Was Man Made for The Economy or....?

There is an argument that with respects to coronavirus and its effects on the market, cooler heads should prevail and we should jump-start the corporations that are about to start bleeding capital along with their putative stock value by bailing them out, and well, maybe smaller businesses should get cheap loans or whatever, and a little bit of a payroll tax cut and a wad of cash on the nightstand should be just fine for the working folks. 

Those people should be pilloried. At best. The reason everything is falling apart isn't because the businesses are fucked. It's because the people are. We're fucked. We're mortal. We've built a widely interconnected just in time financial universe, and time is out of joint. We can't travel or function as we once did, and the economy is a lagging indicator of what is happening to us. To people. 

Extreme measures to flatten the virus “curve” is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) March 23, 2020

I am considered an "essential employee" because of my government work, and my husband and brother are both in food retail. We haven't stopped working. We've worked more. But this thing about assuming that some people, the workers lower on the chain, the presumably younger ones considered at "a lower risk" should be exposed (and therefore be at a risk of exposing others, like our parents) is a tip--we're invaluable and expendable at once. We are revenue-producers and without value in ourselves. We serve the economy, and not the other way about. And our pneumatic lungs juice the wheels of commerce!

Let's consider the possibility that maybe the stock market and the health of capital shouldn't be a stand-in for the health of humanity. Maybe the important thing is that people can eat. Stay in their homes. Have access to health care. Have basic security. And that mere suffering mortals aren't born into this world to make rich people richer. What if the maxim that "Man was not made for the Law, but the Law for Man" carried over to the economy? What if no one gave a good honest fuck if the stock price of every major industry fell through the floor and then another floor and then another, but we just focused on whether human beings could afford to live?

I don't know how long the virus is going to affect everything, I only know that the length is up to us, and if we want any kind of society, we need to take a long view. We need to protect one another. That is what society means. We take a hit for one another if we need to. If my husband cuts your meat, if my brother stocks your shelves, if my sister-in-law nurses your sick, if my brother-in-law keeps your machines running, you stop seeing our service as a right the economy deserves, but the lifeblood of the economy itself. We are it. The food service worker, the farmer, the bus drivers and train operators, the people out here, right now. The EMT and cops and firefighters and the other frontline folk the rich want to starve money from (because taxes pay salaries for some folks, don't you know). The health care workers whose hospitals might be starved for money, but who are keeping humans alive, or devoutly trying to. You tend to the people first. You backstop the people doing the work. Then maybe, we can worry about the "poor" money.

But people who don't understand that the only value money has is it's fungibility for real work and real goods, and is not valuable in itself? These people! How do they price/value themselves?

I don't know. But the idea that the stock market is more of a metric for our overall health than the evidence that a virus is killing folks is absurd and insane.