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seb314 | 6 years ago
in general, measuring the cost of government decisions seems good.
But here, you seem to be suggesting that a) if the government acts, it should pay the income you'd had if you had kept working (and assuming corona hadn't stopped you anyway) or b) if it doesn't act, I guess you'd like to claim damages for that family member that got killed by corona because the goverent allowed the epidemic to get out of control?
tathougies|6 years ago
No. The government has no real control over the epidemic.
In some ways, this is the trolley problem. There is a trolley (COVID-19) heading towards a group of people (the general population), and the government can pull a lever to switch the track to a smaller group of persons (the industries impacted by COVID). Make no mistake about it, some people will die if the government simply ordered people to stay home (i.e., pulls the lever). Some will die due to suicide because of mental illness or because they lost their job. Some will die because they don't have the social support they're used to. Either way, there will certainly be deaths caused if the government did nothing else and just pulled the lever (i.e., ordered people to stay home and business to shut down)
Nevertheless, the government has currently chosen to pull the lever to redirect the trolley towards this group of people. Because it has done so, it now owes those people restitution to mitigate the impacts of the government's decision. This is what a stimulus bill is.
If the government did nothing, it wouldn't owe anyone anything. This is not such a crazy belief. Many major moral philosophies claim that by pulling the lever, you gain responsibility for the outcome, whereas by doing nothing, you are not responsible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem