John Calhoun, among the most influential of America’s nineteenth-century statesmen, was born on March 18. As someone who served as a congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and vice-president to two presidents with whom he strongly disagreed (and with whom he sometimes fought as president of the senate), he deserves attention. But tarred by his defense of slavery, any attention Calhoun now gets seems to be negative (e.g., Yale changed the name of Calhoun College to distance itself from his position on slavery).

Although we’re told that strong governments are in the best positions to take action against pandemics, from the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, regimes have repeatedly failed to act, hid the truth, and were busy protecting their own reputations.

China’s rise as a global power has produced an immense number of books, articles, and analyses about what is behind the nation’s economic growth. But it isn’t a great mystery. The remarkable economic surge of China since the 1980s is based on the relatively liberal—relative to his predecessors—economic policies of Deng Xiaoping, who prioritized at least some limited access to property rights as the basis of China’s economic growth.

It is widely held that financial asset prices fully reflect all available and relevant information, and that adjustments to new information is virtually instantaneous.

A few days ago, I received an email addressing the ongoing COVID-19 situation from the Wyoming State Bar, of which I am a member. Attached to the email was a thirty-page PDF entitled Wyoming Judicial Branch: Respiratory Disease Pandemic Plan. The stated purpose is as follows:

People are understandably upset about the coronavirus epidemic, but if we’re not careful, an even greater danger lies ahead. Sinister forces in American political life are using the crisis to incite war with China and to stir up bad feelings towards the Chinese people. The Chinese people are in fact heroic. They are our friends, not our enemies. But the forces of evil want you to think otherwise.

In an emergency meeting yesterday, the Fed announced a new set of measures designed to combat the negative supply and demand shocks anticipated from COVID-19. The target for the benchmark federal funds rate (the rate at which commercial banks lend to each other) was cut to 0–0.25 percent and the discount window (the interest rate at which the Fed loans money—or, I should say, “money”—to commercial banks) was slashed to 0.25 percent.

In slashing its key interest rate to zero in response to the economic calamities imposed by all levels of government ostensibly to fight the coronavirus, the Federal Reserve System is trying to regenerate the crashing stock market. At opening bell right afterward, however, the market continued to crash, and those results perhaps should be telling us that the Fed’s one-trick solution to economic crises is just that: a trick.

There’s a lot to be said regarding the Fed’s surprise announcements—including its Sunday surprise of $700 billion in renewed QE and the complete elimination of all reserve requirements for banks—but here let me just focus on one element: the tendency for Fed officials and all the pundits to treat injections of “liquidity” as if they don’t count