In the early days of the COVID-19 panic—back in mid-March—articles began to appear pushing the idea of “flattening the curve” (the Washington Post ran an article called “Flatten the Curve” on March 14). This idea was premised on spreading out the total number of COVID-19 infections over time, so as to not overburden the healthcare infrastructure. A March 11 article for Statnews, summed it up:
David Flattum by email points out that in the movie The Big Short, it is said that each 1 percent rise in the unemployment rate is associated with forty thousand deaths. Another anonymous emailer suggests that the government authors of shutdowns be held accountable by international tribunals for the deaths they cause.
When was the last time the government delivered both on time and under budget? In the case of public bailouts, it seems every week brings more program expansions. We can only speculate as to how big the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) will be by the time we get out of the Great Lockdown.
People of a certain age might remember the old John Birch Society slogan ”Support your local police!” The idea here is that your local policeman is a liberty-loving buddy of yours who would only ever support just laws and constitutional mandates. Only those bad guys in the FBI or BATF would ever consider violating your rights.
In a world where the Left has declared everything from abortion to social media to be a human right, it is disheartening, to say the least, that so many who think of themselves as “progressive” have embraced wholesale violations of real human rights: namely, the rights to seek employment, to freely assemble, and to exercise one’s religion.
The eurozone economy is expected to collapse in 2020. In countries such as Spain and Italy, the decline, more than 9 percent, will likely be much larger than in emerging market economies. However, the key is to understand how and when the eurozone economies will recover.
There are three reasons why we should be concerned:
In a recent article entitled “Where Are All the Austrian Scholars’ Yachts?” John Tamny has criticized Austrian economists, and Mark Thornton in particular, for their skepticism regarding the relatively “ebullient stock market” in the midst of the pandemic.
When reports regarding COVID-19 illnesses began to surface, media outlets initially downplayed the risks. But they soon followed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) claims that the virus was more serious than the seasonal flu and that a high volume of cases could prove burdensome to healthcare systems, and governments around the globe scrambled to keep the virus from spreading rapidly.
Every once in a while economists want to go out on a limb with their models and publicly make forecasts on what the future rate of price inflation will be. The current COVID-19 lockdown is no exception. Many economists have warned us of potentially very high rates of price inflation, because monetary stimulus on a massive scale meets a negative supply shock.
