Any discussion of the lives saved by the FDA must include estimates of the lives lost due to that very same agency. Two thousand Americans are dying each and every day while there’s a savior in a syringe sitting in a warehouse ready to protect us.

This sounds awfully familiar. In fact, this pattern has been repeated a number of times in American history since the beginning of the 20th century. An innovative company springs up from nothing and dominates its field—usually a new field. Politicians become agitated and do all they can to prosecute it for monopoly behavior and if possible, break it up.

At some point hopefully we will feel the shame of the Salem witch hunters and all those who aided and abetted them, those in the courts who squirmed and screamed every time a suspect witch was questioned. Maybe we’ll shun the current panic-mongers, as those people were later shunned. But for now it’s full-bore hysteria. And there’s no end in sight.

We are far from triumphing over the oppression inflicted upon us by politicians and so-called experts, but refusing to give into their absurd dictates is the only path to victory. The more of us who reject the idea that avoiding the coronavirus should inform virtually every aspect of life, the harder it will be for these epidemiologists to achieve their goal of making the new normal last forever.

Money isn’t best thought of as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Let’s just think of it as just a medium of exchange and a unit of account. For the most part these circles overlap, and the two functions are united. But this isn’t always the case.

While Yellen is surely smart in the book sense, there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about her economic knowledge. In truth, her ideology is very unoriginal, and is rooted in the hard-to-credit view that economic growth can be engineered via the forced redistribution of wealth from producers to consumers.

Foreigners do not treat us ‘unfairly’ if they insist on sending to us more imports in exchange for a given amount of our exports (or, what is the same thing, if they accept fewer of our exports in exchange for a given amount of what we import from them). Accusing foreigners in such a case of treating us unfairly makes no more sense than accusing your employer who gives you a raise of treating you unfairly.

The public should know that the pandemic will not be here forever. While these are challenging times – and, for many families, life-changing times – like every other pandemic in human history, the COVID-19 pandemic will end. With wise and informed policy choices, we can reduce its ultimate toll of death and human misery.

Lockdowns have generated enormous collateral damage on other health outcomes, such as plummeting childhood vaccination rates, worst cardiovascular disease outcomes, less cancer screening, and deteriorating mental health, just to name a few. Even if all lockdowns are lifted tomorrow, this is something that we will have to live with – and die with – for many years to come.

With all the carnage from these various “stringencies” designed to control the mostly uncontrollable, why focus on the tribulations of religious institutions? The history of liberty began with the idea of religious freedom. The realization that no great calamity would befall society if people were allowed to worship as they pleased then gave rise to all the other freedoms we took for granted until recently. It makes sense, then, that the long road to recovering our rights would begin here.