Mises Wire

If we're serious about increasing the capacity of our medical institutions, free trade and deregulation offer real solutions.

The fight against COVID-19 would benefit from a comprehensive deregulation of the market for testing. A brief look at India shows the damaging roadblocks to solutions that regulations impose.

Thirty million Americans are now unemployed, in part thanks to government "lockdowns." Meanwhile, unemployment in many cases doubles the unemployed person's risk of death through disease, suicide, or drug overdose.

Thanks to the growth of the state over time, political stakes have become much higher, and groups fear that they will be crushed by the other side if they lose. Crisis-induced cohesion is not a silver bullet, but rather a ticking time bomb.

Chile, like many other countries, needs to do this: cut taxes, deregulate, and limit spending.

The lockdowns of the past month have not been conducive to the common good. While they have saved the lives of many people, they have also endangered—and are still endangering—the lives and livelihoods of many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent.

The whole idea of government regulating so-called monopolies in order to promote competition is based on fallacies. If anything, such intervention only stifles market competition and lowers living standards.

With apologies to Frédéric Bastiat, this is how his great essay "The Seen and the Unseen" might read if applied to the current government-forced lockdowns forcing business owners into bankruptcy across America and the world.

New York and New Jersey have produced more COVID-19 deaths than the rest of the country combined. So politicians have repeatedly claimed that the nation is "two weeks behind New York" to drum up support for extreme lockdown measures.

We need to move beyond the stale platitudes of trying to fix politics in DC. The chattering class’s lamentation about the divisiveness of politics is frankly silly. In some ways, polarization is our friend.