As we’ve vastly expanded the mission of government, its cost has spiraled upward beyond the country’s willingness—and, very likely, its capacity—to pay. Confronting a true crisis like Covid-19 is vastly more difficult when you carry trillions of dollars in liabilities into the fight.
Also in the Wall Street Journal is columnist Dan Henninger’s call to bring back laissez faire. Here’s his conclusion:
Washington and the states have ordered a bare-bones economy. It’s time for them to give back with bare-bones government.
Dan Mitchell makes the case against price controls. And don’t miss this item from Ryan Bourne.
Others think “the Chinese” created the virus to weaken us economically. Yes, one might suppose some Chinese leaders are as braindead as certain American leaders and pundits whereby they believe trade is war, and that prosperity in other countries harms their country, but then this would counter the view held by some on the right (probably the same people) that the Chinese have long been “cheating” us by “manipulating” trade agreements in order to inundate us with exports. Ok, so which is it? The two absurd lines of thinking are rather contradictory. Indeed, if the Chinese have all along been trying to hurt us by giving us daily raises through their export of increasingly cheap goods, why would they try to export a virus that would collapse an economy on which conservatives have long told us the Chinese are reliant on for exports? For the Chinese to try to engineer economic contraction stateside would be the equivalent of Gucci seeking the annihilation of Beverly Hills.
Here’s Arnold Kling on stock buybacks.
