It is precisely during a crisis that private property, the price mechanism, and the profit and loss system are most important, and when the government can do the most damage.
Bob Murphy and Oren Cass have a friendly discussion about their disagreements on economic policy.
Anti-price gouging laws mean that those who really end up getting the short end of the stick are those who don't have the time or the means to beat the crowds to the store. Worse off are those of lesser means who rely on public transportation or walking to transport groceries home.
What needs to be done in such a crisis is not to attempt to steer the market to ensure it provides what is needed, but to let it free to do what it always does: match the goals of entrepreneurial producers with the needs of the populace.
The coronavirus crisis must cause us to rethink the idea governments can manage these situations. It is absolutely true that most private industry can be trusted, because the alternative for poor or unscrupulous providers is failure.
Governments that hamper entrepreneurship certainly damage it in the near term. But these measures destroy the conditions necessary for innovation and entrepreneurship in the future as well.
After an old red barn was given "heritage protection" by the city council, the owner demolished it anyway. Many townspeople cheered the defiance of the council's blatant violation of property rights.
In this article from 1950, Murray Rothbard suggests some of the less bad ways of financing military operations. Hint: monetary inflation and taxing savings and investment are among the worst.
"The reality must be faced that the new…colony of Pennsylvania lived for the greater part of four years in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience."
Free market economics is often ignorantly dismissed for being "ideological" rather than scientific. It probably sounds smart to the economically illiterate, but it is decidedly not.
