posner18_BRENDAN SMIALOWSKIAFP via Getty Images_trumpcovidmask Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

COVID and the Conservative Economic Crack-up

Free-market advocates have been unable to stem the erosion of intellectual and public confidence in their arguments. Two prominent economists, both former Trump administration officials, recently showed that those arguments have now veered into incoherence.

CHICAGO – A recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal exposes the dark hole into which conservative economic thinking has sunk since the pinnacle of its influence in the 1980s. Economists Casey B. Mulligan and Tomas J. Philipson of the University of Chicago, both of whom served in Donald Trump’s administration, have used the COVID-19 pandemic to make the case for abandoning what they see as the conventional wisdom among economists: “that the purpose of government policy is to correct market failures.”

https://prosyn.org/My6O2co