Hacker News Reader

Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

> In a normal free market economy

What exactly leads you to believe that we’re currently in a situation for the free market to prevail while millions of Americans can’t leave their houses and the infection rate of COVID continues to double every three days?

The last time we saw labor contraction like this was during the Great Depression, when millions starved and the economy took years to recover. What are people supposed to do when there are no jobs for them and they can’t leave the house? If there’s no work to be done for the next three months and no income coming in, what do these millions of workers do, starve?

View on HN

> The last time we saw labor contraction like this was during the Great Depression, when millions starved and the economy took years to recover. What are people supposed to do when there are no jobs for them and they can’t leave the house?

What do you think they did in the Great Depression? WW2? They didn’t sit there and wait for the government to bail them out. They saved for a rainy day. The US govt borrowed money from the citizens to fight WW2. But thanks to QE infinity, the government has disincentivized and fucked over savers as well. Big surprise, anytime the government gets involved they fuck it up.

Complaints about saving are the most absurd thing ever.

Rich people were getting free money by doing nothing and taking no risk. Now they're getting less free money by doing nothing and taking no risk.

It's crazy that you want to enact policies which would very literally kill thousands of people just because you want rich people (who don't need more money) to get more free unearned money.

In a truly free market wealthy people would have to pay vault, security, and insurance fees to maintain a riskless balance.

You may want to read up on depression-era programs like the WPA and the invention of social security.

> They didn’t sit there and wait for the government to bail them out.

The government in the 30s took on trillions (in modern dollars) in debt to do just that; the only difference being they put people to work by pouring money into infrastructure projects because people could actually work without isolation.

The difference here is that the money isn't going into infrastructure, it's going into basic necessities and healthcare; people are still being put to work as you can tell from the ramp-up in hiring for delivery, cargo, logistics, etc. The velocity of money hasn't stopped - if anything, it's actually increased in certain areas of spending. The problem here is unique for almost everyone alive today: entire quadrants of the economy have ground to a halt because of an external stressor.

TL;DR: your understanding of the new deal needs work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com