“Today I cut my pay to $0. I'm committed to laying off 0 of our employees.”

Large companies with cash in the bank may not have this problem, but small businesses often only have a few months of runway.

I would prefer companies that buy back stock, pay ridiculous salaries and bonuses to execs, have giant golden parachutes, and so forth use the capital to secure themselves for situations like these. I think bailing out companies that have demonstrated that the government bailout is their risk mitigation strategy should be allowed to die. Yes, that would suck more right now, but it would mean that from here on out companies have to act 'just a little bit more' responsibly.

If businesses can buy it back at cost later, is this not a textbook example of moral hazard?

Now I in no way believe you, or business people like you, are responsible for this debacle any more than the average person on the street - rather, it is these gigantic but incredibly fragile corporations that have optimized for profitability at the expense of stability/resiliency who have put the entire country in an extremely precarious place. Again. 12 years after the last one, which a lot of "non-expert" people saw coming, while the "expert" economists and policy makers poo-poo'd these warnings, patting these people on the head as if they were children who are unable to think on the same level as them. Technically, they are right, in a way - us regular folks truly do not think on the same level as them, in that we tend to not posses the magnitude of arrogance and self-confidence it requires to drive straight into a clearly visible wall at top speed, while ignoring all warnings.

Will we learn anything this time? I predict we won't, and I speculate that the core reason is that we have a fundamental problem in our culture. Our cultural axioms (the way we believe reality is, the way we believe society and commerce should be structured, etc) contain imperfections. Until we are willing to consider this possibility, and then proceed with a serious[1] post incident analysis, with a goal of honestly identifying shortcomings and setting out to fix them for good, I'm afraid we will repeat this whole process over again within 20 years.

Think about the magnitude of the aggregate intelligence that exists within the HN community, with broad expertise across many domains. And not just HN, but all the various communities out there. Imagine if these "non-experts" were to one day say: "We have had enough. Let's stop fighting among each other, put our heads together, and start writing policy papers of how this should be done, go through a standard process of review, criticism, refinement, etc (just like we do on any engineering project), and then publish and publicize the results of this work widely. Let's use our combined minds, and voices, to once and for all put some detailed and implementable ideas out into the public domain, and shine a light on them for all to see. Then, when "the experts" come up with their self-serving plan, we can start a process of compare and contrast, pointing out in extreme clarity, in words understandable to both layman and domain expert[2], exactly where they have hidden their backdoors."

Granted this is no small task, but is it impossible? And if we don't do it, what are the consequences of that choice (because doing nothing is a choice).

[1] By serious, I mean: no restrictions on access to information (and therefore no restrictions on who can get involved in an analysis - "many eyes"), no restrictions on speech, no single entity (corporations, lobbyists, mainstream media) dictating the narrative to citizens). The post 2008 analysis is not what I would call serious. A more appropriate word for that would be "theater", not unlike many other rituals our society engages in.

[2] Ideally, the information would be presented in various levels of detail, catered to different demographics, not that dissimilar to those who do contribute documentation to open source projects.