I kind of thought New Zealand was getting a little too much credit. This article explains why.

In southern Alberta, we have two beef packing plants, each with about 2500 employees. Both factories were considered essential because they are food production. One plant was shut down about two weeks ago: about 500 workers have Covid 19. The reasons for the shutdown were health and safety of the workers, but the reality it is hard to run a plant with 20% of the workforce sick and/or infectious. The other plant has about 150 cases, and has decided to run one shift a day. The supply chain has been turned upside down.

So my take is that if the government did not shut down parts of economy, Covid-19 was going to do it anyways. The isolation seems to have given the plants of only two extra weeks of production.

I like your comment about how Covid-19 and whatever government actions/inactions are going to undo 30 years of economic planning. So true. I don’t even think the experts want to predict the effects of an abrupt increase in money supply.

In my mind, we should have had an economic plan in place before the pandemic happened. That plan should have taken months to work out. That way when the pandemic does happen, the government need only pull that plan off the shelf and enact it. Much better than all these knee-jerk, band-aid solutions created on the fly to appease frustrated citizens.

Such planning is not a feature of western democracy.