It is unlikely that pundits, politicians, and the general public have ever been so obsessed with numbers as they are right now. I speak, of course, of the numbers surrounding deaths and illnesses attributed to COVID-19.

For months now, every new day has brought new headlines about total COVID-19 infections, total deaths, and estimates put out by models claiming to predict how many deaths will soon occur.

Many of my readers, I imagine, are in this position. You have read Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty. Or maybe some other book by Rothbard, or Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism. Or maybe you have encountered the “argumentation ethics” of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You find what you read convincing, and you would say that you know that the free market views that these thinkers defend is correct.