Bourne, Ryan

At 8.4 percent, the U.S. unemployment rate after a big shock is back to France's boomtime unemployment rate. Virtue of easy hire and fire laws -- more volatility when crises hit, but ultimately get much lower unemployment and pretty quickly.

Pro-business folk want to subsidise, incentivise, order people to "go to back to normal" lest a particular business fail. Using the power of government to overcome people's revealed preferences is not "pro-market." It is the crude pro-business approach Friedman condemned.

Milton Friedman distinguished between being pro-market and pro-business. Pro-market people recognise that people voluntarily deciding to change their spending habits and socially distance in light of a virus is welfare-enhancing. Preferences are context- & constraint- dependent.