But do they hate them because they didnt provide government support as part of their response, or do they hate them because they think just doing nothing wouldn't have also destroyed their business when everyone got sick at the same time?

They hate them for inflating the currency, giving everyone stimulus and so many benefits it’s hard to hire, for forcing their businesses to shut down for months and have 50% of small restaurants go insolvent for “two weeks to slow the spread,” for forcing people to work from home suddenly and the productivity damages and delays initially caused…

There’s plenty to hate and more.

"giving everyone stimulus and so many benefits it’s hard to hire"

When did all of those benefits and stimulus for the common person end? It was September wasn't it with some states stopping them months before that yet the states that stopped them before are still having trouble filling jobs.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

The stimulus stopped as did some other programs like deferring rent payments.

Others did not though. Many people have private agreements with their landlords for payment, and some cities have their own policies. Some are still collecting unemployment. Many just have never reentered the workforce. For example, many “Baby Boomers” decide this was retirement time and retired en-masse instead of being spread out.

And then there is the whole “Great Resignation” going on for the rest.

This is a pretty mask-off (excuse the pun) moment in your argument. So to protect small businesses we shouldn't have paid people at all or closed down at any point and we'd have more than a million dead Americans but at least workers would still be as expendable?

You don't get to call us "essential workers" and treat us like shit. This is the first time in my living memory McDonald's and co raised their starting wages. Line cooks were the most impacted and it was the most dangerous job last year. You want that to be worse, for small businesses to survive?

I can reincorporate "Drekk Design Studio", the line cook can't re-enter his mortal coil. We should have paid everyone every month of the pandemic and enforced these public health measures like Germany (1 in 10 infected vs the US 1 in 3).

> we'd have more than a million dead Americans

We would? How do you know?

Nobody guarantees small businesses the right to exist. Sure nobody can plan for a pandemic but the government’s responsibility is to society at large, not the plight of small business owners.

> Nobody guarantees small businesses the right to exist.

This is a bit of a dead end argument. By the same token, nobody guarantees that there is food in the supermarket for people to purchase. Yet, if there wasn't, and 90% of us starved, it'd be a fairly major problem. Small businesses and their employees make of roughly half of "society at large".

Okay, society at large has 47.5% of its people employed by small businesses. If you removed their right to exist, you’d have 50% unemployment.

Also, what the heck? The Supreme Court has ruled businesses have some constitutional protections repeatedly.

Jobs don't magically disappear like that.

You don't think society needs small businesses? Out big businesses for that matter, as many big businesses received bailouts. Personally I would say a healthy society requires a good number of businesses.

If we'd had total lock-down for two weeks it would have slowed the spread and businesses might have been able to re-open. Instead we had half-assed lockdowns forever.