As the coronavirus crisis shuts down the economy and calls come for bailouts to save businesses that have seen their revenues plummet, complaints across the political spectrum come about bailouts for businesses that have engaged in stock buybacks. For example, Rep. Katie Porter, a California Democrat, complained that United Airlines shouldn’t seek congressional support because it spent $3 billion on buybacks, and Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, proposed banning buybacks as one of a series of conditions of government relief. Anyone making blanket condemnations of stock buybacks is either confused or otherwise fundamentally unserious — and proposing counterproductive policies that will slow the recovery.

Let’s start with what a buyback is, since even many financial journalists do not understand this : A corporation purchases stock from its shareholders. It’s economically indistinguishable from a special dividend, where a corporation pays out money to every shareholder, except it permits shareholders to elect their own tax consequences, unlike a dividend that creates a tax event immediately.

Would United be worse off if it had spent $3 billion on dividends instead of buybacks? In each case, United has $3 billion less, and shareholders have $3 billion more that they can invest in something else, growing the economy. Moreover, buybacks protect shareholders from dilution that can occur when employees are compensated with stock options. And shareholders usually prefer stock options as a cheaper means of paying and incentivizing executives than the large cash bonuses that executives would otherwise demand to realize the same expected after-tax income.

Some say that United could have retired debt or paid workers more. But it’s expensive to retire low-interest debt, and many bonds have “make-whole” provisions penalizing early redemptions that mean no money is saved by doing so. It also sends a bad signal to the market to say a corporation doesn’t have anything better to do with its money than invest it in debt paying 3%. United did pay workers windfall bonuses, so the complaint that it should have paid more is simply a complaint that owners shouldn’t realize the benefits of profits. And either way, United would be in the same cash flow position as it is now.

Some say that United should have held on to the cash. But United still had $6 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter. It wouldn’t be any better off now with $9 billion in the bank instead of $6 billion; the difference covers less than a month of expenses in a once-in-a-century economic shock far worse than Sept. 11 was for the airlines. United could access credit lines — but banks will want United to lay off grounded workers to reduce expenses, which is what we don’t want United to do.

When we say families should keep three to six months of savings in cash, it is because families have one or two income streams, rather than millions of customers. The variance is much higher to an individual family in a recession than to a business, and a family needs more of a cushion. But it makes no sense for a business to plan for a 90% loss of revenue. Shareholders don’t want corporations to hold on to cash, especially in a low-interest-rate environment. Shareholders want to invest. If shareholders wanted to invest in big stockpiles of cash, they wouldn’t be shareholders.

Proposals to ban buybacks are effectively proposals to demand corporations hold such huge stockpiles of cash, depriving shareholders of investment choices. Such proposals will backfire by slowing down the economic recovery when money that could be invested is instead held in corporate bank accounts, doing nothing.

Bailouts can be bad and encourage moral hazard. And it’s important to make the rules clear to prevent lobbyists working with Congress to pick winners and losers. Small businesses shouldn’t be disfavored in the political process. And some corporations may have acted irresponsibly by being too heavily leveraged. A bailout should be structured as a combination of compensation (for the positive externality of keeping workers on the payroll that a profit-maximizing corporation would otherwise lay off) and a senior loan to ensure shareholders and other creditors are sharing the burden with taxpayers.

But adding additional strings and turning government officials into CFOs will slow any post-vaccine recovery, and we should resist using a national emergency to do more than get the economy on its feet as soon as possible.

Ted Frank (@tedfrank) is director of litigation at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute (@hamlinclaw).