HOT TOPICS: Ayn Rand | Iran | ICE | Renee Good | Heritage American | Wealth Tax | Mamdani | Jimmy Lai
In normal times the government supports many bad, irresponsible, and unjust policies, driven in part by perverse incentives. Not the least of these is an imprudent eagerness to please special interests. Emergencies and the resulting panic only further loosen whatever weak restraints there normally are against government misbehavior and malfunction.
When there is a shortage of medical supplies, going out of our way through nationalism, mercantilism, and “protectionism” to make them more expensive will hurt people. Free-market capitalism and free-trade amongst nations is the rational solution.
Why did the coronavirus produce a social and economic calamity, whereas the H1N1 (Swine flu) from ten years ago is barely remembered by most people.
Economic nationalists seem to be applying Rahm Emanuel’s now famous phrase of ‘never letting a serious crisis go to waste’ in the service of a political agenda that might be harder to push in calmer times.
I fear the kind of government that can shut down public gatherings and centrally plan healthcare and everything else. I fear it much more than a virus.
Bernie Sanders’ statements are not that different from those of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Chavez and other tyrants.
Highly restrictive government regulations have had the unintended consequence of shutting down tests that could detect outbreaks and save lives.
The reputation of the 1619 project’s other essays, many of them entirely unobjectionable adaptations of scholarly insights for a popular audience, has suffered because of the NY Times’ inflexible refusal to address erroneous historical claims in the essays by Hannah-Jones and Desmond.
The shelves aren’t empty because of free-market capitalism. They’re empty because of active interference with free-market capitalism.
