Actually, my perspective is based on the draconian measures taking place as we speak.
Businesses are forced to close, many of those being small, family-owned businesses like restaurants, hair salons, feed stores, independent clothing stores, bakeries, and the entire service industry, etc...most of which function primarily as brick & mortar stores only, which means they can’t even look to transitioning to an online presence to stay open.
They will go bankrupt.
ALL their decades (if not generations) of hard work, sacrifice, contributions & support to local economy...many becoming pillars of the community & providing steady, stable employment and valuable services to their area.....GONE.
Exactly HOW LONG do you think these small mom & pops stores (the most beloved by the American people) can afford to continue paying rent for a business that is bringing in ZERO revenue?
As most of us already know, bills come every month whether we want them to or not, and certainly whether we have the money to pay them or not.
Small business owners shouldn’t have to dip into their retirement funds to sustain their closed business for an indefinite amount of time.
Meanwhile, corporate-owned businesses are raking in the profits that small businesses have lost because they ARE allowed to be open.
Wealthy stores like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Costco, etc...they have more business than they can handle & are hiring on the spot at reduced wages, often minimum wage.
My husband is friends with a professor from SMU who took a part-time job filling orders for Amazon because colleges are closed, and he is being paid minimum wage despite having multiple doctorate degrees.
Today our governor here in Texas has required that we wear masks in public or be fined $1,000.
WTF?!
It seems we aren’t even allowed to breathe fresh air anymore! I understand self-quarantine if you are sick, but why must the healthy be forced to stay indoors, wear masks & slather hand sanitizer all over our bodies like lotion?
Why is everyone complacent with these new Communist measures?
The "communist measures" are the result of the massive amount of control already given to our federal government. You see, almost everyone in the country is paying a whole lot more towards a federal tax than to their state. So the reason that small businesses are going to struggle right now is that the federal government has been robbing us for years. There isn't a state in this country that wouldn't be able to respond to a situation like this with funds to support small businesses better than the federal government is doing right now.
Still, the best way to have a defense against the federal government encroaching on the states is to have people live, because if a lot of people die, that is going to be a way to justify greater federal intervention. If people don't die, then there is a chance that this whole shelter in place thing will piss off enough people to cause a constitutional convention that might allow us to secede and dissolve the federal government.
There are too many people to start swinging the FEMA executive orders around as though they are going to mean something to over 300 million people. So you know, it is to our advantage that people live right now.
And yes, even though Dr. Phil has compared this with something mild on Fox News, people are dying from this in larger numbers when there is no shelter in place order. Look at Sweden that has no shelter in place order. My guess is that they are not stupid enough to keep posting COVID as the cause of death if it is not reasonable to do this because they are going to end up looking ridiculous in a couple of weeks if their numbers keep going up the way they are.
They are making themselves into a great example for comparison with how fast their death count is going up. There is no reason to assume that they are doing this to justify a shelter in place or anything else and they are going up a lot quicker than any location that implemented a shelter in place order. They have nothing to gain by posting their death count increasing this way and everything to lose if they keep going up like this.
So it is reasonable to assume that a lot of people could die from this and if a lot of people die, it is 100 times more likely that our freedoms will become more limited.
In addition to this, going from trying to justify your argument with the padded death counts and then the claim that the hospitals were all going to be rolling in dough because of the Medicare payments, to using the faces of small business owners as a poster child for supporting your position the same way Sally Struthers shows the face of a starving child to try to get money for Feed the Children doesn't really do the job on its own.
On its own, this is the same argument that people have used for the last hundred years to suggest that technology advancements were going to be detrimental to the workforce and put them out of a job. Every economics class in this country will go over these historical arguments and how they have already been proven false over and over again. There has always been a balance that has been created where the end of one job is met with the creation of a new one.
And there is still way too much money circulating in this country to assume that there are not new jobs outside of Walmart that are being created in the process. In my case, I am considered essential, so I am still working. However, my spending habits have not changed that much during this time. I already shopped for most everything besides food online and I have been spending basically the same amount of money and shopping the way I normally did throughout this whole time. So for myself and almost everyone that I shop from, nothing has really changed because of these measures
I mean, did people forget already that brick and mortar businesses were already going out of business in droves because of e-commerce. You're acting like this is some new development that started with the coronavirus, when this has been a complaint for the last 20 years. So I can't help but feel that your argument is not entirely sincere unless you were advocating that eCommerce were an enemy before these "draconian measures" were implemented.
