I know there must be reasons and this is a dumb question, but I’m a bit of an abstract thinker and have trouble grasping it from a big picture presepctive. Can someone break this down for me? Can’t we all just kind of agree to just kind of… Reset some numbers or something?
Sincerely,
I’ve never taken an economics class in my life
In: Economics
What would be the effect of freezing all mortgages, rent, utility bills, car payments and all non-essential jobs. No income for anyone except essential functions to survive. Free food for everyone as well. Would this work to allow 95% of ppl to stay home?
>I’m a bit of an abstract thinker and have trouble grasping it from a big picture presepctive
How do you reconcile these two statements?
money is the answer to the underlying issue of scarcity of goods and services.
Since goods and services have a limited supply, we estimate their price with money, which describes the intersection between supply/demand.
If all goods and services were infinite in supply, it is possible that money wouldn’t exist at all.
I hope this helped!
There’s better answers from others on this thread, but the simplest way I can think of it is… Someone has to lose. You need to eat, pay rent, or whatever. To do those things, you have to either pay (which means you need to be working, or your employer has to pay you to not work), or the provider of that good/service has to give it to you for free and pay their employees to provide it. That’s in the “real” economy.
Now the share market is different, and that gets “paused” all the time. They have automatic suspension trading when the losses get too big in any single session, and that’s been activated a couple of times. To achieve this would be disruptive, but I suppose the stock exchange or government may be able to shut the whole thing down for an extended period.
We can. The US paused the stock market after a big dip a couple of times recently and closed it after 9/11. France is pausing all rents and utilities bills. Italy is pausing mortgage payments. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader in the UK, is asking for the same.
So we can do it. It’s just that in the US our government is so corrupt that they can’t even pass paid sick leave. Capitalism will be the death of thousands and many wont even know why.
fundamentally: you can’t pause the value people actually place on things. if beanie baby trading were banned 20 years ago and legalized today, would you be willing to pay 2000 prices?
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