Thank goodness for the First Amendment and social media! The former has allowed amateur comedians to flourish and share their wares via the latter, mostly in the form of humorous memes. It’s come in handy by providing comic relief as concern about the coronavirus outbreak has swept the land.

I took a stab by offering a quip about the stash of wine bottle corks my wife and I have stockpiled over the last few years. I drew a link between that surplus and the baffling run on, and subsequent shortages of, toilet paper.

From late 2014 to early 2017, I occupied a unique spot in the tenant/landlord dynamic: I was both. I started out as a homeowner, but for several reasons I recently spent a year in an apartment, plus two more years in a rental house. This experience came in handy upon reading about Christine Drennon support for the creation of a renters’ commission to “augment the ongoing work of the Housing Commission” here in San Antonio.

In a recent episode of the Economics for Entrepreneurs podcast, I interviewed Steve Mariotti, who has spent a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship to kids from difficult and troubled backgrounds in the US, as well as the sons and daughters of parents who lived through the USSR and Vietnamese communist regimes. He portrayed entrepreneurship as an escape from poverty and oppression for these young people, one they embraced with excitement and enthusiasm.

Michael Moore, patronizing saint of poisoned water wells, hospital waiting lines, and the Rust Belt, has decided to shill for the establishment while waxing poetic about the poor. He may get a lot wrong, but he was absolutely right in 2015 about Trump: people wanted to vote for him in droves because he symbolized the Molotov cocktail they could throw at the system. Trump’s victory as a populist would signal the “biggest f%$k you” in American history, and it did.

The coronavirus epidemic has for the past couple of weeks compelled panicked households to flood grocery stores in search of basic goods. Until this past weekend, however, US governments had refrained from using special powers to order forced business closures and curfews.

On the night of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, and in the wee hours of Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Donald Trump became US president-elect. I am not aware of a single media source that predicted that. Many predicted Hillary Clinton would win. Some stayed out of the fortune-telling game.

The natural response in the face of a pandemic like the one we are experiencing today with COVID-19 is to take immediate and direct action to curb the crisis. We are told we need to have extensive quarantines, citywide lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders. We supposedly need to limit the number of goods people can buy so they don’t hoard them up, and definitely keep prices where they are at so people can afford to get what they need.