This weekend, we received a package at our front door. My mother, in Kansas, found an educational kit for my three daughters on Amazon, purchased it, and had it shipped to our house. Under normal circumstances, that might have been considered merely a nice gesture from a grandmother. However, during our period of social distancing and isolation, it was a gift not just from a caring grandmother who was able to shop from home but also from Amazon, the warehouse workers, and the delivery people who had a role in delivering the gift.
I spend most of my time advocating for doctors, inventors, and a free market. Both doctors and inventors are rightfully being celebrated for their role in helping combat this pandemic. But the free market is also coming through when we need it most.
Amazon is delivering the things that we need to keep educating our kids. It’s delivering the things that keep us occupied and help us feel normal. It’s delivering goods from businesses that need the sales. And it’s doing this in a way that helps us all stay at home and helps reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
Amazon isn’t the only company that should be celebrated. Like Amazon, grocery stores aren’t being staffed by the military — they are being staffed by the same employees who worked there before the pandemic. They aren’t open by order of the government. They are providing a service that we all need, a service that also helps to alleviate panic. While the stores might be quieter than normal, the lines might be a bit more spread out than normal, and there might be less toilet paper on the shelves, shopping for groceries, even alongside people wearing masks, feels like life as usual. This is a good feeling in these trying times.
In fact, even during this pandemic, Amazon has announced more hiring. I have seen new faces at the grocery stores, and companies are competing to provide the items that we need to combat the virus and take care of the people who need them. The group that seems to have slowed down our response to this pandemic the most is the government itself.
These are the stories that we need to remind ourselves of when we come out of this and hear calls for more government. At some point, we will pass the peak of the curve, and it will be time to restart the engine of the economy.
We took the tiger by the tail when we shut down the economic engine. But as tough as figuring out how to let go of the tiger is, it is what comes next that might be the hardest part. There are two ways that this can go. Either the government can take a bigger role in the economy and growth can move at the speed of bipartisanship (there is none right now), or we can rely on entrepreneurs to spring into action, feel out the new normal, and grow the economy. The front line of people helping us now is the same that will bring us out.
It might feel safer to believe that the government can will an economy to perform, and politicians will undoubtedly try to sell that they can, but the government isn’t good at adapting to changing markets, and governments aren’t good at innovating. They can’t even pass a legislative package to help those in need when they need it the most without partisan bickering. Innovations come from inventors and entrepreneurs who see problems and set out to solve those problems — assuming that they will benefit from solving the problem as well. Restarting the economy is going to take all of our inventors and entrepreneurs to innovate and charge back in.
It is also going to take the companies that are already in the market, which are acting out of their own self-interest too. Grocery stores are going to have a great quarter. Amazon is adding workers, and its stock is going up amid this pandemic as its value gets the spotlight. Furthermore, our supply chains are experiencing a stress test that would have been hard to imagine, let alone model, and they seem to be keeping up.
The economy is stopped, but America is not. In fact, as long as the government stays out of the way and possibly provides some financial assistance, we appear ready to pounce once everything is safe to restart.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
