"long before that". Can you cite laws regulating the use of horses for transporting people and goods through cities out of existence and when they were enacted? You're making the claim that it was the government, not market forces, that replaced horses with cars. Bring the evidence.
You mean, Am I going to do a lot of research on the subject... um, no, I'm not going to do that.
Of course, the government had to outlaw horses at a certain point, and they did, mostly because they couldn't have the infrastructure to support them (such as cleaning all the horse shit off the streets.. The free market wasn't going to do that.)
It was the shutdown that killed the economy, and it was the governors that pushed it and are keeping it going.
Actually, nowhere near.
First, the economy was already going into recession before the Shutdown/Covid hit. Even though the Shutdown wasn't enacted until the last two weeks of March, GDP Growth for Q1 of 2020 was -4.8. You don't get that from two weeks of partial shutdown. That's the sign of an economy that is already weak.
Secondly, - we are still losing 1000 people a day, now mostly in the Red States that didn't do shutdowns.
If we had done a nation-wide shutdown early on, we'd have gotten control of this thing a lot sooner. Instead, we got a president who undermined the experts because Fauci was more popular than he was.