Current crisis: Pearl Harbor, or another Great Depression?

Speaking on "Meet the Press" a few weeks ago, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams called the coronavirus crisis "our Pearl Harbor moment" -- invoking the greatest call to action in our nation's history.

Within days of the Japanese aerial attack, hundreds of thousands of Americans decided to quit their jobs or interrupt their pursuit of college degrees in order to enlist in the U.S. armed forces. Almost as quickly, the "arsenal of democracy" began tooling up, with women and minorities replacing departing soldiers in millions of factory jobs as automakers and other private-sector companies curtailed production for domestic purposes and began churning out massive numbers of tanks, warplanes, ships, and other military goods and equipment.

In today's environment, people's lives have been radically changed or uprooted in a much different way. Instead of being a call to heroic action, steps taken to contain the coronavirus have been a call to inaction and watching out for your own safety -- staying home, washing your hands regularly, avoiding unnecessary trips, and keeping a safe distance from other people.

Rather than mobilization on a massive scale, in the past several weeks we have witnessed the fastest economic de-mobilization in our nation's history -- as a result of government-ordered lockdowns designed to keep the contagion from spreading so rapidly as to overwhelm local hospital systems. The lockdowns have idled as estimated 25% of the workforce, which is on a par with the unemployment rate during the worst of the Great Depression.

The $2.2 trillion stimulus bill will rush enhanced unemployment benefits to the millions of people locked out of jobs and extend credit to many businesses facing financial ruin. As big as it is (and it is truly huge -- newly contemplated spending that is equal in magnitude to 44 percent of the total expenditures called for in the 2020 federal budget), the stimulus bill is still nothing more than a stopgap measure.

The trillions of dollars of new debt -- piled on top of a mountain of older debt -- is a major concern in its own right. But that is not what keeps my friend and associate Joe Forshaw up at night. Joe is the chairman of the Show-Me Institute and the retired leader of a close-knit and longstanding small family business. To him, one of the more bizarre features of the daily news cycle over the past several weeks has been the "surreal" spectacle of "businesses being told by the government to close up shop and wait for a check from the government to keep the lights on." As he put it in a recent article:

Never in my most feverish dreams could I have imagined private-sector companies being so utterly dependent upon the government for revenue and the ability to keep people on their payrolls. Contemplating the horror of this situation makes me a strong proponent of a careful re-opening of the economy sooner rather than later.

To be sure, we are sitting on the horns of a real dilemma: Do we run the risk of opening the economy too soon and seeing a resurgence in infections? Or suppress economic activity and destroy the livelihoods of more and more people?

A partial reopening of the state's economy has now begun. Gov. Mike Parson has lifted the statewide stay-at-home order that forced businesses across the state to close for weeks, but local governments may impose stricter guidelines within their jurisdictions.

No restaurant, we may reasonably suppose, will be able to survive at 25 percent of capacity, but is 50 percent too much, too fast? And how do we treat many other smaller businesses that are the real backbone of local economies across the state?

I, too, am one of those who favors the earliest and fullest possible restoration of free-market activities. I would hate to see "our Pearl Harbor moment" turn into a second Great Depression.

Andrew B. Wilson is the resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute.