- Position‹5 of 8›
- Help businesses
- Argument
By helping businesses you are helping people
In helping local businesses, you are contributing to people's salaries and helping to keep people employed at this testing time.
The argument
This argument answers the charge that directing pandemic support toward businesses rather than individuals helps the wrong party. Its contention is that the distinction is largely false, because of how support reaches a business and what the business does with it. The circumstances are specific. Restaurants and bars have been forced to close their doors to patrons, so the trade they depend on has been removed by order rather than by any failure of their own. Many, however, are still able to serve food for pickup or delivery, which means the capacity to operate has not been destroyed — only the ordinary channel through which custom arrives. That leaves a business that can still function if revenue can be found for it. Two forms of support follow directly. Ordering food from these restaurants keeps trade flowing through the channel that remains open. Buying a gift card for a favourite bar goes further, because it transfers money now for a service to be delivered later, supplying cash at the point when the closure is biting rather than when it lifts. Both allow the business to keep cash coming in during the pandemic. The step that completes the argument concerns what that cash is for. A restaurant's largest commitment is to the people who work in it, and the reason cash flow matters is that it allows the business to keep its employees on staff. Support directed at the business therefore arrives at the employees, who retain wages and their jobs rather than losing both. Those employees are precisely the individuals that help is said to be owed to. Because the money reaches the people who depend on these businesses for work, by helping businesses you are helping people.
Context
Giving businesses your custom allows them to keep their employees on and helps families maintain an income.
Premises
Counter-arguments
If the end goal is to help people, why not just help the people directly. For every $1 spent at a business, the government takes a cut of it in taxes, the businesses takes some to cover operating expenses and a fraction of the whole dollar is spent on staffing. The $1 would fo far further if we gave it directly to the people that need it.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P3] If the goal is to help workers, help them directly.