6 ms·

Why not just massive investment in making masks that everyone can afford, given historically low interest rates the government is basically spending with free m

• trentnix 6y ago
  Those are still loans that must be paid back, they just don’t accrue interest as quickly as they would if interest rates were higher. TANSTAAFL
  • MiroF 6y ago
    > Those are still loans that must be paid back Yes, obviously - what did you think deficit spending was? But the point is the cost of fiscal expenditure is lower than it has been in the past, and it seems like we have a really useful thing we could be spending it on. To me, it seems like normal "propensity to consume + ability to pay" style distribution of masks won't help that much in a pandemic that disproportionately spreads among the poor and where the more people wearing the mask, the better.
  • bleepblorp 6y ago
    National government public debt, held by a government that borrows its own currency, is not the same as private debt. For all intents and purposes, it doesn't have to be paid back.
    • trentnix 6y ago
      Then it's cronyism - the government gives free resources to one set of manufacturers and the rest are on their own. And do you think the government handed out that money based on merit? Or based on lobbying, political preferences, or name recognition? As Friedman famously asked - who are the angels that are supposed to make these wise, unbiased decisions on our behalf?
      • MiroF 6y ago
        > Or based on lobbying, political preferences, or name recognition? Ah yes, as opposed to the rational private market of large capital investments to create new industries, which is apolitical and has no cronyism /s (never mind no price incentive to massively invest in large-scale manufacturing for a temporary pandemic)
        • trentnix 6y ago
          The market at least has a means of rewarding the rational and punishing the irrational. As you imply, cronyism is how irrational advantage is gained. And price controls are another form of cronyism, as they exclusively protect the entrenched in a market from competition.
          • MiroF 6y ago
            There is no "the market." To some extent, I agree with you for publicly traded markets. I do not think it even remotely holds in the illiquid limit of massive-scale private capital investment markets. I would rather that power be wielded by actors exercising public power shaped by institutional constraints than by private actors who can wield it in an arbitrary manner, particularly in the context of a pandemic where there is a huge societal difference between 10 $10 masks and 100 $1 ones.
            • trentnix 6y ago
              On the contrary, there is nothing but the market. It can be free, controlled, or somewhere in between. Capital is always traded for goods and services, but it’s not always financial capital.
      • bleepblorp 6y ago
        Making collective decisions to allocate resources to support needs that markets will not, or cannot, do is precisely why governments exist. Governments that are democratically accountable to the people are far more likely to create outcomes that support collective social needs than are business owners who are accountable to no one. The fact that the United States does such a poor job of this is an indictment of poor governance, and lack of democratic accountability, than a weakness of the principle of government in general. Other countries do far better at this--note the universal availability of rated masks in places like Korea and Japan from day one of the pandemic--and there is a reason the US is ranked 22nd, and falling, for public corruption.[0] [0] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2018/results/usa https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2018/results/usa