And without businesses there are no wages to pay workers. The problem is that the match between employees and business and the match between customers and business are both very valuable and can take a long time to replace (think about built up institutional knowledge, personal relationships which are how things really get done rather than formal structures, brand trust, etc). So you only really want to break those links if the business isn't viable and there's an economic need to redeploy those resources elsewhere.
You're absolutely right. Those things are important.
While businesses are shuttering down, they are essentially laying off massive amounts of people. Or they simply stop paying wages, or reduce those wages. That's already happening. All the things you mention between parentheses (institutional knowledge, personal relationships,...) are already in the process of being destroyed.
For instance, a significant part of the workforce works through outsourcing, temp contracts or freelancing. So, those contracts are now rapidly getting terminated in order to keep expenses down. Meaning that you get a domino effect.
At the same time, businesses will get a contribution that partly replaces lost income...
> an economic need
The idea of supporting people directly over businesses can be easily motivated: because the underlying motivation is to save lives.
Businesses can be rebuild. Lives can't. The ghoulish statistics media espouse every hour do represent very real people. Friends, family, co-workers,... You could apply calculus and "write off" a part of the population in order to safeguard businesses, but the true cost of dealing with a massive death toll is a collective mental trauma that will have lasting effects for generations to come.
The sad part is that there's not much middle ground. Many will die, many will impoverish. Whatever actions are taken now and over the next months and years, it's damage control.
Yes, agreed. Both businesses and individuals need support, and I think it would be reasonable to tie business support to them keeping their employees on the books.
