I sit down with Steve Berger, former Mises Institute Board member and a passionate student of Austrian economics. He views the COVID era through a refreshingly different lens. Instead of rehashing the usual debates over data or narratives, Steve looks at lockdowns, mandates, and vaccine rollout as symptoms of deeper economic distortions: the Federal Reserve’s ability to print trillions with impunity, the crony capitalism of public-private partnerships, and the moral hazard created by liability shields for pharmaceutical companies. We discuss why massive societal shutdowns were only politically and economically feasible because of the Fed’s money-creation backstop, how a true free market would have produced very different and far less damaging outcomes, and why regulatory capture and centralized control usually serve entrenched interests rather than the public. Steve opened my mind to consider the hidden economic forces that shaped the catastrophic Covid response. I’m delighted to share it with you.

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