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But I believe that 99.9% of the time, when there's no government shutdown or apocalypse or cold serious enough to require a doctor's visit, the nonessential is the essential. In a specialized economy, essentials are replaceable. One farmer is the same as another to everyone except waiters at high-end restaurants. We value entertainers, tech entrepreneurs and guys who run hedge funds that make a little under the average return of the S&P 500. There are lots of places to go for hard news but only one place to learn what I'm thinking, as long as you don't count Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and my website.
So I hope essentials are enjoying their moment, for it will not last long. Essentials didn't start Google. Essentials never made art or literature. Essentials don't create entire new coffee drinks by adding just a tiny bit more or less milk. Life without nonessentials looks as gray and bleak as the postapocalyptic world in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, if those people had essentials. To put it even more starkly: postal workers have been considered essential.
After this shutdown is over, the nonessentials should all ask for a raise, from the person who maintains the animatronic joke-telling LBJ at the presidential museum in Austin to the Smithsonian employee who procured the Laugh-In lunch box to the chef who makes the high tea at Acadia National Park. Not only are those jobs what makes America exceptional, but complaining about their existence fuels our most robust industry, conservative talk radio.