@MrRBourne (Twitter)

At 8.4 percent, the U.S. unemployment rate after a big shock is back to France's boomtime unemployment rate. Virtue of easy hire and fire laws -- more volatility when crises hit, but ultimately get much lower unemployment and pretty quickly.

Pro-business folk want to subsidise, incentivise, order people to "go to back to normal" lest a particular business fail. Using the power of government to overcome people's revealed preferences is not "pro-market." It is the crude pro-business approach Friedman condemned.

Milton Friedman distinguished between being pro-market and pro-business. Pro-market people recognise that people voluntarily deciding to change their spending habits and socially distance in light of a virus is welfare-enhancing. Preferences are context- & constraint- dependent.

RT @CatoInstitute : Freeing markets is both an important and an underused weapon in the battle against poverty, says @MrRBourne http://j.mp/2LW378j #CatoEcon

. @lymanstoneky , @MrRBourne and @swinshi discuss how marriage penalties make it less affordable to raise a family in the latest episode of The Social Capitalists podcast. Listen here:

What happens after the hearing is over? We continue the conversation over at The Social Capitalists: Post-Hearing Discussions with the Joint Economic Committee Republicans! Subscribe to hear more from @swinshi @lymanstoneky and @MrRBourne :

Earlier: @CatoInstitute 's @MrRBourne testified before the Joint Economic Committee on family affordability

Estimates suggest that relaxing the average mandated staff-to-child ratio by just one child across all age groups would reduce child care prices by 10 percent or more. - @MrRBourne #JECHearing on family affordability @JECRepublicans

All right, but apart from the iPhone, encrypted conversations, encyclopedic knowledge at your finger tips, the biggest library of videos ever known, next day delivery, door-to-door minicabs, comprehensive maps, and humongous music libraries, what has Big Tech ever done for us?

Thanks - I appreciate that.