In parlance of the crypto community, the USD is a shitcoin. It is centralized, has no issuance cap, it uses a traditional database with a weak consensus mechanism, and the team behind it keeps pumping and dumping.

Yeah but in the parlance of religious traditions, the USD is the Eternal Hope, whereas cryptos are cults. They're both faith-based, but one isn't a solution for the other.

I don't think we have a money problem here (interest rates are low, so little harm in borrowing at the moment), but rather a protect-the-moneyed-elite-at-any-cost problem. The government has a responsibility to take care of its citizens (which is redundant, since, at least in theory, we are the government), but it doesn't have a responsibility to any given business. I'm all for direct cash transfers to people right now, but I can't see any justification for keeping zombies on life support.

Obviously in the last recession, we lent the auto companies a lot of money. I think it was worth it, but there were big time strings attached, justifiably so. The Wall Street money, on the other hand, was mostly free and clear. We don't need TARP 2.0; we need a fundamental rebalancing of power. I don't know how we get there, but we can't continually socialize risk and privatize reward. It's such a fundamentally incorrect way to run society. I'm dismayed that of all the lessons we didn't learn in 2008, that that is one.