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Former president George W. Bush has returned to the spotlight to give moral guidance to America in these troubled times.

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In economics, branding serves an important purpose. Brands allow people to economize on knowledge, a scarce resource. We make decisions with imperfect information, and brand labeling and trademarks help us navigate these decisions. As Thomas Sowell writes:

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The world seems to be on fire. A couple of months ago, the economic upswing was still firmly established, production expanded, and unemployment was declining. It all changed with the advent of the coronavirus or, to be precise: things turned really sour with the politically dictated lockdowns.

In responding to the coronavirus threat, governments around the world have committed themselves to a series of harmful and largely unnecessary policies which are likely to plunge the world into a prolonged economic depression. In the UK, the effect of our lockdown has been severe, with thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and billions in GDP simply wiped out of existence. The consequences of these outcomes will be profound and, in some cases, fatal.

Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
By Branko Milanovic
Harvard University Press, 2019
287 pages

It is in a time of crisis where the leviathan state has the greatest opportunity to grow. The global coronavirus pandemic has given cover to governments around the world to give into totalitarian instincts and implement authoritarian policies against their people. It is in times like this when an uncompromising defense of liberty and markets is needed most. We are grateful that people around the world have sought out the content of the Mises Institute to better understand the environment we find ourselves in, pushing traffic on mises.org to all-time highs.

Editor’s Note: We keep hearing from the Fed’s defenders that the current spate of new stimulus and bailouts from the central bank are really not a big deal and are all very prudent and moderate. I asked Senior Fellow Bob Murphy to provide some much needed perspective.

June begins and we are now two months past the dark days of the Great Lockdown, when the Dow closed at 18,592 points on March 23. Despite having no duty to protect the stock market, investor’s prayers were answered when the Fed announced one of the greatest anticapitalist interventions the nation has ever seen.

I think centralizing power is always a net loss for liberty. So did the founding generation. This is why the framers of the Constitution emphatically rejected a proposal to give the federal government veto power over state laws. It’s also why the first Congress rejected applying some provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states.