Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
It’s never a pleasant thing to stand up, alone, in the face of a national mania and provide an unpleasant solution. I’ve been putting it off for some time.
Finally, I’ve had it. Nobody who does this for a living seems to be willing to step up to the plate so I guess I’m stuck doing the job. The free-market solution to excess demand over supply is to raise prices. We are not raising prices to end the empty shelves because the government in various jurisdictions has made it illegal to raise prices in the face of an emergency.
Nobody has had the courage to say this. Everyone who has taken a basic economics course in the US knows this. This lack of even discussion on how to fix the empty shelf problem is deeply weird and nobody is talking about the odd silence either.
Update: Kudos to John Stossel who did address this issue (from a different perspective) a few hours prior to my publishing this. His article is here.
In December of last year a Twitter account was set-up. Titled “Irish Students Against Fascism”, it described itself as an aspiring antifascist organising hub to physically, socially and professionally harass individuals engaged with conservative or nationalist politics on campuses.
Very soon the account garnered well over a thousand followers, with retweets from the Union of Students Ireland’s official account among other leftist activist organizations. The account boasted of an impending website dumping incriminating material relating to students on campus, particularly in Young Fine Gael, and invited individuals to contribute over private messaging.
What has been unknown until today was that, from the very onset, the page was operated by students involved with The Burkean. The account was set up with the intent of performing long term investigative work into antifascism in Ireland, as well as its insidious and often blatant links with civic society, journalism and politics.
Put politely, antifascism is the euphemism given to the work done to destroy the lives of people with right leaning sympathies. While traditionally associated with left republicanism, it is these days more often than not linked to Ireland’s ubiquitous NGO complex, as well as well-funded activists heavily networked within the world of journalism, politics and the private sector.
Many young people on the Irish Right have long claimed that there is institutional bias constantly working against them. However, it is only now that we can definitively say that this is not the case.
There is no institutional bias against young conservatives. There is an outright conspiracy against them…
Oh, my … does the Dem Party, the historic party of slavery, secession, and segregation now look to add another “s” to their banner of massive fail that of ‘socialism’, or whatever currently-fashionably euphemism that superannuated, work-shy Commie-symp, Bernie Sanders wants to call state control of any resources of value, including the labor of the masses? Looks like the finger of the burned fool is wabbling back to the fire, as Mr. Kipling so memorably put it all these decades ago. The live-action political version of Grandpa Simpson polled well in Nevada; he would have looked perfectly awful at the Dem Party debate-debacle … save that apparently all the other contenders came off even worse.
I have finally seen an ad for “not Mike Bloomberg” here in Wisconsin – it was sort of like a bigfoot sighting I was so slack-jawed. And it was from an unlikely source: Liz Warren. The ad wasn’t about how great she was or about any sort of policy, rather it was a Bloomberg bash. I couldn’t find the ad on youtube, but essentially it just said something like “hey, aren’t you tired of all of those Bloomberg ads, billionaires bad, I’m Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message”. I thought for sure I would have started to see some Biden stuff by now, but not a peep, as of yet.
The themes of this update will be on issues of COVID-19 spread, World Headlines, border closings, the CDC news conference, developments with fomite spread, how American Public Health institutions build a liablity law suit proof diagnostic test and how that limits tests for community spread and a new recommended COVID-19 sites, social media and videos section.
Top line, There are currently 80,420 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, including 2,710 fatalities as of the 24 February 2020 at 5:24 p.m. ET time hack on the BNO News corona virus tracking site (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/) There are 39 nations including China plus three “Chinese special administrative regions” (Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan) that have reported COVID-19 infections. China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Italy, Iran and R.O.K. all appear to have local, or endemic, spread of the disease. Italy has spawned further spread in Spain proper, it’s Canary Islands possession, Austria, Germany, and possibly Croatia. And now Brazil in South America and Algeria reporting a case signals North West Africa have added two new regions to the Pandemic spread list. The virus has spread from Asia to Europe, North America, Australia and Africa.
All of the above meets the pre-COVID-19 WHO standard for a “Pandemic” that requiring endemic spread in multiple nations in multiple WHO regions. However, the WHO just decided that it was time to retire the term “Pandemic” because…something…[insert reasons here]. The WHO statement for doing so was a master piece of unintelligible double talk that boils down to “Lets not scare the “Normies” and set off more “Run, Hide & Hoard” panics like seized Italy, ROK and Singapore in the last few days. Meanwhile the WHO is cheering-on China’s “Hospice-Prison system for the infected” Quarantine as a “Model” in aiding China’s restarting the World economy.
ITALY COVID-19 Confirmed Cases and Deaths 25 Feb 2020
World Headline Summary
o WHO warns the rest of the world “is not ready for the virus to spread…”
o CDC warns Americans “should prepare for possible community spread” of virus.
o San Francisco Mayor declares state of emergency
o Later, CDC says pandemic not a question of it, but when
o Brazil may have South America’s first coronavirus case
o Germany confirms 2nd case on Tuesday, brings total to 17
o Italy cases spike to 322; deaths hit 10
o Japan’s Shiseido tells 8k employees to work from home
o Trump Economic Advisor Kudlow tries to jawbone stock markets higher
o HHS Sec. Azar warns US lacks stockpiles of masks
o Italy Hotel in Lockdown After First Coronavirus Case in Liguria
o Algeria confirms 1st case
o First case in Switzerland
o Kuwait halts all flights to Singapore and Japan
o Iran confirms 95 cases, 15 deaths
o First case in Austria
o Spain reports 7 cases in under 24 hours, including in Madrid, Canary Islands, Barcelona
o Iran Deputy Health Minister infected with Covid-19
Pandemic Border Closures
Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Armenia, and UAE blocked border crossings by Iranians.
Russia, North Korea and Vietnam are blocking border crossings from China
Austria and Switzerlan are blocking border crossings from Italy.
El Salvador on Tuesday announced it would prevent entry of people from Italy and South Korea.
