[nostromo]

If the government has required your legal business to close, you should be compensated for that. Just as if they take your land to build a road, they have to give you the fair market value of the land. Otherwise, if you're not being compensated, you should be free to stay open.

These are only "zombie companies" because they've been directly shuttered by the government.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I don't think this analogy is applicable. The government hasn't banned air travel, and the drop in demand is more of a second order effect as the result of minimizing potentially detrimental behavior (spreading the virus).

In general I don't believe the government is required to compensate businesses if regulation results in loss of business and possibly the loss of the business. As an example, look at CFC bans and fuel/emissions regulations. A company may suffer a loss and/or go out of business because of a regulation, but they can't demand compensation for that from the government.

[bpodgursky]

The government has, in fact, banned most international air travel.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

The US government hasn't banned most international travel for legal residents. There's a list of restricted countries that require legal residents coming from them to only go to specific airports with enhanced entry screening.

It has banned entry by foreign nationals from those countries, but I wouldn't call that banning most international travel.

https://www.dhs.gov/coronavirus/protecting-air-travelers-and...

[aaomidi]

Why are we prioritizing businesses before individuals?

Maybe our old system was inefficient and these dying companies should be left to die?

We can't say the same about people. Who are in fact in trouble, and a dying person is far more morally reprehensible than a company having to shut down.

[cameronbrown]

Businesses are people. They're just groups of people selling shit to other people, who likely do the same. Consumers are leaf nodes in this graph, so every business that dies due to lack of consumer demand could mean a dozen more are going to fall as a result.

Businesses failing == people poorer

[MisterBastahrd]

No they are not. Businesses are legal entities which have different standards of liabilities than people. The way to support businesses is not to make sure that the government hands them a wad of cash, but by handing a smaller wad of cash to individuals so that they can continue to fund businesses directly through the market. This has the benefit of also keeping corporate taxes flowing to federal coffers.

[AnimalMuppet]

If the people have money, but the company can't sell to them, what good does that do for the company?

And if the people want to buy from the company, but the company goes bankrupt before the people are allowed to buy, then giving money to the people didn't help the people (at least not with respect to this problem).

[asdff]

What good is giving money to a company that can't contribute to the economy? That's feeding a parasite. 70% of this economy is driven by consumer spending at the bottom, not by companies like Boeing covering their poor financial decisions. Giving a company like boeing money is fundamentally unproductive compared to giving it to the people, who would reinvest it into the most productive and critical aspects of the economy, not just who commands favorable defense contracts or golfs at Mar a Lago.

[cameronbrown]

Boeing is affected by consumer spending just as much as every company in existence.

> reinvest it into the most productive and critical aspects of the economy

How? People, really, really, really, want to go out and spend money right now, but it's impossible because everything is shut.

[bilbo0s]

>if they take your land to build a road, they have to give you the fair market value of the land

Yeah, well, in Wisconsin under Walker, a lot of our farm families learned the hard way that this is not always the case. (Foxconn). It depends on how badly they want your land. But, yeah, it can be perfectly legal for the government not to pay you fair market value.

But to your central point, the government doesn't have to compensate you for anything in an emergency. That's why when criminals rob a bank or Walmart and then hide out in your home unbeknownst to you, the police are free to grenade the place. Perfectly legal for them to leave you the burning hulk of what used to be your house and say, "Don't thank us!" It was an emergency. (Or at least, they'll say it was.)

[spaced-out]

The reason those businesses had to close is because we're in the middle of a pandemic that's killed ~50,000 people in 2 months. That sucks, but the government didn't cause this and doesn't owe the business owner any more than they owe any other citizen.

[chrisco255]

I agree that they should have never been shuttered by the government, but the die has already been cast. They can't undo the damage. What they did is equivalent to a scorched earth economic response to Covid-19. We're going to have to rebuild every industry we hurt. Some of those industries may never come back to the level they were (i.e. cruise ships). There's also fundamental shifts in consumer patterns that are occurring and will continue to occur as a result of economic uncertainty, trade battles with China, price shocks in response to supply / demand shocks, etc.

In the U.S. we also need to shift our consumption based economy to become more of a production based one, like we were 40 years ago. That kind of shift doesn't happen overnight.