Two weeks ago, during a March 17 address to the nation in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, President Donald Trump asked that Americans work from home, postpone unnecessary travel, and limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people.

And last week, on March 27, Trump signed a stimulus package of over $2 trillion dollars to provide relief to an economy on the precipice of collapse.

The aid package includes handouts and loans to individuals, small businesses, and other distressed industries.

In the early days of the outbreak, pundits rushed to the ramparts of Twitter to proclaim that “there are no libertarians in a pandemic.” However, this glee at the apparent failure of markets was soon dashed as more evidence accumulated showing that government intervention was actually the main impediment to success. From an economic standpoint, the channels by which government failure accumulated were legion:

Knox County mayor Glenn Jacobs, known worldwide as Kane, recorded a heartfelt video message for his constituents after eight of them committed suicide within forty-eight hours. His sober take on the human cost of the COVID-19 lockdown is too rare in today’s politics.

The coronavirus crisis and the government’s response are not going away anytime soon. Every day that is becoming clearer.

In his Man, Economy, and State, Murray N. Rothbard investigates not only the role of the capitalist but also that of the entrepreneur in a market economy. Rothbard uses the theoretical concept of the evenly rotating economy (ERE) to compare the role of the capitalist to that of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs earn profits in so far as they successfully correct the maladjustments in the real economy and move it closer to the ERE without ever attaining that state.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has halted economies across the globe. With various countries on lockdown and companies unable to continue production, an economic downturn is inevitable. In light of this, the government of Denmark has come up with a strategy to avoid recession—paying 75 percent of private employees’ salaries.

One of my fondest books as a child was Doctor at Timberline, by Charles Fox Gardiner. Gardiner was a doctor early in the settlement of western Colorado in the nineteenth century. Each chapter of the book is a self-contained story of his experiences tending to the ailments of mostly men in mining towns, ranches, and lonely cabins high in the Rockies.

So far in March, the data indicates that the yearly growth rate of our measure for US money supply (as measured by the AMS metric) stood at 10.5 percent against 6.6 percent in February and 1.7 percent in March last year.

Given that the Fed is busy throwing money at the economy as if there were no tomorrow, it is tempting to suggest that the momentum of the AMS is likely to increase further and that consequently runaway inflation could emerge in no time.

African governments have joined the global lockdown bandwagon as they press for an urgent halt to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.