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They have a gun pointed to the government, we'll lay off 12,870 employees, unless. And so on. So it's not always that easy.

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Pretty easy to call their bluff and just pay for those people's unemployment instead

But for various other reasons, that's not likely to happen in the U.S.

Let them do this and use money to pay job loss benefits to employees.

First rule of stopping kidnapping and blackmailing - don't pay ransom.

Actually, the first rule of kidnapping is to get the victim out alive.

Sometimes, the best option for that is to pay the ransom.

In this case the victims would be the workers. So you could either buy the company out, nationalize it, or let it go bankrupt and pay the employees directly.

None of those solutions incentivize the kidnapper like a ransom payment (bailout, no strings) does, and they’re likely cheaper.

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