31–40 of 125 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inflation caused by currency debasement is a flat tax, which is comparatively regressive. It raises the prices of all items faster than wages, and everyone has to buy food, buy electricity, etc. Someone will have to pay.
Hm no; monetary inflation is reducing the value of each dollar so disproportionately affects those with more dollars, making it progressive.
If you want to charge for content, that's fine, but this kind of bait-and-switch is just rude.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would we (assuming you mean the US) have to pay for this with our taxes, who do we owe the money to? The US issues it’s own currency and we printed money to keep the economy afloat. We don’t owe that debt to anyone? The only reason extra taxes would be needed is to curb inflation.
Maybe at the federal level, but state and local governments cannot print money. They will need to raise taxes to cover thier costs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would we (assuming you mean the US) have to pay for this with our taxes, who do we owe the money to? The US issues it’s own currency and we printed money to keep the economy afloat. We don’t owe that debt to anyone? The only reason extra taxes would be needed is to curb inflation.
Inflation caused by currency debasement is a flat tax, which is comparatively regressive. It raises the prices of all items faster than wages, and everyone has to buy food, buy electricity, etc. Someone will have to pay.
> With the Spanish flu a century ago, people adapted their individual behavior, but social life proceeded more or less as before. “Public places of amusement” were shuttered, but work and business were little affected overall. This is a pretty telling difference with how we perceive the world today. During the last decades most people living in the "first world" (however you define it today) lost ability to rationall…
Covid is a little similar in that it’s a new class of risk (different group dying than do from heart disease and all of the other known risks). It also doesn’t help that people on the Internet are calling others murders for being a potential transmission vector.
> With the Spanish flu a century ago, people adapted their individual behavior, but social life proceeded more or less as before. “Public places of amusement” were shuttered, but work and business were little affected overall. This is a pretty telling difference with how we perceive the world today. During the last decades most people living in the "first world" (however you define it today) lost ability to rationall…
I'm not arguing for or against your reasoning, but I know I would be more worried about infrequent random shootings than I would be about frequent targeted shootings, mostly because I believe I'm no one's target.
> With the Spanish flu a century ago, people adapted their individual behavior, but social life proceeded more or less as before. “Public places of amusement” were shuttered, but work and business were little affected overall. This is a pretty telling difference with how we perceive the world today. During the last decades most people living in the "first world" (however you define it today) lost ability to rationall…
that's not to say completely ignore dangers and live obliviously, just put them in their proper place.
> With the Spanish flu a century ago, people adapted their individual behavior, but social life proceeded more or less as before. “Public places of amusement” were shuttered, but work and business were little affected overall. This is a pretty telling difference with how we perceive the world today. During the last decades most people living in the "first world" (however you define it today) lost ability to rationall…
What price would you put on a 5% chance of death plus higher chance of permanent chronic health problems for each of your friends and relatives over age 70? (That may even be an underestimate of the Covid IFR for elderly people.)
Even for healthy young people, we are talking about a 1/1000 chance of death and rather higher chance of long-term organ damage. If this virus ends up infecting 60% of the population, as it will if people carry on their pre-pandemic lives, we’ll end up with something on the order of 2–4 million deaths in the USA, and the aggregate healthcare costs over the next few decades will be an outrageously large burden.
In my opinion the biggest problem the pandemic has highlighted is that many countries have a limited ability to collectively think rationally before getting into a crisis, and adequately prepare so we don’t get hammered so badly by entirely predictable risks of large-scale problems. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
> usual set of killers, from old age to cancer to traffic,
It would be great if we would also spend a significant amount of societal resources on reducing traffic deaths, firearm deaths, set agricultural policy to promote healthy diets and stave off cardiovascular disease, stop companies from dumping carcinogens into the environment, and so on.
As a society we could save a lot of money and lives with some systemic changes and investments.
Nor did the government tell companies how to shift their workforces to remote work, they just did it, and they did it pretty well, even though some of them had never tried it before. Some companies even introduced remote work in March, before the government ordered any lockdowns!
In doing these things, businesses have relied heavily on technology (also a product of the market) which enables far more people to productively work from home than would have been possible a few decades ago. Small, local businesses quickly pivoted to social media and online ordering to survive.
Given all of that, how can the author say, with a straight face, "None of this has anything to do with the spontaneous interplay of individual economic units that economists like to talk about." It seems like exactly that.
> With the Spanish flu a century ago, people adapted their individual behavior, but social life proceeded more or less as before. “Public places of amusement” were shuttered, but work and business were little affected overall. This is a pretty telling difference with how we perceive the world today. During the last decades most people living in the "first world" (however you define it today) lost ability to rationall…
However there is a possibly implicit meaning that you consider the current efforts of preventing transmission of the virus to be overkill.
Possibly in other parts of the world a little more measure and give might have been the best response in hindsight, but knowing what we did know then, rather than now, I believe most places* (in the 'first' world) made the correct adjustments.
The USA is one of the places that had a fragmented, and insufficient overall, response. History will record how things were historically the worst in this country due to many factors.
Among those factors, anti-intellectualism as a driving force in politics, which contibuted to rigidly sticking to bureaucratic processes rather than scientific evidence and results oriented decision making. Another is an absolute failure to modernize and take a long-term investment stance across many government agencies and processes: often lead by a reluctance to be socially responsible.