You want to keep kicking the can down the road, so that someone that isn't you will hold the bag. Because someone will hold the bag for all this, and it isn't fair. So? Life isn't fair. Pandemics happen, and the government can't possibly bail out everyone.

He's right. Add a UBI and nationalize healthcare. It's not complicated; the elites just don't want it. The ones like you.

As a result I have some clarification questions... How do they want to "keep kicking the can down the road" exactly? Your comment about the government not being able to bail out everyone only serves to reinforce the point about the risk of starting a small business.

What do you mean by "He's right"? He's right that people will line up to start new businesses and put their diminished life savings on the line after what's transpired?

Then you flippantly say "Add UBI and nationalized healthcare", as if it's just something you add to a shopping cart and "it's not complicated". So it sounds like you assume these features as part of the assumption that people will flock to starting businesses. That's not part of the discussion at all, but it's an interesting point to discuss whether that would spur the activity. It very well might as it's the "social safety net" one would need to have more confidence.

About the only thing you said that resonated with me is "the elites just don't want it". Given the growing wealth disparity and the relative flat to down real income of the average American in the last 40 years I'd say that's a fair statement.

Your final statement comes out of nowhere as you lump the commenter into this group of elites when all they were saying is "hey man, I'm not so sure people will be lining up to risk their life savings to start a small business".

Care to try again with a gentler, more constructive tone and explain how the commenter, and by extension myself, are naive with the summarized viewpoint I stated at the outset?

It's all about the money supply. The elite want to bail out because it inflates the money supply.

You can bail in instead of bail out. Bankruptcies happen and equity holders lose, but the problem is that bankruptices reduce the money supply. Money effectively disappears when debt is restructured.

The problem we now face is that equity holders today have decided that bail outs are necessary politically. Equity is the most speculative ownership of productive capacity, but you wouldn't guess it with the way it's discussed. Wouldn't you expect that that kind of security to lose value in an unforeseen circumstance like this? The system eventually doesn't function if the government hamfistedly tries to alter price discovery to such an extent that markets stop working. That's where we are today.

So bail in. Give everyone free money. I give you an ID number and a bank account number, and I receive cash every month. That's a hell of lot simpler. Nationalize healthcare. Wouldn't a nationalized system be simpler? The lines of code per person have to be higher in a country with fifty different systems. It will cause inflation, but we don't really have a choice.

Sorry if my tone is a bit flippant, but someone has to argue for sanity here. The United States is going down a dark path in nationalizing so many USD assets. Somebody has to try to explain why.

Considering how many economists seem to disagree on what the proper response here is, I highly doubt it's just math.

And regarding nationalizing healthcare... That's a whole truck full of worms, and seems unrelated to an economic recovery. Couldn't you also argue that seeing the government nationalize an entire industry would decrease entrepreneurial spirit in other industries in fear of the same thing happening there?

It really is just math. Every dollar we waste today on unproductive capacities is a dollar that your children will never have.

I don't think it works like that.

This might be true, but I don't know that there's been an obviously wrong set of recommendations yet during the coronavirus crisis. Do you have an example?

> the realists are a good place to start

This is almost certainly false - at least if you're including yourself in "realists". Personally, I'd look at the heretical economists first.

You seem to be missing a lot of other points from your analysis.

> The elite want to bail out because it inflates the money supply...The problem we now face is that equity holders today have decided that bail outs are necessary politically.

Let's check the numbers. Collective wealth of all the billionaires in the entire world is 8.6-8.7T USD [1]. Collective retirement and pension assets in just the US is 19.1T USD [2]. So it seems that commoners, relying on the retirement and pension assets, would benefit much more from a stock market recovery than the elites.

> Nationalize healthcare. Wouldn't a nationalized system be simpler?

Maybe yes, maybe not? UK / France / Italy / Germany / Spain all have public healthcare and have ~320M people between them, roughly the same as the US. And yet, their COVID-19 deaths are ~100K vs ~55K for the US when both the continents had fairly similar advanced warnings. Why is this simpler (and presumably better, from your tone) system producing a far worse outcome?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire#Statistics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_fund#United_States

Pensions are not equity. Pensions also usually fall very high on the cap table, saving them from restructuring in bankruptcy.

> Maybe yes, maybe not? UK / France / Italy / Germany / Spain all have public healthcare and have ~320M people between them, roughly the same as the US. And yet, their COVID-19 deaths are ~100K vs ~55K for the US when both the continents had fairly similar advanced warnings. Why is this simpler (and presumably better, from your tone) system producing a far worse outcome?

That's not really how pandemics work for one; the Milan fashion show arguably killed tens of thousands of people as a superspreading event. The US healthcare system is terrible, whichever way you slice it (cost, infant mortality, outcomes).

I am talking about pension funds which have to invest their money in something, with public stock market being an obvious choice for such investments.

My point is that the assumption that most small business owners will be able to reboot their businesses when the economic shutdown ends is almost certainly not true due to the mass destruction of their working capital. No one said anything about fairness or bailing them out, just about the unrealistic expectation that these people will be able to start new businesses, so that life will go back to normal for their customers, or that millions of people that have never run a small business will have a sudden desire to fill that gap. Many jobs will be disappearing as a result.

Another poster suggested what is likely to happen and I already see the wheels turning in my city: cash-rich investors/companies will swoop in to pick the carcasses of dead or distressed small businesses, acquiring the assets of the best ones at a steep discount to what would have been required pre-shutdown. That is a poor outcome for small business owners and will change their risk calculus going forward.

Not all small businesses need capital to start. And a lot that did start with capital didn't really need to (I've seen so many people rent an office as their first move, for a business they could easily run from home).

To use your analogy: imagine if the government wrecked your house, but left you with the mortgage. You can't move anywhere, can't buy another place, can't rent anywhere. You'll have to rebuild from the rubble.

But in real world terms, it just sounds like a large number of Uber drivers.

This terrifies people more than anything...and the more entitled someone is, the more they fear it.

Yes it costs maybe a couple hundred dollars to legally start a business. So you are correct in the most literal sense, that it does take some $ to start!

But if you have a mindset that it takes anything more than that, I'm here to tell you from firsthand experience that you're wrong :/