Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

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> Why not? We have our own currency and have no qualms manipulating it to manipulate the stock market. We can communicate with other countries.

People are starting to go crazy. Personally I couldn't be happier with lockdown, I love staying inside. I'd be happy to do this for the rest of my life, but almost everyone else I know is losing it. And that's not even to speak of all the people who've lost their jobs and can't make money.

It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy.

> By opening up our economy we’re pointing a gun at the world.

Many countries are already open. Sweden, China, Japan, Korea. Reopening isn't pointing a gun at others, it's pointing a gun at ourselves.

My point isn't that the gun isn't there. It's that we're getting shot no matter what, the only choice we have is whether we also want to lose a few million more jobs and a few trillion more dollars of GDP.

> This just strikes me as a very naïve and dogmatic worldview. Where are you getting this from?

I'm just looking at the outcome potentials as I see them. A cure, optimistically, is 9-12 months away. Every month we keep the economy closed, more businesses blow up, because they aren't generating revenue to meet their fixed obligations. They are firing employees, and then those employees can't make rent, and then the landlords can't make their mortgage payments, and on and on. This stuff will cascade throughout the economy and destroy it, and it gets worse the longer we wait. You can fix some of this with cash transfers, but not all of it, and the long and medium term effects of large scale cash transfers of the kind that would be necessary are not well understood.

Originally the purpose of lockdown was supposed to be "flattening the curve" so as not to overwhelm the medical system with peak demand. That is and was a good goal, that we have more or less achieved. The goal of lockdown was never to just wait out the entire virus, because that's just not realistic.

Of course it’s realistic, we can still produce necessary goods at the rate we need to live.

> It seems like you are proposing that to fix the income issue we just print money indefinitely until a cure comes out, and then restart the economy. Doing something like that is not really comparable to the kind of QE that's being done in the stock market. It'd have to be done on an incredible scale, and nobody really knows what the effects of that would be on the economy.

At least people could know they have food and shelter. We live in a death cult.

I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins with personal servants and massive stores of resources.

Hell even in the last year we ran Evo Morales out of one of the greatest runs of poverty reduction in contemporary times and he was replaced with a fucking nazi.

Your attitude is mask-off homicidal.

> Of course it’s realistic, we can still produce necessary goods at the rate we need to live.

For a little while. But things will start to break. There are all sorts of things that can be done for a bit, that cannot be extended indefinitely.

> I wonder why we don’t know how to make a basic plan for the economy, hmm... oh yea we jailed those folks and hunted them down and killed them around the globe, yay freedom to die on the job or starve while rich fucks nest up in cabins.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich.

>I'm not sure what you're referring to here. This isn't an issue of planning, and it doesn't have much to do with inequality either. A major economic depression is going to hurt the poor more than the rich.

> it doesn't have much to do with inequality either

> hurt the poor more than the rich.

...seems like the poor and rich, are quite inequal. Possibly the rich could have rigged the rules in their favor using their wealth. One could then say, that is an issue of planning, as the rich should not hold greater political sway than the majority.

None of this has anything to do with political sway. I'm talking about the economic depression that will ensue if we keep the economy closed. That will hurt the poor more than the rich. Economic depressions cause people to lose money - if you start at a higher place, you're better off when you lose 30% or more of your net worth. It has nothing to do with political influence.

You can pretend that the economy is non-political all you want. The clear loss of life you imply says otherwise.

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