“We are at war,” Emmanuel Macron declared in a national address as France confronted the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic.
The French President is not the only politician drawing wartime analogies. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has spoken of the virus as “a deadly enemy” which must be combated. Venture capitalists too have counseled entrepreneurs on the value of becoming “wartime CEOs.”
Certainly efforts to enlist industry in the fight against coronavirus—from automakers...