailer is capable of realizing that financial exchanges are still being made by American citizens.  It is not as if absolutely no one is earning income, selling goods, or spending money.

A total economic shutdown would be disastrous, yet that is not what Americans have had to live with in recent weeks.  Despite this, vocal factions of people with assumption-riddled ideas--conservatives and liberals alike--have rushed to make blind, irrelevant assertions for the sake of their asinine ideologies.  Some of those ideologies regard the economy more highly than human life.  Some of those ideologies regard the health of a minority of people more highly than the collective wellbeing of a nation.

In both cases, the ideologies being defended are asinine because they are false, hypocritical, or based on mere assumptions.  The economy is not at a total standstill, and economies cannot exist without the people who create and participate in them.  At the same time, pressuring an entire country to take gratuitous and prolonged economic measures for the sake of a minority that is more susceptible to COVID-19's worst effects is far from a rational response.