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The way it would work is, Berkshire Hathaway with their $130 billion in cash would purchase Delta outright for pennies on the dollar. Berkshire can endure whate

The way it would work is, Berkshire Hathaway with their $130 billion in cash would purchase Delta outright for pennies on the dollar. Berkshire can endure whatever reasonable length of time is required to get Delta back to spitting off $6 billion per year in operating income. Someone else with immense capital and assets would buy American Airlines (maybe Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison would lean into that; Ellison likes airlines). Someone else would buy United, perhaps a major financial firm, private equity. Capitalism is not ill suited for this crisis. This is not the first time we've seen this. We had Capitalism in 1860-1870 and 1918 as well. What people didn't like about this process in the past, is the way it often consolidates economic returns further, it generates huge winners and losers (in a way that seems to most to be particularly predatory or unfair, as an emotional take), and society often feels taken advantage of by people with vast well-stocked fortunes. Don't confuse whether it would work with whether people like it or not. It works in fact and we've seen it multiple times in the past, we know exactly what happens: there are big winners (those that were prepared to take advantage) and big losers. Many people took vast economic advantage of the Civil War, not least of all by buying their way out of serving (hiring legal substitutes). Rockefeller for example did well in commodities at this time, prior to the Standard Oil days.

claudeganon 7y ago
> society often feels taken advantage of by people with vast well-stocked fortunes. Given that the rich will survive this with a dent to their fortunes, while everyone else is risking losing their house, jobs, health, and even lives, this isn’t a feeling, but the reality. If the outcome of this pandemic is Capitalism devolving into greater wealth concentration and inequality, and the consequence of that concentration is ever increasing precarity and material harm for everyone else, it is terribly ill suited for this and all other crises.
- saas_sam 7y ago
  Yours is a grossly ignorant comment. This crisis was started and worsened by the Chinese Communist Party who used their one-party, autocratic power to jail doctors and journalists who were trying to help early on. Every supply-and-demand crisis in history that was managed by a non-capitalist regime such as in the USSR and Venezuela was worsened by many orders of magnitude. I'm talking about people starving in the streets while warehouses full of pork, milk, and grain rotted due to an inability to centrally manage supply chains. I'm talking about once-productive farms shutting down once the "evil greedy farmers" were run out of the country and the farms turned over to "the People" -- go read about what happened to these farms and the people who depended on them. I know it's fashionable to rail against The Man and watch your Reddit Gold™ roll in, but I really wish you'd press pause on that until becoming a smidge better educated on the subject.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    It is always remarkable when capitalist cheerleaders fly into a fit of incoherent rage over reasonable criticism of their favored system. You don't get enough out of capitalism to lick the boot that hard, buddy.
    - saas_sam 7y ago
      Hmm, one side of this argument appears to come prepared with facts and examples while the other side only has name-calling and insults. While I would never dream to try and change your mind, friend, I very much appreciate that you outed yourself for me so other readers are led to the correct conclusion.
      - danharaj 7y ago
        I'm not arguing with you, I didn't say "You're wrong because you're malding", I just said "you're malding".
      - chillwaves 7y ago
        > I know it's fashionable to rail against The Man and watch your Reddit Gold™ roll in, but I really wish you'd press pause on that until becoming a smidge better educated on the subject. Clearly throwing insults exposes a weak hand.
        saas_sam 7y ago
        OK you got me, but my point is that's ALL the other guy had. ;-)
danharaj 7y ago
Under capitalism, the spare capacity that hospitals could have had to deal with this crisis, in beds, ventilators, equipment, supply chains, personnel are all defined as waste. That's what hospitals have been cutting for decades under the rubric of efficiency and profitability. Profitability under normal conditions quickly becomes systemic failure under exceptional circumstances. You have to be drunk on ideology to not see the impending cascading failures which will occur because the profit motive necessitates the coupling of systems and reduction of their ability to absorb unpredicted shocks. Like every system, of course capitalism will fail under certain circumstances, usually circumstances that it itself creates.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >Under capitalism, the spare capacity that hospitals could have had to deal with this crisis, in beds, ventilators, equipment, supply chains, personnel are all defined as waste. That's not true, spare capacity is spare capacity. Hospitals have a profit motive to keep spare capacity around because they want to be able to make money during surge conditions. Or, that's how it would work if capitalism was in charge. (I leave open the possibility for a lot of deviation from ideal theory in this case because the US medical system is actually a combination of the worst attributes of regulation and capitalism, committing to neither and shambling along with the most self-serving parts of each).
  - extralegos 7y ago
    While it’s true that American hospitals do tend to have a lot of spare equipment and real estate, you’re exactly right that the reason is profit motive, _not_ providing healthcare. Real estate investments speak for themselves, while equipment upgrades are cooperative with regulation procedures that favor scarcity, often for the sake of profit. Also, the American health industry does not have the labor force to facilitate a pandemic. The American Medical Association has kept it this way for a reason. The whole industry depends on scarcity. Nurses are one exception where low pay is favored. They are the peon workers of the industry but, because nurses are paid so little, there is a very limited amount of them as well.
- 7y ago
extralegos 7y ago
You are literally describing the catastrophe phase of Karl Marx’s critique of capital accumulation. >Many people took vast economic advantage of the Civil War. And the period immediately following restoration is known as The Guilded Age. It’s not exactly considered a high point for capitalism.

claudeganon 7y ago

> society often feels taken advantage of by people with vast well-stocked fortunes. Given that the rich will survive this with a dent to their fortunes, while everyone else is risking losing their house, jobs, health, and even lives, this isn’t a feeling, but the reality. If the outcome of this pandemic is Capitalism devolving into greater wealth concentration and inequality, and the consequence of that concentration is ever increasing precarity and material harm for everyone else, it is terribly ill suited for this and all other crises.

saas_sam 7y ago
Yours is a grossly ignorant comment. This crisis was started and worsened by the Chinese Communist Party who used their one-party, autocratic power to jail doctors and journalists who were trying to help early on. Every supply-and-demand crisis in history that was managed by a non-capitalist regime such as in the USSR and Venezuela was worsened by many orders of magnitude. I'm talking about people starving in the streets while warehouses full of pork, milk, and grain rotted due to an inability to centrally manage supply chains. I'm talking about once-productive farms shutting down once the "evil greedy farmers" were run out of the country and the farms turned over to "the People" -- go read about what happened to these farms and the people who depended on them. I know it's fashionable to rail against The Man and watch your Reddit Gold™ roll in, but I really wish you'd press pause on that until becoming a smidge better educated on the subject.
- danharaj 7y ago
  It is always remarkable when capitalist cheerleaders fly into a fit of incoherent rage over reasonable criticism of their favored system. You don't get enough out of capitalism to lick the boot that hard, buddy.
  - saas_sam 7y ago
    Hmm, one side of this argument appears to come prepared with facts and examples while the other side only has name-calling and insults. While I would never dream to try and change your mind, friend, I very much appreciate that you outed yourself for me so other readers are led to the correct conclusion.
    - danharaj 7y ago
      I'm not arguing with you, I didn't say "You're wrong because you're malding", I just said "you're malding".
    - chillwaves 7y ago
      > I know it's fashionable to rail against The Man and watch your Reddit Gold™ roll in, but I really wish you'd press pause on that until becoming a smidge better educated on the subject. Clearly throwing insults exposes a weak hand.
      - saas_sam 7y ago
        OK you got me, but my point is that's ALL the other guy had. ;-)

danharaj 7y ago

Under capitalism, the spare capacity that hospitals could have had to deal with this crisis, in beds, ventilators, equipment, supply chains, personnel are all defined as waste. That's what hospitals have been cutting for decades under the rubric of efficiency and profitability. Profitability under normal conditions quickly becomes systemic failure under exceptional circumstances. You have to be drunk on ideology to not see the impending cascading failures which will occur because the profit motive necessitates the coupling of systems and reduction of their ability to absorb unpredicted shocks. Like every system, of course capitalism will fail under certain circumstances, usually circumstances that it itself creates.

whatshisface 7y ago
>Under capitalism, the spare capacity that hospitals could have had to deal with this crisis, in beds, ventilators, equipment, supply chains, personnel are all defined as waste. That's not true, spare capacity is spare capacity. Hospitals have a profit motive to keep spare capacity around because they want to be able to make money during surge conditions. Or, that's how it would work if capitalism was in charge. (I leave open the possibility for a lot of deviation from ideal theory in this case because the US medical system is actually a combination of the worst attributes of regulation and capitalism, committing to neither and shambling along with the most self-serving parts of each).
- extralegos 7y ago
  While it’s true that American hospitals do tend to have a lot of spare equipment and real estate, you’re exactly right that the reason is profit motive, _not_ providing healthcare. Real estate investments speak for themselves, while equipment upgrades are cooperative with regulation procedures that favor scarcity, often for the sake of profit. Also, the American health industry does not have the labor force to facilitate a pandemic. The American Medical Association has kept it this way for a reason. The whole industry depends on scarcity. Nurses are one exception where low pay is favored. They are the peon workers of the industry but, because nurses are paid so little, there is a very limited amount of them as well.
7y ago

extralegos 7y ago

You are literally describing the catastrophe phase of Karl Marx’s critique of capital accumulation. >Many people took vast economic advantage of the Civil War. And the period immediately following restoration is known as The Guilded Age. It’s not exactly considered a high point for capitalism.