James Grant is editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, which he founded in 1983. He is the author of nine books, including Money of the Mind, The Trouble with Prosperity, John Adams: Party of One, The Forgotten Depression, and more recently Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian. In 2015 Grant received the prestigious Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in business journalism. James Grant is an associated scholar of the Mises Institute.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

It has now become commonplace to accuse anyone who opposes covid lockdowns of being “antiscience.” This sort of treatment persists even when published scientific studies suggest the usual prolockdown narrative is wrong. support the antilockdown position.

There are sociological, economic, and cultural reasons why experts will take the politically popular position, even when the actual scientific evidence is weak or nonexistent.

According to some commentators such as economics Nobel Laureate Paul Romer, technical knowledge is key to economic growth. But if this is the case, why do third world economies continue to experience poverty? After all, individuals in these economies have access to the same technical knowledge as the developed world.

Careful examination, however, shows that a key driver of economic growth is the pool of consumer goods, or the subsistence fund.

Negative rates are the destruction of money, an economic aberration based on the mistakes of many central banks and some of their economists, who all start from a wrong diagnosis: the idea that economic agents do not take more credit or invest more because they choose to save too much and therefore saving must be penalized to stimulate the economy. Excuse the bluntness, but it is a ludicrous idea.

Keep the definition of “maximum employment,” as explained by the Federal Reserve, forever in mind; and remember it every time an economist or central planner uses it to justify their interventions in your life:

Last week, Thomas Jordan, the chairman of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) appeared on national television, stating:

The SNB still regards both foreign currency interventions and negative interest rates as vital to stem appreciation pressure on the Swiss franc…