>https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israeli-expert-trump-is-right-about-covid-19-who-is-wrong-1.8691031

'Trump Is Right About the Coronavirus. The WHO Is Wrong,' Says Israeli Expert

Dr. Dan Yamin has developed models for predicting the spread of infectious diseases, and helped curb the Ebola epidemic. He says the coronavirus could take some 13,000 lives in Israel – but there's cause for optimism.

The virus spreads in a geometric progression,” Benjamin Netanyahu declared last week, going on to explain to the lay public what that means: “One person infects two people. Each of them infects two more. The four infect eight, the eight infect 16, the 16 infect 32, the 32 infect 64, the 64 infect 128 – and so on and so forth.”

The Treasury’s Helicopter Cop‐​Out

> https://www.cato.org/blog/treasurys-helicopter-cop-out

Predictably, the depths of the present economic crisis, including the remarkable flattening of interest rates since it began, have led to several calls by economists, including Jordi Gali and the Mercatus Institute’s David Beckworth, for the Fed and other central banks to ready their money choppers for a major money-financed spending-spree.

Helicopter Money vs. Deficit Monetization

“Helicopter money” in its strictest sense is money simply given to people by a central bank. This needn’t be done using actual helicopters, of course; and in practice, proposals for it have central banks handing out free money, not directly to the public, but to their sponsoring governments, for use in financing some spending or transfer program.

Either way—and this point is crucial—helicopter money is distinct from deficit monetization in its usually-understood sense. As Kevin Dowd explains, “debt monetization involves an explicit increase in the federal government’s indebtedness, whereas under helicopter money that same increased indebtedness is written off by the Fed” or whichever central bank undertakes it. It has the central bank increasing its liabilities without acquiring any offsetting, valuable asset.

Alternatively, as “Helicopter Ben” explains, helicopter money can be likened to an extreme version of deficit monetization in which the Treasury gets money from the Fed in exchange for a security that bears no interest and that the Fed agrees to hold on to forever. The Fed, in other words, has to commit itself to permanently increase its balance sheet by the amount of its security “purchase.”

Dubious Advantages

The benefits of helicopter money, Bernanke explains, consist of

(1) the direct effects of the public works spending on GDP, jobs, and income;

(2) the increase in household income from the rebate, which should induce greater consumer spending;

(3) a temporary increase in expected inflation, the result of the increase in the money supply. Assuming that nominal interest rates are pinned near zero, higher expected inflation implies lower real interest rates, which in turn should incentivize capital investments and other spending; and

(4) the fact that, unlike debt-financed fiscal programs, a money-financed program does not increase future tax burdens.

significantly, as Bernanke also notes, advantages (1) and (2) would also be achieved by a debt-financed government spending program. Benefit (3) can, in turn, be achieved through other sorts of unconventional monetary policy, including either ordinary or expanded-asset quantitative easing (QE), aided perhaps by a Fed commitment to temporarily raise its inflation target, or by its agreeing to switch to NGDP level targeting.

This leaves only advantage (4). But this “advantage” is no real advantage at all. It assumes, first of all, that Ricardian Equivalence holds, or at least that the public takes considerable account of future tax increases in adjusting their current spending, but that they do not take future inflation into account in doing so.* But that’s not all: under the present abundant reserves or “floor” system, even helicopter money generates a future tax burden, because it generates fresh reserves on which the Fed must pay interest at a variable rate; and the Fed may have to increase this rate to keep inflation under control.

And Real Disadvantages

If the advantages of helicopter money are doubtful, its potential costs are hard to dispute. Here again, Bernanke is a good guide. He observes, among other things, that “helicopter money” might prove incompatible with the Fed’s use of an interest-rate operating target and that it could threaten the Fed’s political independence, particularly by serving “as a ‘slippery slope’ for legislators, who might be tempted to use it to facilitate spending or tax cuts when such actions no longer make macroeconomic sense”—that is, as a slippery-slope leading toward “fiscal QE.”

Perhaps the biggest drawback of helicopter money has to do with the way in which it smudges the boundary line separating fiscal from monetary policy, and the division of powers that boundary line is supposed to protect. This problem becomes most evident in pondering the question, “whose responsibility is helicopter money?” while supposing that Treasury-central bank cooperation can’t be counted on. If the government is to take the initiative, then the central bank must be made subservient to it, risking the undermining of its monetary control while opening the floodgates to fiscal QE. If, on the other hand, the central bank is to take charge, the government must arrange its spending plans in accordance with the central bank’s wishes. Neither prospect seems appealing. Call it the “helicopter money dilemma.”

The Dissipation of Moral Energies

> http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-dissipation-of-moral-energies.html

“The Dissipation of Moral Energies”

by Paul Rosenberg

“Roughly 98% of us have a deep-rooted connection to morality. Even confirmed criminals routinely say things like, “That ain’t right,” which is purely a moral judgment. However well or poorly we use it, nearly all of us hold morality as a central reference. And this is true across nearly the whole sweep of life. Take a hard look into any workplace and you’ll find that nearly every interaction is tied to some form of moral judgment: “He didn’t treat me with proper courtesy,” “She’s arrogant,” “That’s a man you can respect,” and so on..

Opposition to Morality: Our present world, however, is an adverse environment for morality. This becomes obvious once we observe two simple facts: The basic statement of morality is known to nearly all of us and has been championed in nearly identical form by more or less every serious moral teacher. People are deeply confused on what is or isn’t moral. If morality is simple and widely known and yet we’re confused; something is intervening.

The basic statement of morality is our Golden Rule of course: What is hateful to you, do to no one else. This was proclaimed by ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Hebrews, and more or less every serious thinker since. And it’s a supremely simple dictum to live by.

Why, then, moral confusion? There are many reasons of course, but all of them stem from a single source: the people and systems that can’t thrive under a simple and clear Golden Rule. Our Golden Rule is built upon self-reference: recognizing what we like or don’t like. It is then extended to others with uncomplicated thinking. The enemies of morality, then, are those who don’t want us to refer to ourselves. And so they demand that we reference outside standards and obey them without self-reference and without thinking. They do this partly with fear and partly with confusion.

The fear-based method of stanching morality is the statement of authority we all know: Obey or we’ll hurt you. The confusion-based method is the belief that our obedience has been ordered by a super-human authority: the god-king, or the god, or the majestic ancients, or the holy will of the people, or nowadays, by our magic-infused democratic processes.

Here are two statements that express this same concept from a different angle:

Government is an entity that does things we’d be condemned for if we did them to our neighbor, and yet it is held to be righteous.

Anyone with a clear enough moral view and sufficient moral energy is (at a minimum) worrisome to rulership..

The internal energies of a mainstream, respectable couple, for example, are almost fully directed away from serious moral issues. This couple likely devotes extreme levels of emotion (drawn from the same energy pool as moral energy) to harmless diversions: the environment, their pets, hating one or the other political party, office politics, complaining about all the small moral failures they see, and so on.

All of these are dispersions of moral energy, from which no personal or civilizational improvement results. And once these energies have been expended, little is left over for more productive applications.

The Reverse View: Imagine now that your interests would be threatened if people focused their energies on the Golden Rule. What would you do to ensure your continued prosperity? I think you’d do this:

• Encourage and support anything that would keep people afraid.

• Encourage and support anything that diverts moral energies into harmless paths.

• Encourage and support things that make people surrender their moral energies to blind obedience.

• Undercut the development and application of morality among the masses.

• Subvert whatever purposeful development of morality remains.

And here are examples of each in the modern West:

• Keeping people afraid. News channels broadcasting fear 24/7.

• Political talk shows focusing on the evils of the “other side.”

• Diverting moral energies. Facebook, politics, celebrity gossip, and other trivialities.

• Surrendering to obedience. The ubiquitous and uncritical lauding of democracy.

• Undercutting moral development. The persistent ridicule of Christianity. The perennial hatred toward Christianity’s sibling, Judaism.

• Subverting what remains. The grafting of evangelical Christianity into the military-industrial complex.

This conversation could go on of course, but I think my primary point has been made. My only exhortation is that we should leave this status quo and construct a world that does not drain our moral energies.”

>www.freemansperspective.com