Ayn Rand Institute applies for and receives government bailout.

Not surprising, she was on welfare for years. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/

Hey, religious fundies, you should be pissed about this.
Ayn Rand hated religion's stinking ever-loving guts more than Richard Dawkins could ever dream of.
If you worshipped Jesus instead of the dollar sign, she hated you.
She said so in no uncertain terms.

Lemme guess, this'll be item kajillion on the "mulligans", list, just so long as Trump pays lip-service to protecting white fetuses.

I also took aid from the government during lockdown. Here’s the argument. The government took the money I could have used to save up for an emergency such as this. I paid into the system and they created the conditions that lead to the shutdown of the economy, thus creating the conditions that forced me into a position where I had to use unemployment insurance that I , again, paid into. The government also has created little incentives for people to save money and instead has incentivized people to borrow and go into debt. If I were allowed to keep that money instead and if the government hadn’t forced this upon me, I probably would have kept my job, thus not needing to go on unemployment in the first place and I probably could have saved money for such an occasion. In short, the government put me in this situation, they can bail me out instead of bailing out big corporations that aren’t deserving of it.

Hypocrisy is a thing? I find that utterly shocking.

Would you have? I'm not being at all snarky here and trying to attack you. We have a number of studies from around the world, showing that this isn't really the case. People tend not to save as much as they really should, or are unable to save, without significant help.

Okay, what could any government have done to prevent the need to shutdown the economy? We now know that the virus had spread to the US before anyone had realized the severity of the issue. Even if one had locked down the borders of the US at the point when the first person was identified as having the virus, it would have been too late to stop it from spreading here.

Your employer paid significantly more into the unemployment fund than you did.

At the behest of the large corporations that fund political campaigns of most candidates.

Except behavioral economists have shown (both through observational studies as well as experiments) that this isn't the case for 99% of the population. If someone has extra money in their pocket, they tend to spend it, rather than save it. Indeed, our entire economic system, hinges upon the idea that it is better to spend than save. This is true regardless of whether one looks at the US, or countries that are more socialist. It is possible that things would be different if one lived in a society that was completely free-market, but we're talking about gambling with human life here, and it actually violates various ethical rules to run such an experiment.

You're going to have to explain how the government could have stopped the spread of this disease without shutting down the economy for this to make sense.

We shouldn’t have gotten to the point where the government had to shut down the economy in the first place. There were warning signs as far back the Obama administration that predicted a pandemic was coming. I point you to the famous Bill Gates speech. Let’s not forget the Bush administration creating a pandemic response team or whatever it was called. If the government had their shit together, it may not have gotten to this point.

As for my former employer paying more into unemployment insurance than me, fuck em’. They didn’t even attempt to try to give me part time hours or call me back to work when things opened back up. I should have milked unemployment until the bitter end, but I did “the right thing” and took a job that I didn’t want to take and that I have issues with because my mama taught me no to be like the lazy piece of shit that stays on the government dole their whole life even when they’re totally capable of working.

What on earth makes you think that even if we'd have had our shit together that we wouldn't have had to shutdown the economy? Every other country on the planet that is seeing a decline in virus numbers has shutdown their economy for at least some period of time. Are you trying to say that those countries didn't have their shit together? Or that we could have somehow done something that they didn't and this would have enabled us to avoid shutting down the economy? If so, what would that have been? And where's your answers to my other questions?

That's literally how none of this works. First of all, unemployment only lasts for a set period of time, as does welfare. The ability of someone to stay on the government dole for life hasn't been true since at least the Clinton administration, if not before. Next, your taxes pay for those things, so why not take advantage of them? After all, if you're willing to take advantage of things like unemployment because your taxes paid for at least a portion of it, why shouldn't you be willing to avail yourself of all the other things that your taxes pay for as well? Not trying to be snarky here at all. When the economy cratered out in '08, I lost my job and spent 4 months on unemployment because I couldn't even get an interview, let alone a job offer. I wound up taking the first job offered to me because it paid $20/wk more than unemployment did. Had I gone and applied for food stamps, I would have probably turned that job down, since it wouldn't have paid me as much as unemployment and food stamps combined would have. It turned out to be a really shitty job, and for much of the time that I was working it, I was unable to look for another job or go for interviews if I did find a potentially better job. But it did keep me from going completely batshit crazy because I had nothing to do for most of the time, except send out resumes and fill out job applications. So maybe it was good that I took it, but perhaps had I not taken it, I would have found a much better job than I wound up with and I'd be better off today. I don't know. I do know that if I ever find myself in such a situation again, I'm going to sign up for every single benefit the government has to offer so that I don't have to grab the first job dangled in front of me and I can take something more inline with my skills and interests. YMMV.

You want to expand on that? The Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit was established in 2015. Was there another team established during the Bush administration?

Another thing to note for @Federal Farmer, while American households got $1200 in stimulus money (more or less) plus unemployment benefits, Congress members and governors received substantially more in COVID-19 stimulus money than the average American. As did billionaire Kanye West and lobbyists.

That's what you should be angry about. Not the fact that employers pay into an unemployment insurance fund (that money was never going to be yours unless you actually qualify for unemployment). Unemployment insurance and other social safety nets should be made more robust, not eliminated. These safety nets help when we face unprecedented things like a pandemic because they are able to help the average American from being homeless or dying.

Obama improved upon the Bush pandemic response team, and left the incoming administration a pandemic playbook (literally). Trump gutted the pandemic response system.

Yes I’m aware of that. What is the Trump administration, government. The government ( Trump administration) didn’t have its shit together. Past health scares like SARS and Ebola, we didn’t have to go through the shit China did. That @The Night Funky what makes me think we might not have had to shutdown the economy. You even pointed out that you started the thread back in January and that if you noticed a problem back then, then the Trump administration should have too instead of blaming his distraction on impeachment.

@Federal Farmer you seem to have fallen into the common trap of forgetting there are many dozens of other countries besides the US that can be looked at for reference, and for the most part successful responses have involved locking things down.

Neither SARS or ebola are as contagious as this virus. Also, if you paid attention to the thread, you'll have noticed that researchers figured out not too long ago that the first people to get sick with the virus in the US happened in November, which is roughly the same time that the US government was said to have gotten the first inclinations that the disease was something to watch out for. At this point in time, the disease hadn't even been sequenced yet, so the only way it could be identified was when someone developed symptoms. That could take up to 14 days to happen, and who knows how many people might have been infected during that period of time? Don't forget that they hadn't even pinned down the route of transmission at this point.

Next, every other developed nation in the world has some version of the CDC. Most of them probably aren't as large as ours was before Trump gutted it, and they might not have had the kind of stockpiles of supplies that we were supposed to have, but they certainly had as much information (if not more) than what I had when I started the thread. Those nations all locked down in response to the outbreak, and did it before the US. Sweden being the main exception to that, and even they have admitted that they should have locked down their country in response to the outbreak, rather than remaining open as they did. We have two models, proven by real-world experience, to contrast the US response with. The one that had the lowest number of deaths was the one that had countries locking down. You're now trying to say that there was a third method. What is it? Telling everyone to mask up? How do you think that would have gone in January? I cannot see any way in which it would not have been politicized by one party or the other at that point in time. Flip things to the Obama era, and it still would have been politicized. Certainly, I think that Obama might have done things which slowed the spread sooner than Trump, but if nations that don't have the kind of political discord and strife as ours still had to do a lockdown to prevent the virus from spreading, then I don't see what any US administration could have done to stop the outbreak, other than locking down the country. If you've got some ideas, then let's hear them.

Uh huh. The basis of all social services is that capitalism takes away the surplus value of people's work.

Rand was all about self-interest. It's not inconsistent or hypocritical to argue that social welfare is bad for society generally but in one's individual interest to take it when offered.

You run into an irony when you have situations like this: people who have been brought up to hold the government in contempt, regard government employees as second rate and dismiss (other) people who avail themselves of government services as freeloaders (they never see themselves this way) create a recipe for what we have now. Ronald Reagan summed it up when he said "Government is not the solution to our problems, government IS the problem." If you believe that, it's easy to rationalize paying civil servants relatively poorly and starving them of resources to do their jobs. Then, of course, the attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which becomes the justification for the attitude. It's interesting to me that in countries where the attitude toward the government is less hostile and civil servants have more prestige that things have overall gone better.

I’m just taking back the money they stole.

If you had kids, would them getting benefits just be them getting back money the government had stolen from you?

Justify it however you want. You fell on hard times and took a “bailout”. If you weren’t such a brainwashed moron you’d recognize there’s literally nothing wrong with that and that’s why a lot of us argue for these programs to exist in the first place. The whole point of the unemployment insurance system is to allow for people to lose their jobs and be able to put food on the table until they can find a proper job in their respective field instead of wasting their talents and another job opening doing something that’s totally outside their wheelhouse. Otherwise you end up in situations like 2008 where grads couldn’t get entry level jobs because they were all taken by mid level and upper level employees who had been laid off.

Precisely. Hence, socialism.

I hate to break it to you, but odds are you receive more in benefits than you pay in taxes.

Not likely considering all of the years I’ve paid in and didn’t take unemployment. Plus all of the years I paid for SS that I’ll likely never receive.

SUI isn't deducted from an employee's paycheck. The employer pays that.

Y'know what's easier than doing mental gymnastics to hold onto a belief?
Abandoning the belief.

If only that were true.