There are people with actual skin in the games, you know, their lives. Your business goes under it sucks but you won't die.
Only in America would people legitimately make the argument that it's ok to expose people to risk because people someone is losing money.
Who are you to put a value on my loved ones lives? 1/100 chance, 1/1000 chance, why does any of that matter? Fuck your business, it won't bring my parents back. It won't replace scarred lung tissue in COVID survivors or heal neurological damage.
Preventable death and disability, especially using easy measures like mask wearing and lockdown, should always be preferred over monetary issues.
Modern American values are morally corrupt and disgusting.
You do realize that this "somebody losing money" in the aggregate relates not just to some cliche notion of greedy capitalists getting angry about a few less bags of money. Instead it literally means economic ruin possibly hitting millions of people and less directly causing tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, not to mention destroyed families, individual lives and all sorts of psychological and social consequences that go far, far beyond simple greed.
Everything in the world fits along some scale of costs and benefits, and your emotional reaction shouldn't get to ignore that. Your loved ones lives literally do have to balance against the possible consequences to the lives of other people and their own loved ones due to one set of policies vs. another.
By your basic logic of who is anyone to put a value on people's lives due to varying risks of X negative thing happening, we could ban a whole pile of things that people need because somewhere, somehow, these things will indeed cause some people to die. I'm not comparing it to the current severity of COVID, but the flue alone kills tens to hundreds of thousands per year. Does this mean that the whole world should be annually locked down against relatively marginal risks?
The economic debate around the costs of quarantine isn't just about modern american values being "corrupt and disgusting", it's a global consideration that I promise you, billions of people are deeply worrying about in many other countries.. I live moving between two different countries that aren't the United States and which both make many cultural efforts to separate their values from those of Americans, and in both of them, the domestic economic question is causing the same enormous worry and resistance to prolonged quarantines that millions of Americans are also worried about..
I mean, what modern specifically american values? Being able to stay economically solvent? No dude, that's worldwide, and especially among vast parts of the population that don't live under a strong social safety net or with the privilege of enough money or work-from-home opportunities to comfortably sit out the pandemic while criticizing others as greedy.
Filing for bankruptcy will never, ever be equivalent to someone dying from willful negligence because you wanted to keep you business open.
Full stop. There's no argument you could make, it's never going to be equivalent and there's nothing you can say that will balance that out.
I say again, fuck your business. Any size of business. Small family business, large corporation, hot dog stand. If you can't it open, safely, without getting people killed, then you're toast.
Any argument you make is just muddying the waters. This is very clear and unambiguous.
You're either being deliberately emotional and obtuse, or you're trolling, because your argument is so absolutist that it becomes absurd.
It even works against itself, like so, to rephrase your own words: "If you can't shut down the economy and force all normal social activity to cease without getting people killed, then you're toast"
Since you obviously can't claim that your extreme insistence doesn't cause such a level of harm (and it would, directly or indirectly), somebody else could argue just as forcefully against your own idea because it will destroy their lives or lead to the death of some loved one. This is why I mentioned the very important question of balancing harms and outcomes. How can that be so hard to understand on a rational level?
As the other reply said, virtually any activity can be deadly in some context and it's impossible to promise it can't possibly be. This was the case before COVID and it's the case now too. I assume you participated in normal social and economic activity before the pandemic, thus you could also call yourself a hypocrite in cherry picking your starting point for moral outrage.
This logic does not work. You must make a choice to balance risks, because EVERYTHING has risks. Aggregate economic ruin kills people.
By your logic, you shouldn't be able to sell cars, food, practice medicine, go for a walk, run, play sports, do ANYTHING AT ALL because all of these things could injure or kill you or others.
Only in America would people legitimately make the argument that it's ok to expose people to risk because people someone is losing money.
Who are you to put a value on my loved ones lives? 1/100 chance, 1/1000 chance, why does any of that matter? Fuck your business, it won't bring my parents back. It won't replace scarred lung tissue in COVID survivors or heal neurological damage.
Preventable death and disability, especially using easy measures like mask wearing and lockdown, should always be preferred over monetary issues.
Modern American values are morally corrupt and disgusting.