Though it is taking place amid some of the most terrible circumstances imaginable, the coronavirus outbreak is also a real-world experiment. We are testing many of the assumptions shared by those who invest a lot of trust in public knowledge and government competence. The experiment isn’t going so well.

For example, the mandatory substitution of one set of economic activities with another—or, in some instances, replacing conventional economic activity with nothing at all—is increasingly at the heart of the progressive project. Americans are living through a unique circumstance: an engineered recession. The voluntary cessation of much non-essential commerce has put millions out of work or into a state of suspended animation, and the associated hardships are gradually trickling up the economic ladder. These unbearable conditions may be demanded of a nation struggling to contain a pandemic, but an engineered recession is precisely what the Green New Deal’s proponents envision.

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