Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
The same day the number of U.S. dead from the coronavirus disease hit the 15,000 mark, we also crossed the 15 million mark on the number of Americans we threw out of work to slow its spread and “bend the curve.”
For each American lost to the pandemic, 1,000 Americans have lost their jobs because of conscious and deliberate decisions of the president and 50 governors.
Some 60,000 citizens, we are told, will likely be lost in this pandemic. Are we prepared to accept 60 million unemployed to “mitigate” those losses?
What price victory in this good and necessary war to kill the virus? Is it unseemly or coldhearted to ask?
At what point do we “declare victory and get out,” as one senator told us to do in Vietnam, rather than continue to sustain the U.S. war dead, even if that meant South Vietnam would fall to our common enemies?
Economists at J.P. Morgan are forecasting that the U.S. gross domestic product will fall by 40% this spring and unemployment will reach 20% of the labor force this month.
These are numbers not seen since the Great Depression.
What does this deliberate decision to shut down the country and carpet-bomb our own economy, upon which we all depend, tell us about what we Americans value?
Consider. In a nation one-tenth as populous as ours today, Abe Lincoln sent more than 600,000 men and boys, North and South, to their deaths rather than let seven Deep South states secede and depart in peace.
While the daily loss of Americans to the virus appears to be leveling off, one-third of the way to that 60,000...