contricusc
Member
Yes, we know what happened, which is everyone got exposed to Covid despite all the lockdowns and closed borders. All the economic damage has been caused without any benefits. Now Covid is circulating freely and we no longer have lockdowns, closed borders and mask mandates. This is proof that the measures failed and after a few years everyone understood the futility of such insanity. What we got was two years of economic pain, travel restrictions and personal freedoms being abused with nothing to show for.We don't know what could have happen, we only know what actually happened. On the other hand, you could look at death's statistics to see what happened, like with heatwaves.
The subsidies are never a necessity. They are always a choice, usually a poor one. By subsidizing the cost of energy for the end user, you are artificially keeping a higher demand than what would happen in a market economy where the price influences demand. The cure for high prices is high prices, because it destroys demand. If the governments didn’t waste so much money on subsidies, the demand for gas in Europe would have fallen, and with it the price. The subsidies helped to keep the prices higher for longer.Sorry but the entire post makes zero sense whatsoever. The most obvious example is the last sentence of the first paragraph: The subsidies are a political choice, not a necessity or a cost of the war. This is a complete… rubbish, really. The subsidies (particularly and especially in this case) are a necessity because they eliminate or, rather, reduce the severity of the shock to the economy and functioning of the society. These that you do not consider to be costs are going to have to be repaid by the same society (perhaps a different generation(s)) and in multiplied terms due to the borrowing rates. However, these subsidies allowed this society to move through, over, and forward (at least for the time being anyway because this could be debated further) because the “government” is a single entity that is large enough and has the ability to borrow this astronomical amount of money on behalf of the said society. There could be questions about the use (or redistribution) of the funds and so on, but I do believe questioning the necessity or excluding these as costs is simply silly.
I will stop here because we are going off topic, so we’ll have to agree to disagree on the economic implications of the war.