To Open or Not To Open Now

7/5/2020

Sounds like the opening line out of Hamlet - "to be or not to be" except this question is gripping most of the world dealing with the COVID19 pandemic.

Since I am not a medical professional, let's leave that debate to them. My issue is simpler and comes to the fundamental core of the dispute.

Throughout history there has existed a debate between two opposing views - do we make society better at the group or individual level; an argument between the collective and the individual. If you believe affecting people on the personal level is the place to start you are an individualist. Obviously the other choice is collectivism - you help people through their group identity.

The collectivist position is we should wait until there is no more disease before releasing people from isolation because it will increase the deaths from this strain of the flu. On that point they are right, it might bend the curve back up.

The individualist believes the threat has passed enough to move on and it's time to get back to living and with entrepreneurs - get back to work. They also acknowledge there might be an increase in fatalities, but the risk is worth it.

Before you pick a side consider: nothing would have been discovered or invented with this position. Columbus sailing into the unknown, Magellan circumnavigating the globe, pioneers settling the North American Continent, or sending humans to the moon with less computing power than today's smartphone. These were all risky undertakings. The logical conclusion to this belief system will sanitize society to eliminate all risks and in the process kill innovation. That means entrepreneurship is dead and 50% of the world employment is lost. Sounds like a dystopian novel converted to non-fiction.

I will speak now only to my brother and sister entrepreneurs in the United States. If we allow the collectivists to kill the spirit of risk taking and challenging the odds the country as founded is gone.

No risk taking means no entrepreneurship and the only those business organizations big enough to buy favors from the system will operate.

One last thought, something I have expressed many times on this station. The people in positions of power are getting paid while claiming most of us are nonessential and putting us out of business - only in a collectivist world is the moral choice.

eastman