"Yes, but we'll hit theirs as well. We have reserves."

Longshanks: Archers.
General: I beg your pardon, sire. Won't we hit our own troops?
Longshanks: Yes, but we'll hit theirs as well. We have reserves. Attack.

Quarantine will hurt all kinds of businesses. Certain kinds of businesses are more likely to survive than others, of course. "Whether Americans like it or not," says economist Tyler Cowen, "after the worst of Covid-19 is over, theirs is going to be a nation where big business plays a larger role."

And big business, whether Americans like it or not, takes a decidedly left-leaning point of view. Rod Dreher notes: "The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a powerful LGBT pressure group, publishes an annual Corporate Equality Index. In its 2016 report, over half of the top twenty U.S. companies in have a perfect score. To fail to score high is considered a serious problem within leading corporations." Gillette's CEO, for example, considered an $8 billion hit to its bottom line a "price worth paying" to signal its support behind the #MeToo movement. And big business is well-known for its antagonism to nationalism, and its preference for internationalism:

Transnational Identities. In 1996 Ralph Nader wrote to the chief executive officers of one hundred of the largest American corporations pointing to the substantial tax benefits and other subsidies (estimated at $65 billion a year by the Cato Institute) they received from the federal government and urging them to show their support for "the country that bred them, built them, subsidized them, and defended them" by having their directors open their annual stockholders meeting by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and the republic for which it stands. One corporation (Federated Department Stores) responded favorably; half the corporations never responded; others rejected it brusquely. The respondent for Ford explicitly claimed transnational identity: "As a multinational ... Ford in its largest sense is an Australian country in Australia, a British company in the United Kingdom, a German company in Germany." Aetna's CEO called Nader's idea "contrary to the principles on which our democracy was founded." Motorola's respondent condemned its "political and nationalistic overtones." Price Costco's CEO asked, "What do you propose next - personal loyalty oaths?" And Kimberly-Clark's executive asserted that it was "a grim reminder of the loyalty oaths of the 1950s."

But imposing quarantines, and their natural preferences for big business and against small business, were unintended consequences we were forced to accept, being positioned, as we were, to respond to Covid-19 in an information vacuum. Those consequences rain down indiscriminately, as on the fields of Falkirk, as deadly arrows on all businesses. Some businesses have reserves. Others do not. But this was a grim reality about which we could do little.

It would be unfair, then, to ascribe ulterior motives.

Now, however, things are different. In the many weeks that have passed since making that bitter initial decision, information has rushed to fill the vacuum. The news is mixed. The health reasons for quarantine have, happily, declined -- a cause for much relief. But the economic consequences of quarantine have increased, and steeply. With each passing day, the deadly economic arrows rain down on businesses from a greater and greater height, increasing their potency, devastating small businesses. Some estimate that, by the end of June, up to half of small businesses will be gone, a great many of them never to return. 

This is a grim reality. But it is no longer a reality we are bound to accept. We now have choice; there are alternatives available to us. And each passing day we fail to exercise this choice reflects an implicit choice to continue destroying business who lack reserves, while sparing -- and in some cases, enriching -- business who have them.

Has it not now become fair to ask whether this choice reflects a preference for big business? And a preference against small business?