Tweet [1]
Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports that Argentina is headed for another economic crackup [2]. A slice:
But that won’t save Argentines from another round of hyperinflation driven by government “experts” who believe in modern monetary theory—which posits that printing money to pay bills doesn’t have to cause inflation if tax rates are high enough.
The public knows better. Since 2017 the peso has lost 87% of its official market-rate value, which is now roughly 130 to the dollar. In the black market the currency now trades at around 265 to the dollar.
Argentine economist Aldo Abram told me last week that “inflationary expectations are spiraling out of control” because “the central bank is robbing the public of its purchasing power.” As demand to hold pesos collapses, triple-digit inflation is becoming more likely, he said. Even with lots of flexibility and latitude from the IMF, it’s hard to see how this doesn’t end in tears.
Sanjai Bhagat writes wisely about ESG investing [3].
GMU Econ alum Caleb Fuller is correct: Studying economics requires curiosity [4].
Robert Corn-Revere warns of the authoritarianism of some pro-life groups [6].
Nate Silver tweets [7]: (HT Tim Townsend)
One clear case of liberal media bias is the relative lack of focus on the constant screw-ups at the FDA and CDC. It’s a huge failure of government. But there’s reluctance to critique “the experts” and perhaps too much presumption of organizational competence.
Molly Kingsley and Liz Cole decry the fear with which children have been raised over these past two years [8]. A slice:
Fuelled by that fear, we locked our young in their rooms for days on end, padlocked their playgrounds and stopped them from seeing their grandparents and friends. We tossed their education to one side, in the process degrading it to an extent which, without drastic remedial action, will not recover. Fuelled by fear, a woman in Texas locked her own child in the boot [9] of her car to escape his infection; a university in Manchester barricaded its students into their halls of residence [10]; and a mayor in New York gagged the city’s toddlers for months. Fuelled by fear we breached our species’ most basic social compact: to protect our young, abandoning at so many touch points our posts as guardians and often even pushing children into harm’s way – mentally and physically – to save ourselves.
Worst of all, drunk on our diet of fear, we taught children they were “vectors,” “silent spreaders,” “reservoirs of infection” – posing a danger to the adults around them. “You people are just vectors of disease to me, and I don’t want to be anywhere near you, so keep your **** distance,” yelled one university professor [11] in Michigan in January 2022.
The government – wielding the weapon of fear- also terrified itself. Fear fueled a chain reaction of bad decision after bad decision – school closures, masking of children, aching to give them a medical intervention they did not need, suspending vital safeguarding protections, and allowing or actively encouraging demonisation, scapegoating and stigmatization to take hold of a previously cohesive society to an extent that should have been unthinkable.
These decisions leave a debilitating legacy.
Britain still is home to far too much covid hysteria [13].
Jay Bhattacharya tweets [14]:
Some big accounts worry that Novak Djokovic’s stand against vax mandates causes vaccine hesitancy. But really the problem is the public health promotion of the irrational vax mandates. They transformed his private health decision into a bold civil rights stance.