By Andrew Boyd

I have a B.A, in economics from the University of Maryland, whose only real value is in providing me with the pretext to imagine that I know more about how an economy functions than anyone else. Reagan not-so-famously said that an economist is someone who sees a thing working in practice and wonders if it can be made to work in theory. Food for thought.

Let’s cut the crap here. Government spending and fiscal policy is a really, really, really poor substitute for the allocation of resources by free markets made up of millions of individuals pursuing their own self interests. There are circumstances, be they few, where externalities to free-market mechanics, constrained by constitutionally founded legal principles, provide some rationale for big government intervention and management of resource, such as national security and environmental protection, where the benefits do not accrue to the individual in such a manner that markets can effectively account for the opportunity cost. 

There’s a concept worth ruminating on, opportunity cost, which you might otherwise think of simply as tradeoffs. Everything is thus, and every dollar the government collects and attempts to redistribute wisely, while lacking any real wisdom, is economic drag being traded against some espoused social or political priority that tends toward political cronyism, politicians at large being the most wretched and craven among us. Devils stomping about where angels fear to tread.

All that said, is COVID-19 an externality? Yes. Does it require government intervention? I'd say yes there as well. Now, who gets the money? Everyone in accordance with what they put in, IMHO. Enough of this picking winners and losers, capital vs. labor, essential vs. non-essential. It’s a damned dumpster fire and, oh by the way, immoral. It wasn’t their labor, their ingenuity, their value to society to begin with! Pick a number, they’re equally arbitrary, ratio it according to individuals' or households' federal income tax rate and cut the checks. And then someone grow a pair and own up to the fact that modern monetary policy is a train wreck whose destructive energy just hasn’t made it back to our particular car yet (car being a stand-in for time, here).

None of this is really economic policy, by the way. It’s triage. What we're calling stimulus is more like an economic inertial damper, spreading impact over time to presumably slowing the spread of fear that left unchecked will overwhelm our economic immune system. If we want to talk Supply vs. Demand fiscal policy, we need to decouple the conversation from COVID. They’re apples and oranges. But if I must, I’ll argue it this way: Government, you have no good goddamn idea what you’re doing. Get out of the business of managing the economy. You suck at it, completely. Get off people’s necks and let them pursue what ends seem best to them, with one and only one real caveat -- your rights end at the top of my nose and visa versa.  That’s a little thing called freedom, and it’s so much more delicate a thing than we can possibly fathom.

And, oh yeah, flat tax.