Politicians are quick to ignore the costs of government spending in proposing legislation and obscure those costs by issuing debt rather than raising revenues. It is politically popular to issue debt and send checks to everyone. The benefits of the policy are clear: people get checks. The costs, which ripple out through financial markets as interest rates are bid up, are difficult to tie to the policy.

When Suu Kyi won her reelection early this year in a landslide, Myanmar’s generals had had enough. They reassumed power and on February 1 dispatched five soldiers to arrest Bo Bo at his home in Myanmar’s new capital Naypyidaw. Commented a banker in Yangon, "It’s a circular firing squad around here." Free Bo Bo! Free the world economy from zero sum generalists.

That we will look back with astonishment at what has happened to the world is a near certainty. The folly! And people of the future will never stop asking that great question of why. The answer is finally unsatisfying. It was a massive screw up by people and groups who wanted to try something completely new, none of whom were willing to bear responsibility for the results. It will be up to the rest of us to pick up the pieces and get life on the right track again.

When the anti–price gouging law is in effect, being able to buy a necessity here is a matter of timing: being on store premises at or shortly after a shipment arrives. Then you can buy it, and not even at the market price, but at the pre-emergency price enforced by the government. Everyone else is out of luck.

Can the TSA reform its searches and other procedures so that its own employees avoid getting denounced as “Typhoid Marys?” Is “social distancing” from boneheaded enforcement agents asking too much? Alas, it is difficult to expect reasonable policies from an agency that still seems inspired by one of its first mottoes: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

Never before in the history of humanity have governments imposed universal rules for how close we can get to each other in the normal course of life. Does this not trigger some sense that we are being trolled? It should.

The virus didn’t suddenly start spreading in March of 2020 just because politicians decided it had. 2019 is the likelier beginning. Early 2020 too. Life was pretty normal as a virus made its way around the world then. Politicians made it abnormal. Let’s never forget the sickening carnage they can create when they find reasons to "do something."

These issues all boil down to opportunity cost. The time and resources directed towards extra cleaning could be used for an alternative activity that would reap higher benefits for the business, especially in the midst of economic turmoil.

Discretionary central banking creates bad incentives. To overcome bad incentives, we must take away the discretion. The Fed, so long as it exists, should follow a rule.

The flash mobs, coordinated as they are by social media, have created disturbing and disruptive bubbles and may continue to do so. Bitcoin is probably not in a bubble. Above all, let’s not forget the ominous longer-term debt bubble.