AgnosticBoy wrote: What I find extreme:
- keeping businesses closed for an indefinite amount of time
- keeping schools closed for an indefinite amount of time
- keeping stay-at-home orders in place for an indefinite amount of time.
- quarantining the entire country
We need a more selective approach based on risk factors rather than having a blanket response that treats everyone the same without regard to LOW risks. For instance, the elderly should have their activities restricted since they are high risk but the young should not be as restricted. The young, or even ages 50s and under should be allowed to go out and conduct normal business while applying some health measures.
Purple Knight wrote:Look, I agree with all of that. I even think people who everyone thinks will spread the virus but aren't at high risk of dying from it should just be put in camps until they all get sick and all get better. (Voluntary, of course; could even do this in staggered groups so the economy doesn't go all Titanic from it, then give people who volunteered a special sticker so people know they can't get sick from that person, plus to businesses, everyone will want employees with the sticker.)
What I'm saying is that we're learning a lot about our economy from this plague: Specifically, that it's an inverted tower of dominoes, all standing on one or a few but getting bigger as the levels rise. Take out anything, and boom, collapse.
Having such an economy in the first place is pure madness. There are only such easy solutions because coronavirus isn't that deadly.
This is the economy that naturally develops in an artificial absence of threat, and it mimics the overspecialisation of an animal that likewise isn't being taxed in any way (from predators for example).
It's an express ticket to extinction.
Just the not-so-humble opinion of someone with a ludicrously high IQ.
New thread started to answer this.AgnosticBoy wrote: [Replying to post 50 by Purple Knight]
Excellent points. I don't see socialism as a good alternative though. I'm not sure if you're advocating for that.
No, I'm not advocating socialism. Socialism is just a free market with forced sharing. I see the forced sharing as yet another domino added to the already unstable upper levels, making a bad system worse.
I just want to start with a question to capitalists about capitalism, which really got going in the Industrial Era, when people left their farms to work in factories because they pay was amazing in comparison to what they could make on their farms.
The question is this:
If these farmers exited their farms into old capitalism such as we have, rather than new capitalism, and the very real and constant threat of losing their jobs, how many crises (I'm assuming no bailouts) do you think it would take before they concluded that capitalism was awful and all just decided to go back to their farms?
Dear Reason, the last crisis was in 2008. It hasn't even been 20 years. It's been 12.
So here's what I want: I don't want a free market. I don't want socialism. I don't want any part of anything remotely near either of these vials of poison.
I want what would have been if a time traveler had shown the farmers the result of leaving their farms to go work for somebody else.
Time Traveler: A hundred or so years down the road, once you no longer have your farms, businesses are no longer required to pay you a better wage than you'd make on your farm, and there are lots of government measures to make them pay fair wages, which your descendants are shamed for. They're called leeches, parasites, and redistributionists. In this bleak future, businesses also frequently make horrible decisions and nearly go belly-up, but the government steps in to save you from starving, and your descendants are shamed for it. They're called out as the reason this new "free market" isn't working, and everyone wishes they would just starve so the free market could "work". Businesses are naturally very profitable, since they can't fail, and there are a lot of immigrants who want to come in and share the prosperity, but your descendants don't want the competition lowering wages to below what they need to stay alive, and your descendants are shamed for it. They're called racists and xenophobic. They're pointed to as the reason the free market doesn't work, and everyone wishes they would just go away. Now, do you still want to leave your farms?
If they know this fellow is telling the truth and they still do it, then their descendants (us) deserve every bit of the bed those farmers made for us.
If they see what happened as a scam, then I want that scam undone. If this means I have to scrape the ground every day for subsistence, and die at 45 of arthritis, so be it, because there is a place for my children in the world, because I owned that place.
As it is now, I am a serf, with no enfranchisement in any of the property that keeps me alive, and the property owners know so. I will never be able to afford a child, and even if I could, to what point? To make another serf who will work all his life to enrich others and be seen as leech and a drain on society?
I see it as a tragedy that farmers will full enfranchisement in the property that kept them alive were scammed into serfs with none.
