According to Greek mythology, Procrustes had a bed on which he invited travelers to lie. Procrustes made travelers curious by suggesting that the bed had the extraordinary characteristic that its length exactly matched the length of any person who lied on it. But in reality it was the traveler’s length that was adjusted to the bed’s: if the traveler was longer than the bed, then Procrustes cut off the traveler’s legs; and if the traveler was shorter than the bed, then Procrustes stretched the traveler to fit the bed. In either event the curious traveler died. The “Procrustean bed” is a proverbial explanation for the consequences of forcing people or things to conform to one-size-fits-all arrangements.

Governments worldwide have handled the coronavirus crisis with a Procrustean-bed solution: stay home. The traveler who was put on the Procrustean bed was the world economy. “Economy” just means the billions of daily worldwide exchanges of goods and services between individuals to satisfy their preferences. As a direct consequence of the governmental command to stay home, all the choices that individuals make every day to satisfy their preferences have been reduced to one, staying home. That is the same as cutting off the economy’s legs because the economy is larger than the Procrustean bed of the coronavirus (in less figurative language, if the economy had continued functioning normally, the virus would have spread more rapidly).

As a result of having its legs chopped off, the economy has slowed down significantly. And it’s not just the economy of large companies: it’s fundamentally the economy of the little people, who are losing their jobs, their income, their savings and probably their assets, not because they chose to, but because they have been prohibited from making their own economic choices. We won’t know what would have happened if the stay-home command had not been implemented, although it is safe to assume that the contagion rate and the death toll would have been tragically higher (although we still won’t know how much higher). But it is also likely that people who had more fear of contagion than a preference to work would have voluntarily chosen to stay home, and people who for whatever reason had a preference to work over fear of contagion would have voluntarily chosen to continue going to work. In which case the economy, most likely, would now be in better shape.

Now it’s time to start thinking about going back to work in the context of a crippled economy. I don’t think that continuing with the Procrustean-bed approach will accelerate economic recovery. Quite the contrary, for the reasons that follow I believe that our government should stay out of the process, at least until the economy grows full legs again. More than four million people live in Panama, each with his or her own economic problems and difficulties to solve. Solving problems and difficulties requires making informed choices with the right timing. No government can know all choices and timings necessary to solve satisfactorily all those millions of economic problems and difficulties that Panamanians face; only the individual persons facing those problems and difficulties can know that. Governments can only apply Procrustean-bed, one-size-fits-all solutions that will be unsatisfactory in millions of cases, further crippling if not killing economic recovery. Economic recovery can only be accelerated by satisfactory solutions to individual economic problems and difficulties, and those satisfactory solutions, for the reasons given above, cannot possibly come from any government.

But the National Assembly (our Panamanian Congress) is in the process of passing laws that would provide Procrustean-bed “solutions” to the Panamanian people’s economic problems and difficulties. The commendable purpose of the National Assembly is to protect the little people from abuse by banks and other big companies. However, the National Assembly has probably not kept in mind the fact that the jobs of a large portion of the Panamanian population depend on the economic health of those banks and other big companies. In my opinion, if those Procrustean-bed laws become effective, those banks and companies would likely need to fire many of their employees, which would trigger a domino effect on the economy resulting not only in massive unemployment but also in more difficulties to jumpstart the economy when the stay-home order is lifted. Some of those laws have already been approved and are awaiting Presidential sanction for their effectiveness. Let’s hope that those Procrustean-bed laws never become effective to cripple or even kill our economic recovery.