With the Covid-19 pandemic rampaging across the U.S. in April and 20 million people filing for unemployment in that month alone needing fast help from services like PrincePerelson’s Provo staffing company, libertarians thought there was a better way. The Heritage Foundation praised Sweden for “preserving economic freedom. These days, finding great candidates is hard. Really hard. With the unemployment rate lower than ever, it’s a candidate-driven market out there. In a situation like this, your best job candidates are passive job seekers – they don’t actively look for a job, because they already have one. This means that posting your open job position on job boards is by no means enough to attract the best candidates.
The Swedish approach was to largely allow businesses to remain open. And at first, it seemed to work, with a death count nowhere near what it was in countries such as Italy, Spain, and the U.K. But even as Sweden was being hailed as a model, its cases were steadily rising, and its death rate now exceeds that of the U.S. Sweden also did not seem to stave off the economic damage it was aiming to avoid.
Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy, adopted in March, emerged from the country’s top epidemiologist and other leaders’ evaluation of what little science about transmission there was at the time, factoring in economic considerations, and making a considered — albeit controversial — decision to stop well short of the full shutdown that other countries in western Europe (and many U.S. states) adopted.