The Federal Reserve’s changing of the guard — the end of Janet Yellen’s tenure and the beginning of the Jerome Powell era — has me remembering what it was like to grow up in the former Soviet Union.

If you follow financial news related to Fed policy, you would have noticed a recent push for the use of “a new monetary tool,” called countercyclical capital buffers. Some prominent Fed officials and Fed watchers — the monetary version of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men — have decided the time is now to start raising such requirements, notwithstanding resistance to their implementation.

Financial media-administered history lessons — whether by commentaries or interviews — on the Great Crash that occurred 10 years ago are frightening. The would-be history teachers are in total denial (or ignorance) of the key fact that 2008 was a monetary-made disaster. This climate of denial continues to foster ever greater danger in the future not to mention a heavy cumulative burden in the decade since — as measured by prosperity lost.

With Hurricane Florence making landfall in the Eastern United States, the usual reports of the “evils” of the private sector price gouging the poor, desperate people in the disaster zone tend to crop up. The economic arguments as to why this claimed problem really isn’t a problem have been covered extensively.

In order to gain insight into the future state of an economy, many economists refer to a variety of consumer and business surveys. Randomly selected consumers and businessmen are asked to provide their views about where the economy is heading. Thus, if a survey shows that the majority of the surveyed express optimism it is regarded as good news for the economy. Conversely, if the majority of the surveyed are pessimistic it is taken as a bad omen for future economic activity.

The federal government is running a massive deficit right now. American wages are stagnant. The US is involved in multiple costly wars with no apparent objective. And the president raises taxes on Americans at will through his tariff policy.

But fortunately the Congress is getting down to what is really important. Federalizing laws banning the sale of cat and dog meat.

Free-market advocates are clear about what should be done about government services and operations: they should be privatized.

While there is considerable confusion about how the process should be accomplished, the goal is crystal-clear. But apart from trying to speed up privatization, and also forcing that process indirectly by slashing the budgets of government agencies, what is supposed to be done in the meantime? Here, free-marketeers have scarcely begun to think about the problem, and much of that thinking is impossibly muddled.

As Hurricane Florence prepares to ravage the Southeastern United States, social media warriors, and “news” outlets are exclaiming their outrage at the business owners who are raising prices on essential items such as water, food, gasoline, plywood, and even hotel rooms. This “price gouging,” however, is absolutely essential, for people’s lives are at risk due to this storm.

Automation seems to be a never-ending source of fear-mongering. Judging from the commentary, robots will “replace us” and cause large-scale unemployment. With the entry of artificial intelligence (AI), and robots that make robots, the value of human beings as productive forces in the economy is simply zero. People then become value-less consumers, only “mouths to feed” while production is carried out by machines.