Some people think the richest country in the history of the world could figure something like this out, but those people don’t seem to understand how it became the richest country to begin with. The United States was built on laissez faire exploitation and that is not going to change overnight.

Nonsense. Laissez faire exploitation results in banana republics.

Laissez faire exploitation results in banana republics in the victim nations, and ultra wealthy first world countries in the predator nations.

I.e. the US and UK have gone ahead wonderfully; the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, South Africa.. not so much

This is right, except the “predator nations” are really a ”predator class”. Working American have gotten a very raw deal. We have lost industry and jobs and wages galore to globalist projects. We may be the consenters of imperialism, but we are not the beneficiaries.

Here in NZ the govt hasn't sent people $1200, nor have they given large amounts of money to businesses to stay alive while we're all locked up.

What they have done is: - allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support - negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays

Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable

We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown

Correction: "here in UK the taxpayer is covering 80% of furloughed workers pay". Governments have no money, they take it from taxpayers and redistribute. Moving money from a pocket to another does not fix the problem of decreasing resources if people don't work.

You can't simply "protect the salaries", government isn't some omnipotent god who simply needs to do some hand-waving to fix things. There isn't a fountain of wealth that the government is hiding from us! You can print more money (often bad), or make businesses pay salaries while taking no revenue (also bad)

I know that this is a shocking idea, but you can, in extraordinary circumstances, use a variety of government measures, including dipping into reservers to ensure that people don't starve and that businesses aren't forced to lay off people that they will need when businesses restart.

Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.

> dipping into reservers

My assumption is that governments are taking on some sort of debt here.

When you control the mint, it's basically the same thing. Doubly so when its the USD and the rest of the world has exactly the same problem you do, so you hardly need to worry about the depreciation vs other currencies.

(Even if you hardly needed to before just by sheer size.)

That assumption is incorrect for sovereign currencies issuers (like the US, UK, Japan). They would just issue bonds, which is not at all like you or I taking out a loan.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale.

The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

> The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.

>The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.

Bailing them out of what?

The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.

The virus would have shut them down anyway if they had stayed open and their employees and customers became ill. The bad decision making here is the lack of foresight to keep cash on hand to weather a storm like this, despite making record profits in the billions. We are all told if we don’t keep 6 months of cash on hand we are financially negligent. Large companies were begging for money within two weeks of shutdowns happening, after spending so much of their cash on stock buybacks to pump up stock prices.

Sweden shows that view is wrong.

These data show that retail, travel, and restaurants were all taking huge hits before lockdowns went in to wide effect: https://www.ft.com/content/d184fa0a-6904-11ea-800d-da70cff6e...

Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?

On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?

Given how many people have mild symptoms and how age-dependent it is, it's entirely plausible that 500 infections would yield only a handful of employees to sick to work.

And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?

Again, Sweden is not the US, they have not been hit nearly as hard. More people will die today in the US than have died total in all of Sweden. Sweden is not immune from the effects of Covid. They have imposed measures to limit the size of gatherings, have closed secondary schools and colleges, and have imposed restrictions on restaurants. Despite their looser restrictions they are still expecting to see the economy contract and have experienced record unemployment:

``` A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.

The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.

At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.

Banking group Swedbank said recently it expected the economy to contract 4% this year. ``` https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

Most self employed people are eligible to claim up to 80% of the average of their previously declared income up to 2.5K for the last 3 years. There are some notable gaps, but the vast majority are protected.

The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).

"There's nothing we can do" https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-a-grant-through-the-corona...