Governments throughout the world and across the US justified extreme, draconian, undemocratic, and unconstitutional (in most US states) “lockdown” and stay-at-home orders on the grounds that the COVID-19 virus was exceptionally fatal.

In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) was claiming that the fatality rate was a very high 3.4 percent.

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The United States was waiting for the zombie apocalypse. The country was given a coronapocalypse instead. But could the two events merge and provide the nation with a dangerous economic trend? Corporate America’s worst-kept secret had been the swelling number of zombies kept on life support and hidden away during the boom phase of the business cycle.

In the period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration and its media accomplices waged a relentless propaganda campaign to win political support for what turned out to be one of the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in American history.

Nearly two decades later, with perhaps a million dead Iraqis and thousands of dead American soldiers, we are still paying for that mistake. 

Boom and Bust: The Political Economy of Economic Disorder
by Richard E. Wagner

Libertarians and the Authoritarian Personality
by J. J. Ray

Specialization and the Division of Labor in the Social Thought of Plato and Rousseau
by Williams M. Evers

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Many analysts and economists are trying to predict the shape of the economic recovery post-COVID-19. To understand how the recovery may look, we need to look at past recoveries and at the history of pandemics.