Of course, there was never any need to “lock down” any of our children for any period of time. It is well known that children are at extremely low risk of contracting the disease and even when they do, they have the highest recovery rate of all. CDC data reveal that school-age children are more likely to be struck by lightning than to perish from the virus.
While it is true that children could potentially infect their teachers, teachers are also generally young and at very little risk from the disease. The median age of public-school teachers in the U.S. is 41. Regularly testing teachers and students for the presence of COVID-19, and periodic self-isolation when found to be infected, is a far less costly strategy than following extreme CDC guidelines. For example, testing and isolation have been successfully applied in Israel, where schools reopened in early May.
My Mercatus Center colleague Dan Griswold reviews Ilya Somin’s new book, Free to Move. A slice:
Immigration restrictions rebound against natives by curtailing their own rights and freedoms. Along with the economic costs, Somin writes, “migration restrictions also impose unwanted obligations on natives, who are required to cooperate with deportation efforts and often must face the risk of racial and ethnic profiling, civil liberties violations, and even deportation as a result of bureaucratic error in cases where the authorities confuse them with illegal migrants.”
How has covid affected the American labor market?
Diego Zuluaga peers into the details of the Payroll Protection Program.
Mark Perry explains modern American business’s globalness.
Here’s the second essay in George Selgin’s excellent series on the New Deal. Here’s the final paragraph:
To conclude: “New Deal” rhetoric and revisionist histories notwithstanding, FDR didn’t come to Washington equipped with any well worked-out plan for ending the Great Depression. Instead, his recovery plan was mostly rushed together during his famous first 100 days in office. That some components of this hastily-assembled program should have failed to contribute to the recovery, and that some may even have hindered it, should not seem all that surprising. But this is merely speaking of probabilities. I still have to prove that certain New Deal programs did in fact impede recovery, and did so enough to justify the claim that, taken as a whole, the New Deal, considered as a program for economic recovery, was a flop.
