I write this on March 18, now having watched a 180-degree reversal of how we think about contagious disease. Formerly, we would put sick people in quarantine and respect the right of healthy people to go about their lives. Now we are on the brink of martial law. In our zeal to fight the coronavirus, we are shutting down travel, public gatherings, restaurants, etc.

This is what a mass panic looks like.

Last month, I wrote an article exploring some of the issues associated with having completely open borders between political units within a larger political entity.

An argument that is often used to support government intervention relies on “negative externalities.” People’s behavior, it is claimed, sometimes generates avoidable costs for others in this way: you do something in order to gain an advantage over someone else. But that person may try to do the same thing to you. Even if he doesn’t, he will at least take measures to counter what you did to him. Your attempt to gain an advantage thus fails, and you would both be better off if you were put back at your starting point.

In February, the general consensus between large investment banks and supranational entities was that there would be a one-time hit to GDP in the first quarter due to the impact of the coronavirus, followed by a stronger, V-shaped recovery. The IMF expected a modest correction of global GDP of 0.1 percent, and the largest cut on estimates for 2020 growth was 0.4 percent.

Those days are gone.

F.H. Buckley, a Canadian lawyer, political philosopher, and economist who now teaches at the Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, has written a book that challenges conventional wisdom and is all the better for that. America, he tells us, is so bitterly divided that we should consider breaking it up into several separate countries. To do so would not be without risk, but it has many advantages. People tend to be happier in smaller countries, and as Buckley makes clear, this is no accident.

The money supply growth rate rose again in February, climbing to a 37-month high. The last time the growth rate was higher was during February of 2017, when the growth rate was 7.9 percent.

In its emergency announcement on Sunday evening, the Fed assured us that it “is prepared to use its full range of tools to support the flow of credit to households and businesses and thereby promote its maximum employment and price stability goals.” The Fed put its (fiat) money where its mouth is by announcing a host of programs.

The issue of whether government in America can quarantine persons against their will, ostensibly for their own health and that of others with whom they may come in contact, requires a dual analysis—one of the powers of the federal government and the other of the powers of the states. For constitutional analysis purposes, since local and regional governments derive their powers from the states in which they are located, the analysis of state powers pertains to them as well.

In Europe, the danger of “Japanization”—a long-lasting economic stagnation accompanied by expansionary monetary and fiscal policies (Schnabl 2015)—is now discussed more intensively, as the stagnation in southern Europe continues and the ultraloose monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) is widely expected to persist. Concerns about Japanization have been countered by the argument that after thirty years of stagnation the growth in Japan is high when calculated in the appropriate manner (Krugman 2015).

Americans, finally facing the prospect of the mano-a-mano portion of the 2020 presidential campaign, have already learned that previous complainers about the negativity, underhandedness, and attack-dog nature of politics didn’t know how good they had it.