The circumstances we’re living in right now, and will likely be doing for at least the next couple of months? Sure, they suck. But by doing the social distancing and such, we’re saving lives by making sure that important medical resources (hospital beds, ventilators, etc) are available to the people who’ll need them by slowing down the inevitable spread so the world’s health care infrastructure isn’t overwhelmed. It’s taking care of Matthew 25:40’s “least of these”, which seems like exactly the kind of thing conservatives in government would understand and be really into.

You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.

Last night, the President essentially gave an ultimatum to a force of nature, giving the virus two weeks to get out of the way, and saying that the economy and the markets shouldn’t suffer in the face of efforts to preserve lives. It’s ugly, uninformed, and inappropriate.

Then The Federalist goes ahead and says hold my beer (emphasis mine):

The extreme reactionary measures to the pandemic focus only on the benefits of those actions, entirely ignoring the costs. And the costs will likely be massive.

Of course, it sounds very callous to talk about considering the costs. It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. Probably for that reason, few have been willing to do so publicly thus far. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.
First, consider the massive sacrifice of life Americans are making in their social distancing campaign. True, nearly all are not literally dying, but they are giving up a good deal of what makes life worth living — work, classes, travel, hugs, time with friends, conferences, quiet nights out, and so forth. Probably almost everyone would be willing to live a somewhat shorter normal life rather than a somewhat longer life under current conditions. The abandonment of normalcy, therefore, is in many ways equivalent to shortening the lives of the entire nation.

The article goes on to invoke Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom about giving up “essential liberty” for “a little temporary safety,” which is insulting, as the same people have been suggesting the limitations of rights and freedoms in the interest of defeating terrorism or whatever for the last 20 years.

The message here is that the economy, markets, and the wealthy are the ones that matter (see also: the current conflict over the stimulus/relief bill in Congress, and the fact that the government could find a trillion dollars lying around to bail out Wall Street, but can’t find the same amount to give Americans health care), and people* who are struggling in the face of this; losing jobs, tightening household budgets, etc, are acceptable losses in the face of economists’ worries and the inconvenience of not being able to go out to some exclusive supper club for cocktails.

This is our world right now, folks. If you’re not offended, you’re not paying attention.

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* – When I say people, I’m talking about actual, breathing, born people. It’s not stopping states to use this crisis from block legal abortion to rile up the base, because “protecting the unborn” is the kind of empathy a certain segment of society can engage in without it actually affecting their lives in any meaningful way.