In your otherwise excellent editorial “Pelosi’s Taxpayer Ransom Demand”(Oct. 7), you write that “aside from money for beleaguered industries like airlines, there was very little stimulus at all.” This is a terrible mistake. You assume that the airline bailout would be stimulative. Yet, as you have noted in the past, and as academic research also shows, bailouts benefit mostly shareholders and creditors rather than workers. If this bailout were about workers, it would cost less than $2 billion—$50,000 (for six months of payroll) times 32,000 furloughed employees—not $25 billion. Bailouts create disincentives to restructure industries efficiently, and they create many moral hazards.
In short, bailouts spend taxpayers’ money not merely wastefully, but also destructively.
I’m a big fan of philosopher Christopher Freiman. And don’t miss Juliette Sellgren’s excellent podcast with Freiman.
Jenin Younes exposes the weaknesses of Gregg Gonsalves’s attacks on the Great Barrington Declaration.
“Be safer?” The United States has wiped out decades of hard-won prosperity by following the spirit-crushing injunction to “stay safe.” The lockdowns have destroyed the dreams of thousands of entrepreneurs and have put millions out of work, leaving cities like New York moribund ghost towns. The school closures are consigning millions of children worldwide to stunted lives due to delayed, if not now permanently deferred, acquisition of reading, writing, and socialization skills. Children are being inculcated into a culture of fear.
