19 Mar A Free-Market Economist’s Thoughts on Coronavirus
What answers can free-market thinking offer in the face of COVID-19? Read the Full Article here: >National Review...
What answers can free-market thinking offer in the face of COVID-19? Read the Full Article here: >National Review...
“Only connect!” reads the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. That phrase possibly encapsulates Forster’s entire philosophy. It is also contrary to the current commands of our authorities and the mass media: Stay home! Keep inside! Close down! Quarantine! Be afraid! Socially distance! Don’t gather...
In a piece on conservative liberalism, Dan Klein look at the response of conservatives like Smith, Hume and Burke to crises. For example, when the harvest was poor it was common for England to adopt free trade to import grain. Adam Smith argued that what...
The central problem now is how the Federal government can lend money to businesses that need it -- without a budget blowout. I proposed letting people borrow from the IRS which has a pretty good mechanism for getting repaid. Martin Lowy has a more detailed...
Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has invited people around the world to take a sober approach to life and social relations. But it has also spread a potentially worse contagion throughout society: panic. At the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website, James Agresti dispenses the...
The World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. As of Friday afternoon, there are 132,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and the global death toll has topped 5,000 people. The fast-spreading virus claimed 196 lives in Italy, on Tuesday alone. At this time, 90...
George Selgin Not long ago, the CMFA staff and I were preparing to officially launch The Menace of Fiscal QE, my book aimed at countering efforts to have the Fed undertake or otherwise fund off-budget government spending programs. Then came the crisis. Of course our plans were...
The coronavirus is reminding everyone that you cannot rely on government and that ultimately it is the private sector that will provide the solutions. Many nonmedical government officials and members of the media are predicting massive cases of COVID-19 and death, when in fact no...
You’ve seen the pictures on your social media feeds: Empty shelves across America. Panic-buying. Hoarding. You might have even seen comments from self-described socialists saying, “Here’s what the US looks like under capitalism in a crisis” and perhaps mocking people who point to regularly...
Momentous events usually leave strong memories on those who have lived through them, and those memories often become passed on to later generations in the form of historical interpretations of why and what had happened in the past. This has certainly been so in...