Since mid-March, the French people have been coping with one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. Large gatherings have been banned, and schools, bars, restaurants, and all shops (except for grocery stores) have been closed.
From 2009 to 2012, I taught an introductory course in Austrian school economics at the University of Iowa. On the first day of class, I would tell my students that the Austrian school would change the way they looked at the world, not just from an economic perspective, but from an overall life perspective. Nothing would ever appear to be the same again. They would learn to think for themselves and would not fall prey to all the propaganda from government, the mainstream news media, and poorly thought out opinions of friends and acquaintances.
An economic cataclysm has been unleashed upon the world by Western politicians and bureaucrats. Unbelievably, economic activity in the West has slowed to a creep, as entire populations have been confined to their homes for weeks, if not months. As a result, millions have had their lives turned upside down. Most entrepreneurs and self-employed persons have had their livelihoods jeopardized.
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) had a great influence on Murray Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. (Incidentally, this is my favorite of Rothbard’s books—it’s enormously learned and insightful.) This at first seems surprising. Though people differ about what Kuhn meant, many take him to deny that science gives access to the real world. Truth is relative to a “paradigm,” another much disputed word.
To counter the likely severe side effects of the lockdowns on the economy—introduced to prevent the spread of the coronavirus—the Federal Reserve has embarked on massive expansion of its balance sheet. The size of the Fed’s assets jumped to $6.2 trillion in April this year from $3.9 trillion in April last year—an increase of 58.9 percent.
In recent weeks, we’ve been keeping an eye on weekly total deaths as they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Weekly deaths—as opposed to COVID-19 death totals—provide some needed context. This is important, since we now know doctors and health administrators are encouraged to be—in the words of Deborah Birx—”liberal” with counting COVID-19 deaths.
