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Comment by inscionent | Hacker News Reader

We can print more money right. Money isn't real. Death and this virus are.

How about we just take care of those who need taking care of during this disaster. How about we put all national efforts to keep the lights on, providing safe housing and keeping the food supply chains intact.

Instead we are worried about corporate quarterly profits and when the Ruby Tuesday can reopen, because somehow serving burgers for $3/hr plus tips is going to secure that person's financial situation.

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We can print more money, but we cannot print the things the money will buy. When the factories shut their doors and busineses small and large collapse and the food supply chain implodes, you can't eat money or shelter from the rain under money - and all that turning the printing presses up will do is to make it clear to everyone just how unreal money actually is. We know from other countries that's really hard to undo.

And if those people are dying in droves? What then, who makes these things?

This isn't the Black Death. People aren't dying in numbers that would affect the overall workforce size. It's more like an unusually bad flu epidemic - the main differences being that the deaths are more biased away from people who aren't working anyway, and that we don't shut down the planet over the flu. There might be good reasons to lock down heavily, but that's not one of them.

> Instead we are worried about corporate quarterly profits and when the Ruby Tuesday can reopen, because somehow serving burgers for $3/hr plus tips is going to secure that person's financial situation.

Man, fuck off. This is so god damn entitled. Writing off someone's income as negligible because it's already in the realm of poverty anyway is so callous. Taking care of people's needs is hard. You can't just hand wave it with band-aid money. No matter how much money you allocate, people, especially the poor, are going to suffer if their livelihoods are destroyed. And it's even worse for people in poor countries that depend on exporting to the US for money for things like food. I don't give a shit about Ruby Tuesday's bottom line. I care that Ruby Tuesday's being closed means long term economic harm. The real world is complicated. The existing system is horribly far from perfect. But keeping it turned off is going to make things so much worse. Asserting that people who recognize this are thinking only of the corporate profits is incredibly disingenuous. We have printed astonishing amounts of money to ease this situation. It's not a viable solution.

My local restaurants are down to: McDonalds, Burger King, and Panera Bread. Everything else is shuttered. It will take years to recover from this, and in many locations, just won't, as wealth concentrates further into fewer areas.

In many parts of the world, what the original comment describes is simply a normal day; the only reason Americans typically do better than that is our strong economy. We know what economies without strong quarterly profits and Ruby Tuesday look like, and they don't support the modern American standard of living.

Now try to imagine an economy that values human capital over never end growth. We can do better, but it requires a different kind thinking.

We value neverending growth because it represents an increase in the amount and quality of goods and services people want. Most people I've seen talk about valuing human capital over neverending growth tend to believe everyone should live as well as the American middle class - I agree with that, but we won't be able to make it happen without more economic growth.

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