Governments are set to make mask wearing mandatory in many places. Yet some companies are committed to limiting supply and charging monopoly prices thanks to government-created patents.
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Audio recordings of Mises Wire articles, offering contemporary news and opinion through the lens of Austrian economics and libertarian political economy.
Efforts by US policymakers to boost crude prices and to throw a lifeline to high-cost US crude producers is the exact opposite of what prices are telling us the market needs at this time.
From medical practices to grocery shipments, governments are loosening restrictions in order to keep goods and services affordable. But if these restrictions are unnecessary now, why claim they are ever necessary?
The COVID-19 depression will expose the Las Vegas convention center bubble for what it is: a massive malinvestment.
Bureaucrats cannot conjure wealth from nothing. They only have what they extract from the private sector. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats are now starving the private sector of funding while making government budgets ever larger.
Many left-wing pundits and politicians are claiming that the Centers for Disease Control budget was "gutted" in recent years. But the CDC's budget is now higher than it was in the final years of the Obama administration.
Many Americans could die in the coming weeks and months thanks to the FDA’s blockade on coronavirus testing. Should we consider those victims as martyrs for the principle of bureaucratic supremacy?
The Fed is, in effect, a lawless economic government unto itself. It is the lender of first resort, a kind of reverse pawnshop that pays top dollar for rapidly declining assets.
The Italians could learn some lessons about healthcare from the South Koreans, who still maintain a robust private market in health insurance. Although the Koreans have relatively ample resources for COVID-19 patients, Italy's state-dominated system is quickly running out of options.
What is the number of deaths due to disease which justifies the total abandonment of the rule of law and basic human freedoms? Sixty thousand? One hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? Supporters of the current police state ought to pin down a number for us at which all rights are forfeit.
Even if the COVOID-19 virus turns out to be more severe than the skeptics give us reason to think it is, we can get through it. We cannot survive the end of the division of labor. It would be the finish of civilization as we know it.
Taiwan's response to COVID-19 mostly means self-imposed quarantines and more transparency. It's basically the opposite of what Europe is doing.
We are about to enter a production slowdown—a collapse, really—not because some businesses miscalculated their investments, but because government intervened drastically and without warning to shut down all businesses.
The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives.
Current global bailouts may put off global busts for quite some time. But they will weaken output and employment gains. People's standard of living will stagnate or even fall, even in the short term. With this comes impoverishment and perhaps even social unrest.
Politicians and pundits have a blind spot when it comes to international economic transactions. They ignore a portion of trade! In particular, they ignore trade in claims on future income—that is, stocks and bonds.
After weeks of bungling, faulty tests, and policy reversals the CDC bureaucrats managed to achieve some semblance of competence. But by then they were already far behind the curve.
Beyond the usual arguments about incentives and taxes, UBI is a dangerous policy that supercharges the state and threatens to heighten tensions between different groups in society.
What is particularly scary is that the whole argument for the new law was not really about saving lives or reducing gun violence, but is about Brussels ordering Switzerland to modify gun laws to comply with EU gun control standards.
Austrians will be vindicated, but will they be heard?
