What do you expect as an illustration of rape?
Something that economists have been shouting about – there are costs as well as benefits to the coronavirus lockdown. Of course, whenever they do so they’re shouted down by the idiots. How can you care about mere GDP, simple money, when peoples’ lives are at stake?
This not being what economists are saying of course. Merely the truth that there are costs to everything as well as benefits to everything. Meaning that at some point, with anything, the costs outweigh the benefits and therefore we should stop doing whatever it is.
To give an entirely stupid example, say that we locked down farmers. All of them. We’d be fine until about October, then we’d all starve. That’s a cost, one that outweighs whatever benefit in lower infections from not having farmers in fields.
Another example:
Around the world, as cities have gone into lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus, the mass efforts to save lives have put one vulnerable group more at risk.
Women and children who live with domestic violence have no escape from their abusers during quarantine, and from Brazil to Germany, Italy to China, activists and survivors say they are already seeing an alarming rise in abuse.
In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media.
“The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”
Undoubtedly true. We can even predict – insist perhaps – that some people will be murdered as a result of spending actual time with the people they nominally live with. That’s a cost.
Everything has a cost, everything has a benefit, even a coronavirus lockdown. Which is why there’s an optimal amount of it of course.
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Of course there is cost-benefit weighting no one would rightly dispute that. The consensus has fallen quite rightly, in my opinion, on the value of human life over the value of the pound or GDP. But, as you say, we need an economy to come back to.
But the value of GDP has a value in human lives. The reality is something like this, but all too many people are insisting that the yellow line does not exist.
If you don't "do something" then you must not value "human life." This drumbeat of leftists has finally gotten Trump to injure himself - to negate the three-year economic boom and every fact he would offer toward his re-election. (Fox Business has just fired Trish Regan merely for stating this.)
Any time a business lays people off those on the Left howl at the human suffering it will cause. At this point they point out that depression, suicide, homicide, etc. increase when people suffer economically. However, any suggestion that we need to limit the damage to the economy from the Wuhan flu means all you care about is money.
As Tim has pointed out, the Wuhan flu itself has mostly tipped over the edge the 80-somethings that were about to die anyway. The damage to the economy you mean is the damage from government's overreaction (and now, printing up and frittering away $2,200,000 MILLION to compensate for its own overreaction).
To ignore the Constitutional "right...to peaceably assemble" in favor of the computer models of bureaucrats in white lab coats is of course to wink at an era of increased lawlessness, in part because some share of Law Enforcement will be occupied enforcing six-foot-separation regulations to "protect" us from this common cold. It's likely that the authorities in many places won't have the resources to pursue "mere" domestic assault.
This common cold - I know, so much man flu about...
Tim tells the world there's a trade off. Yawn. Why does he think the UK NHS has guidelines for staff on who will benefit from a ventilator - you won't get more than palliative care if already frail and ill and will die anyway?
A benefit of the restrictions will be fewer RTAs so people living who might not have. Will the unseen be greater or less than the seen?