Different people clearly think completely differently. Here is an example:

1. Person A says that it wouldn’t matter whether restaurants are open or not, because people wouldn’t want to go if they are open.
2. Person B says that if restaurants opened up, they would be 100% packed immediately.

Only one of these two can be accurate. So, which one is it?

We got the evidence over the last weekend. How? Because one suburb of Dallas, TX, called Colleyville, opened its restaurants for outdoor seating. To see what happened, all you need to search for is “Colleyville TX” and you’ll have more evidence than you need — but here is one example:  Reported by Daily Mail UK…with several photos from Colleyville!

Families wait to be seated on Texas restaurant patio 

What happened here? It turns out that the State of Texas had only banned indoor dining. It took a while for someone to think about this loophole, but eventually it happened.

As a result, the Mayor of Colleyville was fine with restaurants starting to function (almost) like normal again. How did people react?

I am told from friends and a long list of news reports, that the restaurants filled up immediately to 100% capacity, People came from both nearby and far away — all around the greater Dallas area, perhaps more — to finally enjoy their U.S. Constitutional freedoms to engage in assembly and commerce.

In fact, there were so many more people than restaurant seats, that people brought their own portable chairs and tables. Restaurants over-flowed onto sidewalks and parking spaces. It was, by all accounts, glorious.

So, the debate has been settled: If you open up restaurants, the customers will show up — and at least for now, to 100% of available capacity. Obviously that will not hold forever, or for that matter for too long. We are not going to somehow achieve more restaurant demand than we had before mid-March 2020, on a sustainable basis. For a short period of time, yes. But soon enough, the best for which we can hope is to return to pre-virus psychosis levels.

The fact that there was even a debate about what would happen if (when, hopefully) restaurants re-opened, reflects two different views among Americans today:

1. Mostly people in New York and perhaps San Francisco and Los Angeles, they are scared stiff about a “virus.” Remember, in New York and LA, even shrinks have shrinks.
2. Normal people in most of America think that “social distancing” and germaphobia are mental illnesses for which people should be admitted to psych wards. They view people from New York City and San Francisco like the “Unabomber” profile: Ted Kaczynski

It is therefore perhaps not totally surprising that TV anchors in New York and Los Angeles have skewed views when commenting on the prospects of populating restaurants when they re-open. It’s the same kind of groupthink that caused them to believe that Hillary had a 99.8% probability of winning in 2016. They are so totally divorced from 99.9% of the American land mass, that they might as well be reporting from another country. Such as North Korean state television.

Alcohol prohibition 1920-33 and the new underground economyIf you try to legislate against human psychology, you tend to run up against the wall of fundamental economics. Alcohol consumption didn’t disappear 1920-33: It just moved to The Black Market.

Did drug prohibition mean that drugs went away? No, it moved to The Black Market.

Same thing with restaurants, nightclubs, cafes, barber shops, gun stores, etc, in April 2020: The business simply moved underground, to The Black Market. Politicians never seem to learn this basic fact. When their policies lack any moral legitimacy from half (or more) of the population, the market simply moves underground.

Implications for the November 2020 electionThe Silent Majority of Americans have had enough. They were told that the business closures were there in order to “flatten the curve” for the purposes of lighten the peak load on the healthcare system. That happened 2-3 weeks ago in most American counties.

Yet, now that the curve was flattened, 100% of the business (and other) restrictions did not lift. In other words, we were conned. We were in that familiar position of having lent out money to someone, but get only excuses why we are not being paid back.

Any politician who can capitalize on people’s total disgust for business shutdown ordinances, will win in November 2020. So, who will that be? I don’t know.

For what it is worth, Colleyville, TX, at least provided us with the evidence that on the first hour the restaurants open, they fill up 100% with normal Americans. Germaphobes have the right to stay silent and stay home.

Pickup trucks such as the ones from General Motors (GM), Ford (F) and RAM / FCA (FCAU) are more common in relatively Texas, compared to the more urban and coastal areas of the U.S.