A new study from Baylor’s b-school — tellingly one begun well before the current pandemic — suggests that the policy response to COVID-19 may kill America’s long tradition of entrepreneurship. That is not as far-fetched as it sounds. It has happened before, in many countries.
Group identity and its insignia are an all-consuming obsession of both the left and the right, just as they were of the fascists and communists who marched in the streets, eager to spill each other’s blood. Both sides carry and carefully guard the kind of sustained righteous indignation that comes with certainty of the religious kind.
We think of social media with its inescapable cacophony as a force dividing us. But the problem is our assumption that “united” means “doing and thinking the same thing.” Ironically, exactly this networked technology enables us to think and do different things while remaining connected rather than isolated, and therefore, be greater than the sum of our parts.
No matter what kind of crisis hits, government officials only have a few tools in their toolbox. These tools are spending money, printing money, bailing out companies, restricting freedom, and otherwise expanding government’s powers. These are the “tools” used during pandemics, recessions great or modest, after terrorist attacks, and in the wake of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors.
Looking at the last century, should we count two bloody world wars, central banking and fiat currencies, income taxes, the rise of managerial superstates, vast social insurance and welfare programs, and diminutions of property rights unimaginable to our grandparents as liberal successes?
Misconduct and financial corruption have always been a headache for central governments around the world. Can technology deal with this deep-rooted challenge? According to the 2019 OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum, the development of innovative technologies like blockchain provides state-of-the-art opportunities to reduce corruption in public administration.
This trend of decivilization is inevitable in a democracy. When unproductive people, such as politicians and government employees, can aspire to powerful roles in a government that has a legitimate monopoly on the transference of income and wealth to reward and reinforce non-productivity, they will seize the opportunity it represents and exploit it to the fullest.
All we know is that the most important changes of the last 100 years have taken place during upheavals. And we’re currently in the biggest upheaval of the last 100 years. We know that an irony of technology is that economies often make their greatest leaps forward when the outlook is bleakest. It might be one of the only silver linings of 2020.
Why are so many experts in the field being completely censored? Why is there so much information being shared that completely contradicts the narrative of our federal health regulatory agencies and organizations like the WHO? What’s going on here, and how much power do governments have when they are able to silence the voice of so many people?
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