Pyrrhic Victory

NYC, due to its population density, certainly has a higher potential for pandemic death than anywhere else in the US, but there's good reason to believe that NY didn't reach anywhere near that potential, due to the interventions taken by the community which prevented that from happening. We see much worse infection and death rates in some areas of the world with less dense population, due to different responses. So there's no reason to believe that the rest of the US can't get just as bad as NYC, and worse. And given the almost complete lack of response in some parts of the US, I think we'll get to see what that looks like; if not in the next few weeks, then in the fall when cold weather hits.

Yes, it is. Keynes said at one point that the government printing dollar bills and burying them for people to dig up would be a valid form of economic stimulus.

> This extreme monetarism you describe is... Friedman’s!!!

Milton Friedman did not advocate anything like the arbitrary manipulation of the money supply by the government that is practiced by the Federal Reserve. (He was in fact a consistent opponent of the Federal Reserve; he thought it should be abolished.) He advocated tying the growth rate of the money supply to the growth rate in real productivity, with no discretionary element at all.

> Ultra liberal economics lead to accumulation of wealth by few super riches

No, the government printing money and giving it to a few favored parties, which is exactly what the Federal Reserve does and always has done (the favored parties have almost always been financial institutions, no surprise given the background of most Fed members), leads to accumulation of wealth by a few super riches.

> This happens to be one of the reason the Roman Empire fell because all this money could not be spent on keeping the army in working conditions.

I don't know where you're getting your history from, but it's wrong. The reason the empire had trouble paying for a competent army was that it had debased the coinage so much that people were refusing to take Roman coins as payment. It even got so bad that the Roman government itself, knowing that its coins were worthless, stopped accepting them in payment of taxes and insisted on payment in kind instead.

The emperor Constantine managed to get hold of a large supply of gold bullion and used it to mint new gold coins, which were accepted in payment of taxes. That helped for a while as the empire could use these to pay the army and the civil servants; but many people could not afford to buy the new gold coins and therefore could not pay their taxes, so the improvement didn't last too long.

It also didn't help that the size of the army and civil service kept increasing, for no tangible reason, which just increased the tax burden.

So, yes we might be saving lives, but that is a small fraction of the total rates. Aka, we might be changing the death rate from 2% to 1.8%..

But, since we are mostly talking about the aged and infirm, its a herd culling. So you might be giving .2% another year or two to live until they die from other causes.

Which is why, there is a persistent bit of pessimism being heard from certain parts of the research community warning that this might be more like the flu than we are willing to admit. AKA, its possibly going to be with us for a long time. We have spent the last 100 years working on flu vaccines and treatments and lowered the fatality rate by maybe 90%. That 60k deaths a year in the US are with large parts of the population being vaccinated, and piles of treatment options.

This isn't true, though. The US consistently elects republican administrations that jack up deficits to cover tax cuts for billionaires and nobody bats an eye. The military can blow 700bn a year with barely a peep of outrage. And unlike with infrastructure investment that money is effectively a 700bn jobs program for 3 million people that produce nothing of value.

Complaining about debt is usually a cover for bigotry. People don't want social equity or fairness because leveling the playing field is deconstructing hierarchies people were born into and base their personality on. Its why attacking institutional racism in the police is taken as an attack on the culture, personhood, and lifestyles of cops and white suburbia.