One clue as to why the stock market has rebounded while daily economic news grows worse could be the flood of new punters betting on stocks, from high-flying tech shares to dead-in-the-water leisure stocks.
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Of course, anyone who deals in interacting with the real world (i.e., not lifelong bureaucrats like Fauci, who needs not exhibit any actual competence to collect his $400,000 paycheck) understands that preserving and augmenting wealth is key in enhancing health and life.
Some county governments in Colorado have made it clear that they don't intend to adhere to the governor's ongoing edicts requiring business closures and mandating social distancing. And it's unclear that the governor is willing to burn the political capital to force county governments to do so.
Propaganda kills, but it also works. Many of the same tactics employed to destroy opposition to the Iraq War are being used today against opponents of lockdowns.
In a free country, doctors would be free to prescribe whatever drugs they wish to anyone for any reason. In fact, individuals should be free to buy drugs without a special government-required doctor's note.
Neither voters nor politicians watch the bureaucracy very carefully, so they respond as one might expect—advancing their own and their favorites' interests, at the expense of the public they are supposedly working for.
Americans were once harangued by government "experts" about the need to slow down on highways in order to save lives. Few listened. Today, laws demanding everyone "stay at home" may suffer a similar fate.
James Bovard reports form Maryland, where the COVID-19 lockdowns have decimated employment and the rules only apply to powerless ordinary people. Cops and politicians can do as they like.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The prolockdown crowd has been making extraordinary claims. Meanwhile, they have produced little evidence to support their claims.
Governments often demand that you "ask what you can do for your country," but those governments never guarantee us anything in return for our sacrifice.
The state currently enjoys a vastly unbalanced share of the power within a society, such an arrangement is not in any way preordained, and the assumption that it must be betrays a narrowness of vision and a lack of historical knowledge.
There's now no difference between monetary policy and other government programs designed to prop up firms, industries, and other favored groups. The Fed is simply another government planning agency.
The 1958 pandemic killed twice as many people as COVID-19 has so far. Yet, the economy in 2020 has collapsed far worse than either in 1958 or the far worse pandemic of 1918.
Price inflation is so difficult to predict, because there are so many moving parts: money supply, demand, money velocity, and supply of goods and services.
Although it's true that Austrians agree with Chicago economists on many policy issues, their approach to economic science is very different.
The weird thing about dialectical materialism is that Marx seems to have cobbled it together from two philosophies that contradicted each other.
Most of the world's regimes enthusiastically destroyed their economies and consigned millions to destitution (and a rising tide of resulting health problems) in pursuit of a trendy and unproven theory. There's still not evidence that the lockdowns worked.
With such chaos, confusion, and incompetence playing out, it is little wonder that more and more Pennsylvanians are refusing to obey lockdown decrees.
In theory, it is possible to adjust inflation measures to account for the many constant changes in prices resulting from changing demand, quality, and innovations. But it's essentially impossible to execute these adjustments accurately.
Some claim "the rich" will be fine—or even better off—after the COVID panic destroys the economy for most of us. But there's a problem: the wealthy depend heavily on an economy fueled by the production and consumption of all workers and entrepreneurs.
