Policymaking is not easy. And policymaking in a pandemic is harder still. The CARES Act is a huge expenditure package. Some of it is likely to promote a speedy recovery. But some of it will drag the recession out unnecessarily.
READ MOREOf course much is uncertain. The outcomes of racing in NASCAR, climbing Mount Everest, and launching into space are uncertain. Yet we allow adults to choose to race, climb, and launch. So, how can we forbid a patient with Covid-19 from taking experimental drugs?
READ MOREThe core realization we face right now is that it is not possible to stop and start an economy; nor is it possible to distinguish between essential and nonessential. The commercial society is a web in which everyone and everything is connected with everyone and everything else.
READ MOREFreedom isn’t some feel-good, amorphous chant. It’s in fact pro-life and pro-growth simply because free people acting without forced limits show us through their successes and failures how to get by, and thrive, in life.
READ MOREIf there is one lesson we should learn it is that diseases should be managed as medical matters, not opportunities for politicians and regulators to try out their theories and powers on the rest of the population.
READ MOREWinston Churchill famously said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” We are not at the end of the damage to the world economy from COVID-19, but we are, perhaps, at the end of the beginning. Here are our next steps.
READ MOREAfter all, it’s not the sellers of oranges, toilet paper or water bottles that put the “exploited” buyers in their current predicaments. In contrast, they’re the saviors that offer them a way out.
READ MORERather than accepting the epistemic limitations of the current crisis as a reason to abstain from aggressive policies, they double down on the same. And when their chosen courses go awry or fail to deliver on their promised salvation, history is rewritten to obscure the fact that such promises were ever made.
READ MOREFully entering into such a world, we really would be in George Orwell’s “newspeak:” coercion is liberty; command and control is freedom; political paternalism is self-realization; government planning is free association; collective decision-making is personal choice.
READ MOREThe Spanish Flu killed at least 50 million individuals in the span of a few months and contributed to a industrial production and commercial activity drop of between 16% to 25% in less than a year. Here are three prudent lessons on how to minimize long-term costs brought by temporary behavioral changes enacted to slow the propagation of the coronavirus.
READ MOREWhatever the causes of this uncharacteristic bit of non-litigiousness, Americans should know that ample legal precedents suggest that most shelter in place orders are unlawful and unconstitutional.
READ MOREThe only way to stimulate the economy is to liberate it. The people, all of us, need emancipation from the lockdown. And we need it now.
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