I drove to an essential grocery store this weekend to buy some essential food. On the way, I noticed that Best Buy was still open. I also passed a Dunkin Donuts and a Dairy Queen that were still open and packed with customers in their drive thru lanes. Apparently doughnuts, ice cream, and TVs are all considered essential, which I suppose doesn’t surprise me, nor do I necessarily disagree. These have all certainly been essential elements of my own life.
But it does raise a question about what the government actually means when it declares a business “essential,” thus allowing it to stay open, or “inessential,” thus shutting its doors and possibly driving it into irretrievable ruin. I am not arguing that the stores mentioned above — or for the matter liquor stores, or any other business that our benevolent overlords have permitted to remain operational — should be closed. I am happy that they are open. My point is that every other business should be open, too.
The government’s system of designating something essential or inessential is arbitrary, unjust, often absurd, and subjective. And I doubt it is a coincidence that wealthy and politically connected businesses have so often fallen into the essential category, while small businesses with little money and no connections have been wiped out. Now, if the term “essential” has any objective meaning when applied to a business, it must be that an essential business is one which people depend on for survival. I don’t think anyone is going to die without Dunkin Donuts or Best Buy, but the former sells food and the latter sells things that customers might need in order to work and communicate. If we take a very broad and generous view of the phrase “depend on,” then I can see how these two businesses might fit the bill.
But, then, every business fits the bill. Every business has people depending on it. Even if it is expendable as far as the customers are concerned, it certainly isn’t expendable to the employees and their families. This is why every business is, in a very real and urgent sense, essential to someone. It is obviously ludicrous to suggest that Walmart and Target are essential to me, but my job and my income are not essential to me. Indeed, the essentialness of a product is irrelevant if I don’t have the money to buy it. Which means my income is always more fundamentally essential than anything I might find at any store.
As we speak, there are many thousands of people across the country waiting in line for hours at food banks because they cannot afford the services of any of the essential businesses that the government has so magnanimously left open for their sake. Their source of income has been declared less essential than the items they would use their income to purchase. The insanity of this system should be readily apparent to everyone. The word “essential” means nothing in this context if it doesn’t mean “essential to people,” and nobody can deny that one of the most essential things to a person is his job. So, again, all businesses are essential. It’s time to open them all up again.