It was the worst of all worlds and you're blaming it on the wrong people.
That's really dishonest. The unemployment insurance boost ($600/wk for many months), continuing in a limited fashion, was huge and expensive. And the PPP (even if there were execution problems) was a forgivable loan, basically a grant. A huge amount of money was pumped into maintaining employment.
What does this mean? That the Fed will just print money to cover every business expense of every business during "proper" lockdowns? That seems like a terrible idea.
But if you are a smaller business you are just going to be left to rot.
Yeah maybe they will have to buy less hundred dollar toilet cover for the military, or less last generation missiles, I think that should be more than enough to pay for it. Or maybe less subsidies for the oil industry.
As far as “was the mandatory enforcement an overstep”, based on public polling the answer is an emphatic no. More Americans remain concerned that we opened too soon rather than too late, and large majorities remain voluntarily locked down (depending on vocation of course) despite the lifting of official bans.
Restaurants can survive this. But what they were doing in 2019 is not going to work.
My preference is a more Bayesian argument a la Huemer's In Praise of Passivity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
> Abstract: Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.