British Oligarchs Question Whether Human Lives Are Worth the Cost of Saving Them

April 2, 2020 (EIRNS)—A growing chorus of world leaders cry out in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic that human life is priceless, but not so the City of London’s The Economist. The magazine’s cover story this week fixates on “the grim choices COVID-19 presents between life, death and, ultimately, the economy.” Its subject is the “miasma of trade-offs” created by the virus; its underlying axiom they summarize as follows:

“The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has declared: ‘We’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life.’ It was a rallying-cry from a courageous man whose state is overwhelmed.... But although it sounds hard-hearted, a dollar figure on life, or at least some way of thinking systematically, is precisely what leaders will need if they are to see their way through the harrowing months to come.”

Since models, they say, suggest that “letting COVID-19 burn through the [U.S.] population” would do less economic damage but lead to perhaps 1 million extra deaths, these fascists calculate, “using the age-adjusted official value of each life saved,” that mitigation is “worth $60,000 to each American household,” and therefore is probably worth the effects of the economic lockdown. Unless the lockdown lasts too long.

But, The Economist opines, “America is fortunate to be rich. If India’s lockdown fails to stop the spread of the disease its choice will, tragically, point the other way.”

Winston Churchill would agree wholeheartedly, that letting millions of Indians die of COVID-19 is a small cost to pay to save the British Empire’s financial system.