But as bad as the CDC is, they can only be charged with incompetence, not malfeasance. The latter indictment applies to America’s economic experts, especially those in charge of monetary policy.
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
Suffocated people couldn’t have rebuilt Chinese cities into architectural marvels, with skyscraper density that makes Manhattan seem undeveloped. Thoroughly muzzled people wouldn’t be gorging on all things American at a rate that sets “communist” China up to soon be the largest market in the world for capitalist-produced American plenty.
Wednesday’s initial estimate for first quarter economic growth, which shrank at a 4.8% annual rate. Governments shut down private commerce in March, and the private investment and consumption that drive American prosperity fell off a cliff. And we’re only part of the way down.
The economic process is just like an organism, it must change and evolve. Consumers’ variable and changing situations demand it. There are only two ways this process can go: progress or demise. To ‘pause’ this process is akin to killing it.
The correlation coefficient between deaths per million and the speed and degree of imposition of shutdowns was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem.
It should be stressed that the U.S. economy was until recently the world’s most dynamic precisely because emotional puddles like Marco Rubio were not making “choices about how to structure our society.”
Scientists are and should be skeptical, critical, and even unconvinced. They should disagree. It is how our accumulated knowledge grows and is refined. Unfortunately, society has adopted a form of unreflective and normative scientism in which science is assumed to immediately have all the answers.
Adam Smith long ago recognized that individuals can find workarounds and ingenious ways to realize gains from trade and gains from innovation even in the presence of what he identified as hundreds of impertinent obstructions which human folly may put in the way.
Automate to enhance, not replace. Help workers develop superpowers, reducing the amount of mundane work and increasing their ability to solve tomorrow’s problems. Get inclusive. The least prepared are the most vulnerable. Stop hiring your traditional profile, and prize the transferable skills of your non-traditional candidates. Psychological diversity wins.
Fill out the form below to get the CFI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of CFI's 10-Point Manifesto for Individualism
Join the CFI Mailing List using the form below to recieve a free Sample Chapter of Hunter Hastings' The Interconnected Individualism
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of Reliving We The Living
The Center for Individualism is a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization with a mission to promote Individualism in America. All work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than CFI. Learn More…