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.
Can the US dollar lose its global reserve position? Sure it can, but not to a country that decides to commit the same monetary follies as the Fed. Most countries are trying to out-inflate the Fed. And that's good for the Fed.
Without markets, it would have been impossible for a country like Rwanda, ravaged by the war, to achieve the growth it has experienced over the past twenty years.
As the central bank continues to pick winners and losers with its profligate monetary policy, social divisions will worsen.
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.
Federal agencies have destroyed the separation of powers that is supposed to exist in the US legal system, so agency bureaucrats now act as investigators, prosecutors, judges, and juries.
As with current Fed policy, there would be both winners and losers if the Fed did nothing. Either way, there will be pain, but without the Fed we'd actually build the foundation for a more sound and lasting economic system.
No matter what the situation, no one has the right to compel someone to act for another's benefit, and that includes forced quarantines, business closures, and expropriations of medical equipment in the name of "public health."
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 less agile and adaptive a society is, the more severe its impotence in a crisis. Thanks to an obsessive reliance on monetary policy to fix every problem, our society has increasingly abandoned innovation and productivity.
