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Comment by DethNinja | Hacker News Reader

Actually I believe they sent a clear message that they want problems to get even worse. It is not even keeping the status quo at same level, at the face of this pandemic almost all world governments decisively pursued enriching the 1%.

I only hope more people woke up to this fact and form a critical mass but I doubt it.

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You can read if that way. What I see is them propping up business so that there are actual jobs to go back to once things stabilize.

It does little good to send people thousands of dollars if when that dries up, and it would, there are no above board jobs to go back to.

How nice of the governments to help businesses afford to eat instead of people.

There is no reason assistance to people has to go through business. The reason governments do that is because leaders own equity in the current hierarchy and definitely don’t want to disturb that by giving the lower classes leverage to demand better terms.

If businesses employed robots you’d have a point. But most today provide people gainful employment. No businesses left means no one to hire you.

The businesses don't disappear because the doors close for a few months. People will still have their colleagues’ contact information to be able to re hire and start again.

Some businesses can be easily put on hold and restarted later. I’d wager it’s not that easy for most.

I’d wager those businesses are already classified as essential and kept operating. And if not, that can be a separate issue the government can tackle, but there’s no need for it to be conflated with the issue of keeping people fed and housed.

just like keeping people fed shouldn’t be conflated with keeping businesses operating and solvent. your logic cuts both ways and businesses shouldn’t have been brought up by the grandparent in the first place

Except "gainful employment" has been quietly eroded year after year with things like institutionalizing contract work/gig economy/worship of hustle/eroding worker's rights to organize and bargain with employers...

Do you not understand that if there are not jobs to go back to there will be no eating tomorrow either? If businesses start to go under, and this cascades as it usually does, we could be seeing serious recession, or even economic failure? What do we do about food then? Also what happened to the economic stimulus checks and unemployment system? The systems are definitely taxed but that only shows you how big we’re getting hit atm.

By buying up junk bonds the government props up irresponsible, mismanaged companies, which possibly spent money on stock buybacks and bonuses for executives, instead of product/service development.

The way to go is to protect workers during transition from one job to another by providing them with decent unemployment benefits, training, etc., not bail out lousy executives over and over.

When people die, they're dead. When businesses die, their assets are sold to better businesses and their former employees are hired by better businesses.

I swear I have yet to meet a capitalist who actually believes in "capitalism"...

I see that motion as the status quo. The velocity, maybe even the acceleration, towards enriching the 1% is the status quo. This is how things will continue to go if people leave the system alone, pandemic or not.

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