Information on total deaths through March 28 shows no indication of a general surge in deaths in the United States. It’s quite possible we’ll see April’s total mortality begin to show levels well above normal, but the weekly data we have so far show no indication of this.

We now have data up through week 13 (the week ending March 28) for this year, as can be found here. As of April 15, the week 13 data is not yet quite complete, although the CDC lists that data as 93 percent complete.

On this episode of Part Of The Problem, Dave Smith interviews Jeff Deist. Dave and Jeff discuss the future of a Post COVID-19 world; how rights once taken are rarely given back; and how a free market would be better prepared for a crisis than our system of regulation.

On Tuesday in an interview with Reuters, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath, said that one hundred countries seek pandemic aid.

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The CDC estimates that 61,000 Americans died from the flu during the 2017–18 flu season (with a range of 46,000 to 95,000 deaths). Few of us even remember that event. Stores stayed open, folks met and worked, and everyone lived as normal.

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Unlike the federal government, state and local governments in America can’t just create money out of thin air. So when tax revenues go down, that money is simply not available to the state legislatures and city councils anymore. These governments either have to borrow the money or raise taxes and hope the tax hike itself doesn’t cause total revenue to fall.

This text is excerpted from the introduction to Anatomy of the Crash, a Mises Institute ebook released in April 2020.

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It was autumn 1989. Momentous things were taking place in the world.

The Berlin Wall had fallen. The people of the Eastern Bloc had succeeded at getting to the West through Hungary. The firm line between east and west was wavering. The situation was moving away from the course that Warsaw Pact communist governments had charted: that their populations must remain captive within the borders of the Communist Bloc.

It was unclear whether this social contagion for freedom would spread into Czechoslovakia.

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Expertise is distributed across thousands of different minds in the medical community. The only way to counteract the spread of an infectious illness such as the coronavirus is to take an all-hands-on-deck approach, allowing innovators in the field to advance new solutions as unique challenges emerge.