I recently wrote about some restaurateurs I used to work for who have been driven out of business by the pandemic, or more specifically the shutdowns associated with the pandemic. Most of the pushback I received on the piece centered around claims that liberals would just LOVE to help these poor downtrodden schmoes, but those big fat meanie-pants conservatives just won’t let them give out endless streams of money to people in need!!
Since it was such a common complaint I decided it was worthy of a response.
It is true that most conservatives and the vast majority of libertarians do not like or want the government to come riding to the rescue of businesses who have fallen on hard times. Conservatarians generally believe that in normal, everyday circumstances, when a business fails it’s usually because it was being run badly or had some fundamentally flawed premise to it or because the owners hadn’t adequately planned ahead for an uncertain future. The free market rewards smart and well prepared businessmen and un-smart unprepared businessmen should probably just get a job working for those guys rather than trying to go it alone. Nowhere is that more true than in the cutthroat restaurant business, where nearly 80% of restaurants close before their fifth anniversary. Restaurants fail too often for the taxpayers to fund failing ones.
But we are not living in normal, everyday circumstances. A shutdown where the government literally forbids businesses from opening for indefinite periods is not a normal occurrence in the free market. It’s not even an act of God the likes of which wise businessman could prepare for in advance. The government shutdowns are unprecedented; no one could have been reasonably expected to foresee them.
One of the things people don’t seem to understand, or perhaps willfully misunderstand, about conservatarians is that most of us think it’s ok — indeed a necessity — for the government (not to mention corporations, the Catholic Church, polluting industrialists, and similar entities) to be held financially accountable for wrongs they’ve perpetuated. Fiscal responsibility for government agencies is a huge deal for those of us in the smaller government camp. It is not in any way anti-conservatarian to expect government to pay debts or penalties they have incurred, even though we might very much loathe the fact that they’ve incurred those debts and penalties to begin with.
Under normal circumstances, a person’s lungs are great at breathing. Even when we go swimming in deep water, we can survive it by not swimming in poor conditions or beyond our capabilities, by coming out of the water when we get tired, by making sure we’ve trained our bodies to go the distance. But if some government bureaucrats grabbed a swimmer who had been doing just fine on their own, and held them underwater for three minutes, they would be drowning. They would need to be rescued and resuscitated. They would likely need supplemental oxygen for a time. They might need to be on life support until their lungs healed and they’re capable of breathing on their own again. But their lungs worked before and after the incident. The injury they suffered had nothing to do with some fundamental inability of their lungs to function, and everything to do with solving a problem that was inflicted upon an innocent person just trying to live their life.
You can both believe that lungs work well under normal circumstances and still believe that a person who was forcibly drowned needs assistance. No one of any political stripe believes that a person who temporarily needs life support after a crime was committed against them should be denied it because of “survival of the fittest”. Even those who believe in survival of the fittest in ordinary circumstances are capable of differentiating between normal circumstances and extraordinary ones.
And so it goes for small businesses staying alive in the free market.
If the government messes something up (such as having a shutdown which possibly went on too long) I have absolutely no issue with them being required to pay compensation for the people their policies hurt. And that’s what stimulus money is! Paying businesses to stay afloat during the shutdown can coexist with smaller government philosophies, because it entails holding government accountable for the decisions it makes and the paths it pursues. A temporary, government-induced handicap is not the same as a business that cannot compete under ordinary circumstances, thus it isn’t corporate welfare.
Now, it may or may not be a good idea to hand out stimulus money and bailouts for a host of reasons, starting with the economic consequences of printing off and handing out money like it’s stolen from a game of Monopoly. We already owe a whole hell of a lot of money to some pretty shady customers and it may not be the best of ideas to end up owing them more. And clearly, the government money went to some people who didn’t deserve it while missing some people who did. We can certainly have a discussion on those merits and about the necessity of the ongoing shutdown itself, but to write off my piece on the basis of “conservatives refuse to give money hurr de durr” is both factually untrue, and a complete dodge of the many legitimate questions at hand.
While I understand that some — I believe a minority, but some — on the right prefer powerful people to the unwashed plebes (because in their minds, they would BE one of the powerful people if not for pesky old government standing in the way), levying that criticism against ME is ludicrous. As some of you know, if I couldn’t have the libertarian world I hope for (and I can’t) I would prefer a wisely run non-Woke-Fascist socialism that respects individual liberties over the corrupt oligarchy we have now. But of course a wisely run non-Woke-Fascist socialist government that respects individual liberty is even more of a pipe dream than a libertarian one, so.
One of the biggest reasons I prefer liberty to socialism is that I happen to believe in normal circumstances – indeed, in MOST circumstances – that the free market is a darn good arbiter of which businesses should succeed and which ones shouldn’t. Businesses sink, businesses swim, and it shouldn’t be the government who decides that but the free market itself, for the free market is as impartial as water and cannot be corrupted in the same ways the government can. The free market can’t enact policies that benefit its friends’ businesses or hand out grant money to some businesses and industries at the expense of others. The free market cannot write laws to benefit multinational corporations and fatcat lobbyists at the expense of the little guy. Only government can do that.
Yet I simultaneously believe that in exceptional circumstances, circumstances in which the hand of government is actively interfering in the operation of the free market to start with, the rules must be different. This neither changes my views about how things should work ideally, nor does it make me an intellectually disingenuous hypocrite. The government broke it, the government buys it, because a limited government must be held responsible for the choices it makes even when I strongly dislike the choices it made.
It’s in the job description of the government to make hard calls sometimes, to sometimes have to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. But a limited, fiscally responsible government must pay just compensation for the things it buys and the things it takes, rather than going around seizing the means of production.
In the case of the coronavirus, the government was buying businesses’ compliance with a quarantine, in order to save lives.
SHOW ME THE MONEY!
I recall the other post. I think my remark was that the family would most likely reopen another restaurant once the all clear was sounded, and for now they are hunkering down. This seems like a pretty good idea.
I am good with assistance for all the workers who are out of a job. I am good with some assistance to the family for reopening. Right now, there are bills in Congress to do exactly that, and they are hung up over negotiations with the Senate.
The end may be in sight, but it’s still a long slog to get there. Hang in there.Report
You and I agree here (shocked I’m sure).
But what are the next steps? In 2017 we as a nation decided to forgo a ton of tax revenue that could have been leveraged to offset this. Tax revenue we were all assured would be made up in economic growth that never occurred. And the people that did that are the same people who are sitting on relief bills designed to help your restaurants because they want to shield big companies like Tyson from the liability of failing to cope with outbreaks (which free market theory would suggest they shouldn’t be shielded from). As long as those folks hold sway (and they may after 20 January), we can’t get there from here.
So what do we do?Report
The virus has become only slightly less common than air and there’s a strong argument that it should be in “acts of god” territory.
Allowing everyone-who-got-sick (which rounds to everyone) to sue everyone-with-deep-pockets (which rounds to business) seems to be more an effort to enrich the trial lawyers than the way a free market should function.
Even Tyson, the poster child for infecting workers at work, is also the poster child for a company that we wanted to stay open assuming we want people to eat.Report
We want people to eat and we want workers to be treated safely. Two goals at least. What we don’t want is businesses to be free to be careless with the health of their workers. Or, you know, to have managers betting on how many disposable workers will get sick. Hey i’m not judging, that just seems a wee bit off.Report
What do you want to happen when those two goals conflict and you have to pick one?
For example, if we have a virus with (at that time) unknown abilities that we (at that time) can’t test for and (at that time) don’t know who is at risk and (at that time) safety equipment was (at that time) either not easily available or even (at that time) unclear as to what was needed?
Safety-to-workers says you close the business and send people home because of those unknowns. That also means massive disruption to the food chain.Report
No you work to achieve as much as is critical of both goals as is possible. Either/or is often a terrible way to figure out the path. Both eating and safety are good things we want to maximize. Indeed the hard part about goals is that good goals ( and values) often conflict. So we need to identify what is critical and what is nice but less important in all areas and aim to maximize the critical.Report
That’s fine, but I’d expect the lawsuits against the businesses are more “were workers endangered/killed” and not “were the tradeoffs sensible”.
I am not a lawyer, but I expect legally the acceptable number of dead workers is zero. That the laws were written expecting worker safety to be maximized. If that’s not what we expect then we should probably change the laws, i.e. maybe not let companies be sued if they made tradeoffs.Report
Being able to file a lawsuit isn’t the same as being able to be victorious.
In order for the plaintiffs to prevail, there has to be some sort of finding of negligence or failure to take reasonable precautions.
These are rightly questions for juries to determine, not the Senate Majority Leader.Report
They kept businesses open during a pandemic while companies that didn’t want to endanger their workers closed. As was easily foreseeable, their workers were infected.
How can that NOT be negligence? Do worker safety laws have exclusions for “essential workers”?Report
Your argument would be a great defense- that the company took all reasonable precautions while remaining open per government directive.Report
And maybe the gov doesn’t want obeying it’s directives to be “a good defence” to hundreds of thousands of potential lawsuits where losing even one of them might “send a message that their behaviour is unacceptable”.
Maybe the Senate Majority Leader not only doesn’t want but shouldn’t want thousands of juries double guessing him and playing arm chair quarterback with public policy.Report
It is a relief then, that our system of laws and jurisprudence privilege the wisdom of thousands of juries over the will of the Senate Majority Leader.Report
If the government says “shutter your doors” for a month or so, then that’s a taking. I have zero, absolutely *ZERO*, problem with paying the business owner a month’s income for shutting down. I have zero problem with telling the bank “hey, we bailed your asses out a dozen times over the years, you can miss a payment or two from these guys and not write it down.”
The failure to do this will come across as Injustice (with a capital “I”) and it will result in some serious “turnabout is fair play”ism.
That current Portland Eviction saga? It’s a tip of an iceberg. I am thinking that it’d be a bad idea to engage in *ANY* evictions until the vaccine is common. It’s a recipe for society in general to see laws as suggestions.Report
Mitch McConnell disagrees with you on all points.Report
I imagine that most electable politicians will find stuff in what I wrote to disagree with.
It’s part of why we got Trump in 2016.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Biden pulls off in 1Q 2021.Report
Here’s a fun clip that I’m sure Mitch McConnell will disagree with.
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Does that mean landlords don’t need to make mortgage payments?
My wife was laid off because of the virus, does that mean I don’t need to make mortgage payments? Education payments? Are we going to insist that the banks still lend money?Report
I would be fine with landlords not needing to make mortgage payments.
“PRESS PAUSE” and so on.
My wife was laid off because of the virus, does that mean I don’t need to make mortgage payments? Education payments? Are we going to insist that the banks still lend money?
“PRESS PAUSE”.
The payments you get from the government should cover food and netflix while you’re locked inside.
Press pause.
And if they say “you have to shutter your doors but still make your payments”, well, our tax dollars pay for a lot of things, including lampposts.Report
Oh, we’re good. Her unemployment and stim money was a lot more than her income. With reduced spending we’re seriously cash flow positive from all this.
I will pocket the extra cash, but it does seem weird the gov seems insistent on giving us more.
In terms of ethics and intensions, it’s fine to say “the gov will pay for you to shutter your doors if they’re making you do that”.
However I have serious doubts about the gov’s ability to tell the difference between “shuttered doors” and “shuttered doors because the gov did something” and even “didn’t shutter doors but is politically powerful”.Report
“The failure to do this will come across as Injustice (with a capital “I”) and it will result in some serious “turnabout is fair play”ism.”
I mean, I keep saying this, but it really seems to me that the most iconic failure of the American government during all this was that Donald F’in Trump said “let’s just write everyone a check” and the biggest opponent of that idea was a Democrat.Report
There are downsides to a full lockdown. No doubt.
There are downsides to keeping everything open. No doubt.
We chose the way that would have 75% of the downsides of both and 25% of the upsides of either.Report
These high concept political ideologies like socialism and libertarianism tend to fracture when faced with the chaotic nature of real world events.
In the face of shifting human behavior and idiosyncrasies, a planned economy can’t adapt. And in the face of the need for sudden coordinated action, a small and limited government can’t respond.
Which is why almost all governments throughout history and across geography have used some form of mixed economy, where the delivery of some items is left to the vagaries of market forces, while others are delivered through regulated markets, while some others are just delivered directly by government itself.Report
If only there were any evidence of mixed economies working and states trying to take the best of gov/free market approaches, well then, it wouldn’t matter at all to the various ideologues who insist on purity.Report
Do those mixed economies have notable monoculture enforcement tools like language laws?Report
Some do, some don’t. There are plenty of different examples. The Swiss have multiple languages. You want to find a group of people competing to tell you how many languages they each speak find some Swedes.Report
“The Swiss have multiple languages”
If I googled “Swiss Language Laws”, would I find out whether the Swiss have Language Laws?
Because, if I did, and if it turned out that they did have language laws, we’d be in a weird place where we’re talking about how it’d be nice for us to be more like other countries without noticing what other countries are actually like.
(This is also something that happened during the EpiPen debates. We argued for a more European Medical System while arguing for keeping the FDA to stay like the FDA and not be more like the EMA. It’s weird.)Report
Work permits: Switzerland introduces new rules for language proficiency certificates
…While C permit applicants have been subject to language requirements in the past the 2019 law harmonized (minimum) language requirements throughout Switzerland for C-permit applications.
It also introduced language requirements for certain B-permit applicants, notably family members of non-EU nationals.
But since January 1st, C permit applicants and dependents of non-EU nationals applying for B permit applicants have been required to obtain certified language certificates from a government-accredited institution to prove that they have sufficient language skills to communicate with ease in at least one of the Swiss national languages.
https://www.thelocal.ch/20191231/stricter-language-requirements-for-foreigners-in-switzerlandReport
If you are trying to argue for state mandated multi-lingualism, I will graciously concede that it is a very fine idea.
Si está tratando de defender el multilingüismo impuesto por el estado, le concederé amablemente que es una idea muy buena.Report
I don’t think that you understand the language laws.
The language laws don’t argue “YOU MUST SPEAK ALL THREE LANGUAGES” (if there are three official languages).
The language laws argue something much closer to “YOU MUST SPEAK (at least) *ONE* OF THESE THREE LANGUAGES UP TO A PARTICULAR LEVEL OF FLUENCY”.
So I’m not arguing for state mandated multi-lingualism.
I’m asking if you’re asking for state mandated fluency in one of our official languages.Report
Yes, as part of the application for citizenship, there should be state mandated fluency in at least one of the languages used on ballots.Report
Oh, is that how language laws work in the countries you want us to be more like?
That’s odd because I’m not seeing that rule in the European countries you’re saying we should be more like.
Holy crap… is this one of those things where you’re just imagining what Europe is like and asking “why can’t we be more like that?” instead of, you know, looking at what Europe is actually like?Report
The country I am imagining is America, where as part of the citizenship application process, applicants must demonstrate proficiency in at least one of the ballot languages.Report
Well, I’ll let you go back to wondering why weren’t not more like “almost all governments throughout history and across geography” while imagining systems that are different than “almost all governments throughout history and across geography”.Report
My point was that we ARE like “almost all governments throughout history and across geography” in the sense that we have a mixed economy which can adapt to shifting situations.
If you want to shift to a conversation about multi-culturalism or something, its a bit off-topic, but use your moderator powers freely.Report
Really? Because I was noticing how the original post was talking about how other countries handled the global pandemic well and ours didn’t.
If the argument is that the US is pretty much like all of the other countries in the world, throughout history…
Well, I can’t argue with that.Report
This entire language law is a distraction. Many countries are far more multi lingual then the US which proves what exactly. Language use is tied to history and migration and patterns of colonization. You can’t map language laws onto type of economy. Well you could but it would be a weak ass argument.
The actual good argument against a mixed economy is that a less ideological view requires constant assessment of data which is always imperfect and requires decisions which can be very wrong. If all the decisions are good then a mixed economy stomps the crap out of ideological pure visions. If the decisions are poor then the ideologues can almost catch up.
This crap about they have language laws in Europe therefore we, what?, can’t learn anything about how prosperous western countries thrive is , well, crap. Going all the way back to the great health care debates here the Ideologues effort is spent more on reasons to ignore information then doesn’t fit the ideology. Which is why ideologues got no idea.Report
I don’t see it as a distraction. I see it as something that these other countries that we feel we should be more like have done and they did it for reasons that involve some amount of stasis. Like, they want to remain being countries that can do those things that we look at and say “we should be more like that’.
This crap about they have language laws in Europe therefore we, what?, can’t learn anything about how prosperous western countries thrive is , well, crap. Going all the way back to the great health care debates here the Ideologues effort is spent more on reasons to ignore information then doesn’t fit the ideology. Which is why ideologues got no idea.
The argument is that our country doesn’t have as much collaboration as we would like.
The counter-argument is always something about the difference between somewhat homogenous cultures versus multicultures. And if arguments about demographics are poisonous (remember when Blaise tried to argue with me that Denmark was as diverse as the USA?), I think that something like “the existence of language laws” can be something that is tangible enough to actually point to and say “look… does that thing exist or not?” without getting into discussions of morality.
And any discussion of “we should be more like country X!” should have room for counter-questions like “really?”Report
What we call “States” Europe calls “Countries”. That nicely makes the comparison apples-to-apples and introduces multiculturalism, scale, and different regions having very different cost/price/productivity structures.
If we do that then our country has roughly the same, or (much) better, collaboration as the EU.Report
Monoculturalism is an enforcement tool for monoculturalism, even where it doesn’t reach the level of obvious laws.Report
I see a lot of debate about what we might call marginal cases. Say a law is passed requiring restaurants to space tables wider apart, as a result your restaurant can’t fit in enough customers to make a profit and can’t raise prices without driving those remaining customers away. The restaurant wasn’t ordered to close, it wasn’t ordered to keep prices down yet a case could be made the loss of income was due to the government rules.
Do they deserve compensation?Report
Yes.Report
In the scenario we’re living through? Yes. The partial benefit back to us the community is that the size of the subsidy might be proportionally less if the business(es) can operate at some reduced capacity.
If we through Govt. are unilaterally changing the rules of the market – especially at this scale and not simply an accidental byproduct of some other law – then that cost is a social cost we [ought] to account for.
Administering these subsidies? Well, mostly a nightmare.Report