Thursday, April 30, 2020

In the news, Friday, April 24, 2020


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APR 23      INDEX      APR 25
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California

On Plagues and Their Long-term Effects
One of the most impressive sections of Thucydides’s timeless account is that of the plague that devastated Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War that had begun in 431 BC. He provides us with a clinical description of the disease and its progress, which my medical friends have assured me no modern physician could improve on. Not surprisingly, “the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods.” Sound like the problems our medical establishment is having in fully understanding the nature of this new virus that we are confronting?

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from HumanProgress.org  Education Website

Centers of Progress, Pt. 1: Jericho (Agriculture)
Neolithic Jericho was the site of two decisive events in the history of civilization: permanent settlement and the beginnings of agriculture.

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from Military Times
and Air Force Times, Army Times, Marine Corps Times, and Navy Times

The military diagnosed about 1,000 troops with coronavirus for the third week in a row
With the services reporting 3,919 cases of COVID-19 among troops, Defense Department data released Friday shows a third consecutive week where cases grew by roughly 1,000. The figure represents a bump of 5 percent in the previous 24 hours, or 194 new diagnoses, as well as a 31-percent bump over the week, or 933 new cases. There were 955 cases in the week ending April 17, as well as 1,053 in the week ending April 10. Currently, the infection rate among service members is 1,866-per-million, or 0.2 percent, versus 2,553-per-million in the general U.S. population, about 0.25 percent. The week of April 20 brought with it new plans to start testing asymptomatic service members for COVID-19, according to where their units fall on a tiered-system of essential national security functions.

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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED


This Bust Wasn't Caused by a Virus
On February 10 the stock markets were at all-time highs, with the Dow 30 at almost 30,000. The unemployment rate was at an all-time low and interest rates around most of the world were at all-time lows. With interest rates near zero for an entire decade, the value of stocks, bonds, real estate, land, and virtually any asset was artificially inflated. As a result, total household net worth doubled, increasing from $60 trillion to $120 trillion! People were saying that things were too good to be true. Everything from giggling about personal finances at the gym to people embarking on unlikely business projects, and business owners being shocked when told it would not last, and even record-breaking skyscrapers. Things were too good to be true. Now the popular refrain is that the coronavirus caused the economy to collapse. The government shut down the economy, putting people out of work. so there has been less consumption. Whole industries have been shuttered. The unemployment rate has skyrocketed, increasing by more than 10 percent in the last couple of weeks. It is easy to see how politicians, the media, and even real people see this coronavirus situation as causing the economic collapse. A caused B. This in turn created the supposed need for trillions of dollars in subsidies, bailouts, and unemployment benefits. Plus the Federal Reserve would have to inject many more trillions of dollars to bail out every aspect of the financial industry including junk bonds and student loans. All of this is false in the sense that A did not cause B. A, the coronavirus, did not cause B, the economic crisis; it merely triggered it, causing it to occur earlier than it would have. It may have also accelerated the collapse, and will likely deepen the trough of the crisis in business cycle terms. In other words, the economy was weak, not strong. The fundamentals were weak, not strong. Balance sheets were weak, not strong.

Why the Current Unemployment Is Worse Than the Great Depression
The latest report on new unemployment claims was abysmal, coming in at 4.4 million last week, some 100,000 more than surveyed economists had expected. The continuous claims came in at just under 16 million, an all-time record. Mainstream labor economists estimate that, all things considered, the actual unemployment rate now (which is only officially reported with a lag) is above 20 percent—a rate not seen since the darkest days of the Great Depression. Indeed, all of the job gains since the Great Recession have been wiped out in just a matter of weeks. What’s worse, even though the official unemployment rate is probably not quite as high as it was in 1933 (when it averaged 24.9 percent), there are reasons to believe that our labor market is currently in even worse shape economically than it was at the lowest depths of the Great Depression. Furthermore, once we take into account insights from Austrian capital theory, we can see why Keynesian hopes for a rapid recovery—and calls for longer lockdowns due to health concerns—are misguided.

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from Plough

What Forests Teach Us about Community
Seedlings depend on older trees, including those that have died, to survive. The patterns we see in seedlings have taught us that independence is a myth and that the community in which an organism finds itself has much to do with its ability to grow and thrive.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

Tests of workers at Central Washington orchard finds dozens of COVID-19 cases without symptoms
Stemilt Ag Services, which operates the orchard, and local health officials tested the farm workers in East Wenatchee after some fruit packaging warehouse workers tested positive. The company said it decided to expand testing to orchard workers as a precaution. Of the 71 agricultural workers who were tested, 36 were positive for COVID-19, though they weren’t experiencing symptoms, Stemilt reported this week.

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from UPI News Agency (United Press International)
Media/News Company

USS Kidd reports 18 COVID-19 cases in outbreak, military up to 3,919 cases
Eighteen sailors aboard the USS Kidd have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the Navy said Friday, making the ship the latest of more than two dozen Navy vessels dealing with outbreaks on board. According to the Navy, one sailor tested positive for the virus Thursday, prompting a specialized medical team to conduct contact tracing and additional online testing, with 17 more sailors testing positive for the virus.

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