Their "cure" for the coronavirus will be far deadlier than the disease. The quarantines and lockdowns will bring the world to a standstill—that's the point...

- "The Last Gasp," Straight Line Logic, March 24, 2020

Here is a predictive strategy that will, guaranteed, improve your prognostication batting average. Whenever you make a prediction about a government, predict the worst outcome you can think of.

The only surprise will be that you're probably not pessimistic enough.

Back in 1913, if you had predicted the brand new Federal Reserve would steadily debase the currency and exacerbate rather than dampen the business cycle, you were dead right. You would have gotten more points if you predicted its creation was the first step towards abandoning the gold standard and that it would eventually finance government deficits.

Similarly, back in that unlucky year if you predicted the new Constitutional amendment allowing the government to levy an income tax would lead to massive confiscation of incomes and fund gargantuan welfare and warfare states—the blob—you hit it on the screws.

Later, if you predicted that the New Deal wouldn't reverse the economic contraction that the government had already transformed from a garden variety financial crash and recession into a Great Depression, you were right again. More points for those who foresaw both the abandonment of any effective Constitutional constraints on the federal government, and the fiscal consequence of welfare state collectivism—a spiraling and uncontrollable national debt.