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Comment by MeinBlutIstBlau | Hacker News Reader

Halting an economy to the point of economic depression levels (early on) for the sake of people who were already vulnerable (look at the US, lockdowns but people still left the house cause duh...groceries and jobs) was a dumb idea. The government was trying to play god with it's citizens and they couldn't even police simple things like "stay at home" orders. So what was the point in even shutting down everything and giving people free money to the point of absurd inflation?

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Should an economy serve humanity or should humanity serve the economy? It's largely a moral choice, but how a population answers it determines their political response

> humanity serve the economy

Humanity is economy, no money on the table means no food and no shelter.

Certainly one predicates the other (i.e., there's no economy without humanity) and it's quite impractical for humanity to exist at any scale without trade, but whether it makes sense to sacrifice human life for 'the greater good of the economy' or to sacrifice economic function for 'the greater good of humanity' entails a moral choice

Technically you can have economies that don't operate with money; economies are just a (not necessarily good) quantitative lens to analyze human behavior.

I never made an assertion to the contrary, but I think economies are also useful for permitting specialization (and hence supply chains, to create more complex goods) and amortizing local disruptions to supply (e.g. food stores, trade) and probably a bunch of other useful things. They can also enable large scale waste, environmental destruction, debt traps, extreme inequality etc

No you're still misunderstanding. Even in for example, a super primitive society, there are, say "obligation economies" that exist even though nobody inside the society is using it to understand their situation. Likewise, in a modern society there are economies of waste, economies of environmental destruction etc. The "economies" are just quantitative frameworks for understanding human interaction.

Ah sure, I suppose I'm talking about what pops into mind when most people here the word 'economy', but certainly there's more going on as you've noted.

When I use the word, I'm talking something a more to do with the systems of trade of goods and services, currency, etc. - the health of such systems are the concern of many anti-lockdown proponents.

In modern times, you serve an economy because if you don't, you starve. This isn't star trek socialism. It's a survival of the fittest environment.

The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power. Even among private institutions. Look how many took advantage of the government PPP loans or outright laid off workers just for the hell of it.

The majority of the COVID deaths can be attributed to the old, obese, and sickly people. But most institutions serve people outside of that set. But because we have to protect the already dying, lets shut down everything and make life miserable for everyone! Lets not just tell these people to stay inside and be shut ins even though we could've!

> The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power

Because everyone knew everything in early 2020. Epidemiologists weren't sure about the details of the virus, its spread and how to contain it, but you can retrospectively claim that it couldn't be contained and it didn't make sense to try? Maybe you should revisit the statistics and reporting from Italy or any of the other highly impacted countries early on, the ones with the military hospitals, makeshift morgues, military run hearses and crematoriums, doctors having to choose who has a higher chance of survival under care and take them in, refusing the others.

> But most institutions serve people outside of that set

No, most institutions serve everybody. In countries with older populations, like Italy, Spain or Portugal, or countries with high percentage of obese or sickly people like the US or Mexico, are you really advocating that they should have sacrificed even 5-10%, or even more of their populations so that... The others could go to the cinema or restaurant? People like you are cold as fuck.

> you serve an economy because if you don't, you starve

Sounds like a problem with the economy. Economies are human constructs. With enough consensus they can be shaped in different ways. Quantitive easing is one instrument, but still very much within the rules. The rules can be bent further with consensus

Mask mandates and lockdowns in some western democracies outside of the US have worked exceedingly well, but they by-in-large had less quarrelsome (and smaller) populations

> The majority of the COVID deaths can be attributed to the old, obese, and sickly people. But most institutions serve people outside of that set.

It seems you largely agree that there's a moral dimension here. You may not agree there's malleability to how an economy functions - but once again, economies are a part of the social compact. If people decide that their parents, their kids' grandparents, the immunocompromised, etc. are worth saving, they may hold a different view than sheer social darwinism

The economy, as you know it, exists because government says, "Nope, we know best!" It is a survival of the fittest environment solely because the people in charge of the government don't want Star Trek socialism.

It is true that the majority of COVID deaths are among the population that one government called "life unworthy of life." But the decision to let them die off for the greater good is, itself, a form of saying "Nope, we know best." When a pandemic hits, you don't get to not choose a response.

Sweden did and theyre fine...

My point is simply that Sweden chose a response. You are absolutely welcome to argue that they chose a better response than what others chose, that they served the greater good for cheaper, that the surviving Swedes are happier. But everyone - most especially the Swedish government ministers who made that choice - will tell you that Sweden said, we think we know better, so we're doing this.

The only ones really getting money in Sweden have been the major companies, to the benefit of the shareholders.

The point of lockdowns v1 was panick and healthcare supply chain related. Once we knew who was dying from this (May-2021) we should have stopped given the millions who will suffer and people who will probably die from tanking the economies of the developed world. But hey, have to stick the agenda of report9 to the WHO which predicted 200Million+ dead in year1...

I love the regular repeated downvoters who simply won't engage in conversation that there was a hugely better way of handing this that was at best unwillingly ignored and at worst ignored because who is saying it which is just baffling.

I'm not signing the praises of antivax nonsense I want them all put in a box and sent out to sea. But facts are facts, even the inconvenient ones.

The Government is playing god in protecting it citizens from death?

Not sure if I understand this reasoning, the government has to protect its citizens, that is the number one task.

It depends on how expansive we take the whole "government as protector" role. It is a perfectly reasonable position to believe our government overstepped their responsibility if you take a more narrow view of this idea. In the last 2-3 decades in the US we've seen a consistent erosion of our civil liberties, because people want more "protection" from an ever increasing list of harms.

So if the government did such a bad job policing people from staying at home, why did we even bother with continuing with the stay at home orders? It was obvious from the end of 2020 that nobody was abiding by it and police clearly weren't enforcing these completely unconstitutional laws.

Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply chain failures all around.

But hey, at least we saved a few old or obese people already knocking on deaths door...

It's a revision of history to suggest that government-imposed lockdowns are the only thing that caused the economy to stall. If you recall in the United States at least, not much had really changed until the NBA, a private organization, suspended play on their own on 3/11 [1]. Then the floodgates opened as other private organizations followed suit. The first government shutdown orders then came from San Francisco on 3/16 [2] and New York followed suit on 3/20 [3].

You can see in [4] that consumer spending patterns were changing well before lockdown orders were issued. In fact, consumer spending falls off a cliff the day the NBA suspended its season, which was also when the US stopped all flights to Europe. I don't think anyone argues that stopping travel to Covid hotzones was a bad idea, right? You can see that people starting to eat out less the first week of March, whereas lockdowns really came into full swing around the end of March.

Did lockdowns impact the economy? Sure. But you can't say the economy would be inflation-free and there would be no shortages or supply chain failures if no lockdowns were imposed.

[1] https://www.nba.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-causes-nba-sus...

[2] https://sfmayor.org/article/san-francisco-issues-new-public-...

[3] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-03-20-...

[4] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-consumers-are-spend...

I don't think it's ever been about saving people from Covid, it's always been about saving hospitals from bad-but-eventually-non-threatening pneumonia explosions to the detriment of everything else they're supposed to care for.

I live in Hong Kong, where we have still a somewhat silly aggressive policy. We had 213 deaths for 8M people, so around 26 deaths per million people. Our hospitals never even felt the pandemic. Nobody is suffering of doubling inflation, ridiculous shortage or supply chain failures all around, but it's true we have less obese people than the US in the first place...

If the US didn't let their people free to have so many co-morbidities, they wouldn't pay such a dear price each time a cold mutates from a lab in China. Talk about a powerful country if such a small thing coming from here can knock them down, don't you think ?

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