Bailout

The government has taken steps to shore up most businesses. But it is becoming clear that the current plans may not be ambitious enough. Governments across the globe may need to be more radical if the commercial world is going to be able to handle the coronavirus crisis, while also ensuring tolerable income conditions for all workers, employees and the self-employed. If things get much worse, they may have to break out of their orthodoxies and start engaging with new, contrarian possibilities, such as more extensive public ownership and considerably higher taxes. These ideas will not, at first sight, be popular but maybe now is the time to debate and discuss these new solutions.

'No corporate bailouts,' says Michigan Rep. Justin Amash as lawmakers debate an economic stimulus package in response to coronavirus. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, usually somewhere in Amash's orbit if not quite a fellow traveler, demurs. She wrote that the proper response to the outbreak is, much to her chagrin, 'subsidize everything'. Libertarians are divided on coronavirus, an unusual event (the virus, that is, not intense disagreements among libertarians). Of libertarians, it has been said of late that there are none in a pandemic. We are all Andrew Yang — he of the universal basic income — now. What about conservatives? My longtime TAC colleague Matt Purple says they too are ill suited to the current crisis, as are perhaps humans more generally.