Opinion | The Coronavirus Killed the Gospel of Small Government - The New York Times - 0 views
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Suddenly, it was everywhere.On March 1, 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York announced the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in his state, after reports of local outbreaks up and down the West Coast in February. The avalanche began, with states across the country shutting down and caseloads surging into the thousands. American life had been upended.
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Over the past year, we have been relearning the lessons of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1937, Keynes wrote that serious economics was not a realm for “pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-paneled board room and a nicely regulated market.” The real world is messy, the future uncertain. And the genius of profit-maximizing entrepreneurs does not automatically arise to provide solutions when calamity strikes. For Keynes, the economy was not a self-sustaining engine of prosperity; it was something that societies created to meet social needs and that had to be actively managed to function properly.
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Of course, expanded unemployment aid should have kept flowing through the final five months of last year. And aid to state and local governments to fight the pandemic was insufficient. But where the problem was a shortage of money, the government delivered. Cash constraints have not hindered its rescue efforts, at $5 trillion and counting. Even the loudest moderates of Joe Biden’s Democratic Party did not balk at the $1.9 trillion cost of the Covid-19 relief bill he signed into law Wednesday night.
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