Tucker Carlson’s April 13 show raises a fundamental issue about the shutdown that’s currently wreaking havoc with the American economy – which, of course, means wreaking havoc with American lives. He points out that, based upon computer projections, we were given one reason to acquiesce shutting down the American economy. However, now that the predictions have proven to be completely wrong, the media and various “experts” are insisting that we continue the shutdown for a different reason. In other words, it’s the old “bait and switch.”

When COVID-19 first made its appearance in America, nobody took it very seriously. However, as Americans watched police state action in China and total systemic collapse in Italy, they began to realize that the virus might spread widely here too.

It was then that the experts began to tell us about “flattening the curve.” Because COVID-19 is new, we were told, and because there are no vaccinations, we could expect most Americans to become ill. The pressure mass illness would put on the health care system would be so tremendous that our entire health care system would collapse, not only leaving most of us to die in abject misery but possibly triggering a complete economic collapse.

The only way to prevent that was to slow the disease’s spread so that cases would trickle into hospitals, rather than present as an overwhelming tidal wave. The way to do achieve a trickle was to harm the economy a little bit, rather like a controlled burn in a forest to prevent bigger fires. By pacing infections, we’d have time to develop treatments, work on vaccinations, and allow hospitals space to treat people. Americans rather meekly acquiesced to the plan.

As Carlson points out, though, we’ve now flattened the curve, many hospitals are empty, we have more than enough ventilators and personal protective equipment, and we may well have an effective treatment with hydroxychloroquine and, perhaps, other anti-viral medicines. Logically, then, we should be rushing towards reinstating the economy.

Instead, says Carlson, we’re told that the lockdown needs to continue for months, or even more than a year, to vanquish the virus entirely. We, the American people, didn’t agree to this.

Moreover, Americans have never agreed to stop the economy to save every life. There are always tradeoffs in life. For example, we can make cars illegal (and wouldn’t the greenies love that?) to stop car accidents. However, the tradeoff is a retreat to a preindustrial lifestyle when there was never enough food available, people used and abused animals for transport, people died in riding accidents, and it was common to die because people couldn’t be transported to healthcare.

At the turn of the last century, people embraced the car because . . . it would stop pollution. In major cities, streets were ankle-deep in urine and feces from horses and donkeys. The miracle of the new-fangled automobile was that it made urban areas so much more pleasant and cut down on dangerous infectious diseases. That too was a tradeoff.

In this case, shutting down the economy to reduce COVID-19 deaths to zero means increasing deaths from depression, suicide, heart disease, and all the other ills that come from a broken, third-world style economy. The American people should at least have a say in this matter rather than having rabid leftists, many of whom seem excited by the power they now wield, decide for them.