- Sep 15, 2012
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The Unthinkable Cruelty and Inhumanity of the Coerced Shutdown
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On Wednesday of this week a prominent oyster provider for D.C. area restaurants was forced to let 350+ workers go. Readers can likely imagine that more than a few lack any kind of familial safety net. It’s also not unreasonable to guess that many won’t be receiving a $1,200 check on account of the under-the-table nature of their employment.
Such is the cruelty of economic contractions care of overdone hysteria and political force. The reverberations are broad. The seen is the empty restaurants; that, or restaurants reduced to a fraction of their former capacity in the form of curbside takeout. The unseen is, among other things, the brutality endured by the suppliers of those restaurants. Sick-inducing is that the 350 workers mentioned above are but a fraction of the total number who will have to figure out ways to get by without a paycheck given the forced shutdown of all “nonessential” businesses in various parts of the country. That all too many of these businesses were open, and thriving not too many weeks ago, is a reminder that politicians have a different understanding of “essential” than do investors, business heads, and employees.
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Someone temporarily losing their non-essential service job is nothing compared to the disaster that is happening in hospitals across the country, especially New York City.
Go to a hospital in New York City where they are running out of supplies and people are dying in such large numbers they had to bring in freezer trucks to hold all the bodies that are piling up. 500 dead a day now. Expected to up to 2,000 dead a day in two weeks. Had we locked up and stayed home a month earlier than this, these deaths would not be happening.