Per Bylund, author of The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives has commented extensively here at mises.org, and in a variety of entrepreneurship-focused publications, about the economics of entrepreneursip. Editor Ryan McMaken recently asked Professor Bylund to comment on what challenges entrepreneurs face right now in a rapidly changing legal and economic landscape.
When US attorney general William Barr recently announced that the Department of Justice was reversing course and dropping all charges against former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, the response from Democrats, the mainstream news media, and Never-Trump Republicans such as David French was thermonuclear, to put it mildly.
In seeking to measure everything, econometricians gave us the dubious gift of gross national product and gross domestic product, the latter being in fashion today and the former in times past. Although there are different ways of measuring it, GDP is commonly taken as a measure of spending, comprised of household spending, government spending, investment spending, and net exports.
In an attempt to maintain the lockdown and their authority over our lives, politicians, health experts, and the mainstream media have been misusing some unusual analogies to describe the current economy.
In a 60 Minutes interview in 2011, gambler Billy Walters said he was swindled by Wall Street, losing big on Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco shares. Walters made his fortune betting on football and basketball games. Professional gamblers have little to bet on these days with most sports shut down due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The main reason that the socialists have had the staying power that has, luckily, eluded the Nazis is the argument that these self-acclaimed socialist regimes were “not real socialism.” One influential intellectual responsible for popularizing this argument is philosopher Noam Chomsky, who postulates that socialist regimes, the USSR specifically, merely pretended to be socialist to give themselves “legitimate” reasons to wield their authoritarian “club” against their people.
One unintended effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to highlight the state’s ineptitude in dealing with pandemics. Specifically, it shows the dramatic consequences that one-size-fits-all measures have for areas whose specific needs are not properly addressed by the approach or where the problems being addressed are not present.
The Fine Wine & Good Spirits liquor stores are slowly beginning to reopen in Pennsylvania after they were all closed on March 17 in response to the spread of the coronavirus. On May 8, 77 stores reopened. On May 15, 155 more stores reopened. On May 22, 50 more stores were opened.
