Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

> Everyone who works on the front lines of providing care to COVID patients is a first responder, and whether they or their employers pay, is irrelevant.

I bet it's relevant to them.

> It is the moral imperative of leadership to do what it takes to resolve the situation now, and figure out the details later.

But what does that even mean? Suppose Donald Trump is suddenly made owner of all PPE. How is he qualified to allocate it efficiently? What does someone do who legitimately needs it but didn't make his list?

> Not to mention, I've always said we need more expensive health insurance in America.

You need more healthcare during a pandemic. It costs money. It has to come from somewhere.

> It could therefore create a national stockpile of gear first responders might need in a pandemic, and fill it at contracted prices.

And then go several years without a pandemic at which point the stockpile will either have rotted or been cut from the budget as "unnecessary" before the next one.

This is the type of problem where you want redundancies. The government can try to keep a stockpile and you still want private stockpiles in case they fail or are insufficient -- as has obviously happened. It's not like this is the first ever pandemic in the world that no one could have ever foreseen. What is going to cause them to do any better next time?

> As they have done with oil. And helium. And raisins.

The strategic petroleum reserve is some kind of a silly farce. Oil is a global commodity and the US is a major producer. The reserve exists entirely as a result of politics, it isn't really useful for much.

The "helium reserve" exists primarily because the government is a major producer of the stuff. Nearly all the helium on earth is a product of nuclear reactors.

And the "strategic raisin reserve" (insert eyeroll) was recently found unconstitutional.

> Is that a sufficient example?

You say I'm pigeonholing you but you have yet to name a single occupation - what am I pigeonholing? Also, my "pigeonholing" is not arbitrary, it is the breadth of jobs that can exist with a minimum wage enacted...

No, it is not a sufficient example because you haven't said a word about what this person is doing. You can see how this feels like pulling teeth on my end, yes? I just want an actual concrete example of a job that could exist. If there are so many of these that there is a notable economic impact from this, it really isn't unreasonable to ask someone to name one, is it? I can't imagine what the job looks like that you described.

> But that's the whole problem, isn't it? When things are going well it's a seller's market and you don't need a minimum wage. When things are going poorly, the option isn't minimum wage job vs. less than minimum wage job, it's less than minimum wage job vs. unemployment. So then you're prohibiting bad and leaving them with really bad.

My argument is exactly that you need a minimum wage in a sellers market because the market is exceedingly inefficient for workers and allows companies to exploit workers and pass that profit off to already wealthy shareholders and upper management. For non-sellers markets the minimum should be adjusted to match economic times, I'm not saying we set a $25 minimum wage during a recession here. I'd be very happy to pin minimum wage to economic times.

> Can you not imagine that some jobs might pay less money but be more flexible or closer to home or less emotionally taxing and thereby preferable despite the lower pay?

If it is between a job that pays enough to survive vs one that does not? No I can't. Between two jobs that pay enough to survive? Absolutely.

> Even when a minimum wage does exactly what you want it to, the effect is to transfer money from the large institutions that can absorb the minimum wage increase to the minimum wage workers. But you can get exactly the same desired effect simply by changing their relative tax rates (using negative rates if necessary) without incurring any of the harm caused by constraining anyone's choice of employment.

I fully agree that would be a better policy. It has proved much harder to pass through the political system. I have said it in other threads here but I am 100% not saying a higher minimum wage is an ideal economic state, it is simply better than the current point we are at and the seemingly easiest to pass at the moment. In the end, the clear way to do this is through UBI IMO. And I think that is the root of a lot of these threads that I'm not going into responses on - this isn't a one and done policy change, you need others to match it like an increased social safety net to make that "really bad" unemployed scenario not as bad.

But then you're still expecting something implausible to happen, because everybody knows there is a shortage of masks and they're needed by healthcare workers, so the chances that 100% of millionaires will disregard that and buy masks they don't need is negligible.

> This assumes that people actually behave rationally.

There isn't an alternative. If you assume people behave irrationally you may as well send the army in straight away. People are often stupid but rarely irrational given what they can understand. There is pretty solid evidence that people with money are the ones who spend it rationally.

And besides a private buyer's opinion of what is rational is just as valid as anyone else's.

> If I may suggest you and a minority of others would be better served in such a situation and you are trying to construct an argument so as to justify a policy that would benefit yourself.

Yes? I'd like to live in a world where I can go to the store and buy toilet paper. Just like everyone else. This is not an unreasonable demand.

I'd like to see everything go back to normal as fast as possible, thanks. Policies that make it irrational to return to that happy equilibrium are not in my interests. We need producers and companies involved in consumer logistics to change their behaviors. Money is the fastest tool to do that.

Besides, seriously, why do you think people earn money if not to get first dibs on stuff they want? What do you think money is for? It isn't like everyone is going to get what they want, there is a massive shortage. Someone is going to have to do without. If someone has to do without we use money to figure out who. That is how life works in this era, and the eras before dating back to the invention of money. Price controls aren't going to win a war with the economy. It is more likely to take down the government than stop wealthy people getting what they want.

> The economy needs to have good sold at a profit

Not for things that do not need to make a profit. See: essentials like healthcare, housing, and basic food items.