> This is deleterious beyond just economics. Put people out of a job and they go sick, die more frequently and have a general unpleasant time.
This "people are going die" justification has been behind so much catastrophically unwise policy, because there is no argument against it that matches the visceral alarms-blaring rhetoric. It's a blunt weapon and there's not a matching response, since the honest & sincere response is abstract arguments about the fallibility of human judgement & how every decision has costs and benefits, intended and unintended, associated with estimated probabilities.
The problem is that this inflation is so obviously tied to the moral hazard of 2008, bailing out corporations (a result of progressive policy arguing to protect people) and then, the very much similar in spirit, policy enacted during the pandemic. Even 9/11 & the whole apparatus of the 2000s is similar in spirit. All these things were enacted under the pretense of emergency & collectivism. Totalitarian rhetoric and orwellian redefinitions of language were used to silence & stigmatize opposition. Money was printed recklessly in order to finance even more precarious and unsustainable economic dynamics & govt projects.
Guess what? It's all crashing down now. This isn't austerity & libertarianism. Those people have practically no power, only a handful of politicians qualify for that label. We're ruled by big government. The New Deal won over American government, and by any reasonable analysis has reigned supreme ever since and these are the results. Constant crises spilling over into each other, eking out a couple years of relief before the dam gets ready to burst again even more spectacularly.