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The CDC estimates that 61,000 Americans died from the flu during the 2017–18 flu season (with a range of 46,000 to 95,000 deaths). Few of us even remember that event. Stores stayed open, folks met and worked, and everyone lived as normal.
Unlike the federal government, state and local governments in America can’t just create money out of thin air. So when tax revenues go down, that money is simply not available to the state legislatures and city councils anymore. These governments either have to borrow the money or raise taxes and hope the tax hike itself doesn’t cause total revenue to fall.
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It was autumn 1989. Momentous things were taking place in the world.
The Berlin Wall had fallen. The people of the Eastern Bloc had succeeded at getting to the West through Hungary. The firm line between east and west was wavering. The situation was moving away from the course that Warsaw Pact communist governments had charted: that their populations must remain captive within the borders of the Communist Bloc.
It was unclear whether this social contagion for freedom would spread into Czechoslovakia.
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Expertise is distributed across thousands of different minds in the medical community. The only way to counteract the spread of an infectious illness such as the coronavirus is to take an all-hands-on-deck approach, allowing innovators in the field to advance new solutions as unique challenges emerge.
All over the world, governments and central banks are addressing the pandemic crisis with three main sets of measures:
It feels like it’s been months, but it’s only been a few weeks since the world’s central banks started forcing down their key interest rates to historical lows around the world. In those places where rates weren’t reduced, the central banks have adopted vast quantitative easing plans. In some places, central banks have both reduced rates and adopted new QE.
To trace the epistemological basis of praxeology, it is necessary to understand that Ludwig von Mises, “takes from Kant his central conceptual and terminological distinctions, as well as some fundamental Kantian ideas about the nature of human knowledge” (Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method (2007), p. 17). It is therefore obligatory to review the Kantian postulates.
