In the increasingly polarized America, Black Swan moments like the COVID-19 pandemic have further confirmed growing divides in the country. Our textbooks would like us to believe that emergencies create fertile grounds for unity. But when you have a populace that is politically dividing itself even when it comes to the TV shows it watches, there comes a point when we have to start recognizing that the prospect of national unity is becoming more of a mirage as the days go by.

Sometimes critics of praxeology make this complaint about it. Praxeology is supposed to be logically deduced from the concept of action (Mises) or from the action axiom (Rothbard). If so, these deductions should be set down in rigorous form. We need to know what exactly follows from what. To do this, ordinary language isn’t adequate. Praxeology should be formalized, using mathematical logic. Then, we would be able to tell whether the deductions really worked.

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.]

[An interview with Dr. Hulsmann, originally published in German by Die Freie Welt.]

As a result of the corona crisis, economic life was severely restricted in many countries. How long can the economy take this?

In a column containing a rebuke of the Mises Institute, Medium Marker writer Will Oremus has come up with what he fervently believes is The Explanation for the empty shelves in big-box and grocery stores that once had toilet paper for sale.

With the spread of the coronavirus, leaders across the United States are dipping into their governing toolboxes—treasure troves of both so-called legitimate and usurped power—in order to attempt to stop the virus’ spread. The federal government has suggested social distancing and quarantining, while states have simply imposed compulsory mandates. Some cry that it is a necessity for the state to intervene, and that the market could not accomplish these measures. This begs the question of whether these measures could occur in a stateless society.

The relationship between ends and means has long been debated. For instance, the legacy of “the end justifies the means” traces back to Sophocles’s Electra four centuries before Christ, Ovid’s Heroides, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. And more recently, Leonard Read pointed out that if the ends are just hopes that will not, in fact, be achieved, they cannot justify means that infringe on others’ rights.