A libertarian’s unlikely pandemic plea: Subsidize everything

Last week, Atlantic writer Yascha Mounk called on America to “cancel everything.” At the time, this seemed radical. This week, approximately 17,000 years later in covid-19 time, it is conventional wisdom.

As Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stepped up to the lectern on Tuesday to announce that the government would be looking for a way to send checks to every American in the next week or so, I thought of my own parallel proposal to Mounk’s: subsidize everything.

Those are hard words for a libertarian to say. But then this is a harder crisis than we’ve faced in anyone’s living memory. To put this in perspective: By some of the higher estimates, this virus could kill more than 1.5 million Americans. That’s more than all the Americans who have died in all wars since the country announced its independence from Britain.