Thoughts on Lockdowns – Ricochet.com

A long time ago, I was doing work in a large financial institution and we had this thing you may have heard of called the financial crisis. During the crisis and our mad policy responses to the unique situation of the time, the CFO was doing a town hall I was watching, and he said something to the effect of: “The government is giving out all these loans, and we took the loan. We don’t need the money, but the market situation is such that if we didn’t take the loan, it would be assumed we were failing. So we are going to hold on to it until the government lets us give it back.”

I think this is a pretty good way to look at state and local level coronavirus responses. That the negative inference derived from not doing the most extreme version of things, whether it is locally appropriate or not, is what is driving the massive overreaction. I think this is derived from the fact that nearly all of our national media is based in NYC and their parochial myopia drives a lot of our national consciousness. And COVID is very much a problem for NY.

None of this is to say that people shouldn’t proceed prudently.

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