/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>18115806

This is what it looks like when you are indoctrinated by markets. I'm not even suggesting we should go on a full lockdown, but you can feasibly suspend markets and create an emergency economy, and then return to markets afterwards without an issue. This is virtually done in every emergency, like a hurricane ravaging an area so that people have to eat rations and live in trailers until the damage can be fixed. What the WSJ is suggesting is that the market can't handle this emergency, which is true much like those other emergencies. The market lags, and it falls apart with big shocks. The productive capital is all still there though. The infrastructure is there to provide food and housing and energy and supplies. The problem is the market is not so flexible that everybody can just leave their jobs for two weeks and the cash flows will still deliver food and services to the right places. That requires emergency command economies and rationing.

But either the powers that be are afraid to try that because they thing it is a pandora's box, or they don't know how to do it, or they don't think it is necessary. It could be any of them. But if they genuinely think 3 million or whatever people are going to die and that is a necessary sacrifice for the market, then this is basically just America's Holodomor. They're just choosing to let some people die because of economic goals, which in this case is making asset prices go back up.