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Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

> Government should take a hit, in my opinion.

Government means "everyone who pays taxes".

I'm not sure that's fair. I think it's fine to spend taxes rescuing people (including the business owners if they're in personal trouble), but rescuing businesses feels like a very different story.

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If you don't rescue businesses, you end up needing to rescue a lot more people. You can also give loans (not tax dollars) to rescue business. People require grants.

"loans" given to businesses often turn into grants when the principal is written off in a few years time after the public spotlight has passed.

Sometimes government even announces that they intend to do that at fancy private dinners with a wink and a nudge...

So we just don’t have restaurants (or people working there) for a year even after the stay at home orders end? I think people saying we shouldn’t bail out businesses haven’t fully thought these things through.

People are free to start up new restaurants.

Is this the right trade? When a restaurant goes out of business, we do lose a kind of stock of wealth. It's a tuned machine (suppliers, cooks, customers, an evolving menu maybe) and now we're starting over from scratch with an untuned machine. That's a real cost to everyone.

Yes, it's a cost. But so is bailing out the shareholders of businesses, who (by nature) are holding a supposedly risky asset.

Giving the business a grant is a cost, but how are loans? The US bank bailouts turned a small profit, and there's no reason that couldn't happen again this time.

Which is why I said a year after. Depression-level unemployment rates for a good year are not without secondary bad effects even with “haha money printer go brrrr.”

Businesses exist to serve people—both customers and as employers. In this case the businesses are also the ones being sued, and people only get affected because the business gets sued.

Funny how that's never the story when the economy is going up. Then they're suddenly amoral actors that should never have to care about the outside society or the people that they impact.

That's right, they shouldn't. Instead we need to structure the economy so that they automatically act in a way that benefits society as a whole.

And it's not corporations either - individuals are perfectly capable of being amoral, and we want to structure things so that they have no desire to.

I don't mind rescuing businesses. People need jobs.

I do get a bit annoyed at businesses who've gone out of their way to avoid as much tax as possible by using a variety of weird schemes, and who've gone out of their way to pay their workers as little as possible using a variety of weird schemes, suddenly deciding that The Government isn't so bad after all and asking for a handout.

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