News - Page 21 of 121 - Center for Individualism

Leo’s Edge of Night and Andrei’s Secret Storm Galvanize Kira’s Search for Tomorrow

August 17, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

Daytime drama became a phenomenon in late 1950’s America, and like a novel, it allowed for longer dialogue to develop dramatic story lines and romantic relationships. Not only is We the Living a great title for a soap opera, the novel is loaded with drama and romance. For example, in Chapters 4 – 6, our We the Living Study Group was introduced to the love triangle between Kira, Leo, and Andrei.

Like viewing a new soap episode, it helps to know Kira’s attributes and context. With her family back in Petrograd and visiting cousins in Chapter 2, Kira was asked about fresh fruit in Crimea, “I never notice what I eat.” When told she should wear longer skirts, Kira answered “If one has the material. I never notice what I wear.”

In these instances, she reveals her indifference to what she can’t control. When the conversation changes to new, Soviet system career choices, Kira avers, “I think the discussion is superfluous. I am going to the Technological Institute.”

To her family, this is not an appropriate choice for a young female, and her older sister Lydia demands, “When did you decide that?” Kira answers, “About eight years ago. I’ll be an engineer. I’m going to build because I want to build.” Then Chapter 4 transitions from Kira’s childhood to her young adulthood,

During the lectures, she smiled suddenly, at no one in particular; smiled at a wordless thought of her own. Her childhood had been a cold shower, gay, hard and invigorating. Now she was entering her morning, with her work before her, with so much to be done.

This is how people think if they are truly alive. Conversely, her cousin Victor declares, “A modern man of culture must preserve an objective viewpoint which, no matter his personal convictions, enables him to see our time as a moment of gigantic importance to humanity.” Kira replies, “Nonsense. It is an old and ugly fact that the masses exist and make their existence felt. This is a time when they make it felt with particular ugliness. That’s all.”

Kira’s focus is on what she can control, especially her ambitions, for the singular reason that she wants it. She has no interest in those who want little more than to avoid death. As the master of her future, and being an idealistic 18 year old girl, her attention is also drawn to young men who have not surrendered to their circumstances, whatever that may mean. The first one we are introduced to is Leo,

He was tall, a cap was pulled over his eyes. His mouth, calm, severe, contemptuous, was that of an ancient chieftain who could order men to die, and his eyes were such as could watch it. Kira leaned against a lamp post, looking straight at his face, and smiled.

Chapter 5 further reveals Kira’s naivete during her first encounter with Andrei Taganov, the young Soviet enforcer who overhears her saying, “When the traces of their republic are disinfected from history – what a glorious funeral march this will make.” Later, her Uncle Vasili asks, “How about it Kira? Do you think you’ll live your whole life under a Red Boot?” Kira replies, “No, it can’t last forever.” In the benevolent universe of reason, reality ultimately prevails.

Still unaware of each other’s names, Kira and Andrei’s second meeting at the Institute triggers Kira’s sense of danger,

He stopped and turned, waiting for her. The sidewalk sloped at a steep, frozen angle. Her feet slipped perilously. His strong hand closed over her arm with a smile, “I suppose you weren’t afraid.” She said, “On the contrary I was very much afraid – this time.”

Lurking at the Facebook forum, Doctor J trolls Andrei, “He’s a hopeless twit. But his character is just developing!” Chapter 6 proves this when Kira tells him, “I thought that Communists never believed in doing anything but what they had to do.” Andrei replies, “I must be a very poor Communist, I’ve always done only what I wanted to do.” She then asks, “Your revolutionary duty?” Andrei takes the bait,

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right you want to do it. If you don’t want to do it – it isn’t right. If it’s right and you don’t want to do it – you don’t know what right is and you’re not a man.

Also using a bogus public service dialectic, presidential nominee Joe Biden justifies his vice president running mate selection,

I need someone who understands we are in a battle for the soul of this nation. To get through these crises, we need to unite for a better America. Kamala Harris gets that. A fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.

What the confused Andrei Taganov and life-long dimwit Joe Biden have done is invoke the 19th century moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant – duty as an end in itself. Directly opposed is America’s moral premise – our lives, liberty, and happiness are an end in themselves. Biden’s supporters are ignorant of the fact there are no little guys in America’s founding principles – the soul of this nation is distributed equally among each individual. Avoiding reality and chaos define the Democratic party’s malevolent universe death premise.

Coming of age during the economic and political chaos of a middle class under assault, Gen Z and Kira hold dearly to their life premise of productive happiness.

Andrei continues, “You’re going to say that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.” Kira stands firm, “I loathe your ideals. You will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state.”

Doctor J offers to our online forum: Although young, Kira instinctively understood it would not be of any advantage to sell her soul and blindly obey people. Duty is accountable to no one. We are told we will be better for it while it actually can kill us on so many levels.”

To be continued . . . .

Leo wonders, Who suffers in this world? If only one could come down to the level of those who never want it, never miss it.”

Andrei dreams, “To bring the millions up to where I want them – for my sake.”

Kira insists, “Haven’t you ever wanted a thing for no reason save one: that you wanted it?”

When The Government Takes A Dollar From Your Pocket And Spends It, It Doesn’t Mean The Economy Grows By A Dollar.

August 16, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

When revenue shrinks by 1 percent of GDP and spending increases by 51 percent over 10 months, you get a $2.8 trillion deficit. That figure, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is significantly larger than the deficit Uncle Sam accumulated over the first 10 months of 2019. Yet, many in Congress demand that even more spending be enacted in the name of stimulating the economy.

More spending means more debt and more future taxes. That much we know. What we also know is that the calls for sustained spending—in the form of unemployment checks, individual stimulus checks, small-business grants, and payroll tax cuts—which are made regularly in newspapers, political speeches, and partisan punditry, are overblown to stay the least. The idea here is that if Uncle Sam continues paying people to stay home, their consumption will continue, and the economy will grow.

These calls are based explicitly or implicitly on the belief in an all-powerful federal spending multiplier, or the idea that if the government spends one dollar, the economy will grow by more than a dollar.

That’s right; the belief is that when the government takes a dollar out of your pocket, puts that dollar through the political process, and decides where to spend it (based on input from special interest groups), the economy will somehow return more money in growth than the money invested, even after Washington bureaucrats take their cut. It’s magic! Sadly, these arguments ignore recent empirical evidence that the costs of increased government spending far outweigh the benefits to the economy.

For starters, contrary to the claims of pro-government spending proponents, economists are far from having reached a consensus about the actual return on government spending. While some economists find that a dollar spent by the government generates more of a return than the dollar spent, others find that the return is less than one dollar. And yet others find that if you take into account the future taxes needed to pay for the dollar that’s spent, the multiplier is actually negative, and the economy takes a hit.

After reviewing the recent academic literature for the Mercatus Center’s publication The Bridge, my colleague Jack Salmon and I found that most of “the empirical literature on fiscal multipliers conducted since then (2009) has found economic multipliers resulting from additional government spending ranging from a lower estimate of around 0.2 to an upper estimate of around 0.9.” We go on to explain that in “(p)ulling the results from two dozen academic studies, we calculate an average multiplier at the low end of 0.31 and an average multiplier at the high end of 0.66.”

Now, in fairness, there are narrow cases when government spending can stimulate the economy, but for that to happen, the environment in which the spending takes place is important. Work by economists Ethan Ilzetzki, Enrique Mendoza, and Carlos Vegh on the impact of government fiscal stimulus shows that it “depends on key country characteristics, including the level of development, the exchange rate regime, openness to trade, and public indebtedness.” Many other economists have found the same. Unfortunately for the proponents of fiscal stimulus, the United States has the features of a country where stimulus by spending does have an impact and, in fact, can have a negative impact on growth.

Making matters worse is the fact that, even if you had a country with little debt and the right environment, implementing the spending correctly is a key to getting a multiplier that’s larger than one. As former Treasury Secretary and former Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers has explained, stimulus spending needs to be timely, targeted, and temporary. Unfortunately, evidence from the last recession shows that it rarely is.

There are always economists, journalists, and pundits willing to assume that this time will be different and government spending will deliver on the promises made on its behalf by pro-spending advocates. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. It is also a dangerous game to play. If spending doesn’t deliver on the promised economic growth, what it will undoubtedly achieve is more debt. That, sadly, is a scenario where future growth goes up in a puff of smoke.

Cato’s Letters Remind Us How Far We’ve Moved From The Intentions Of America’s Founders.

August 15, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The 2020 election campaign is different than earlier iterations in several ways. Many of those have to do with COVID-19 and the extraordinary extent of political machinations today. But more important is that we have moved so far from the bounds of what America’s founders intended.

In fact, that statement applies more than half a century before our founding. The reason is that among the greatest influences on colonial political thought was Cato’s Letters, in which John Trenchard and Robert Gordon echoed and expanded John Locke’s views in England in the early 1720s. According to Ronald Hamowy, “its arguments against oppressive government and in support of the splendors of freedom were quoted constantly and its authors were regarded as the country’s most eloquent opponents of despotism … [and] frequently served as the basis of the American response to the whole range of depredations under which the colonies suffered.”

Of particular note with regard to our upcoming election are Cato’s Letters 69 and 70, which addressed the fiercely fought British election of 1722. They remind us how far we have moved from what George Washington described as “the sacred fire of liberty … staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people,” making their insights worth reconsideration for November, as we vote just two days before the 300th anniversary of the first of Catos’ Letters:

Many [are] tired, sick, and ashamed of party-animosities, and of quarreling … to gratify the pride, the ambition, and rapine of those who only sell and betray them. It is yet in our power to save ourselves.

Let us not again be deluded with false promises and deceitful assurances; but let us judge what men will do by what they have done.

Throw your choice upon such who will neither buy you, nor sell you.

In corrupt administrations, your superiors of all kinds make bargains, and pursue ends at the public expense … making the people poor.

Think what you are doing, while you are raising hue and cry after men who will betray you … for a poor momentary share of their infamous plunder.

Know, Gentlemen, how you are used … by those who think it worth their time to flatter you … It depends now upon yourselves … show that you are men.

Liberty: You are our Alpha and Omega, our first and last resource; and when your virtue is gone, all is gone.

You may choose whether you will be freemen or vassals; whether you will spend your own money and estates, or let others worse than you spend them for you.

You are born to liberty … preserve it … your governors have every right to protect and defend you, none to injure and oppress you … But it depends upon yourselves alone to make these rights of yours … of use to you.

All men desire naturally riches and power; almost all men will take every method, just or unjust, to attain them. Hence the difficulty of governing men.

While men are men, ambition, avarice, and vanity, and other passions, will govern their actions; in spite of all equity and reason, they will be ever usurping, or attempting to usurp, upon the liberty and fortunes of one another … Dominion will always desire increase, and property always to preserve itself; and these opposite views and interests will be causing a perpetual struggle: But by this struggle liberty is preserved.

The interest of the body of the people is to keep people from oppression, and their magistrates from changing into plunderers.

Nor can there be any security in the fidelity of one … who can find it more his interest to betray you than to serve you faithfully.

Choose not therefore such who are likely to truck away your liberties … and to sell you to those against whom it is their duty to defend you.

This is not a dispute about dreams or speculations, which affect not your property; but it is a dispute whether you shall have any property, which these wretches throw away.

Do you not know how much you are at the mercy of [politicians’] honesty … whether you are to be freemen or slaves … Would you allow the common laws of neighborhood to such as steal or plunder your goods, rob you of your money, seize your houses, drive you from your possessions, enslave your persons, and starve your families? No, sure, you would not.

Consider what you are about … We are all in your hands, and so at present are your representatives; but very quickly the scene will be shifted, and both you and we will be in theirs … think what they are like to be, when they are no longer under your eye … These humble creatures, who now bow down before you, will soon look down upon you.

While Cato’s Letters 69 and 70 focused on the 1722 British election, they also provide a useful civics primer for the principles American voters concerned with the progressive evisceration of liberty should consider this November, nearly three centuries later. In particular, we should ask whether we are defending the sacred fire of liberty or further abandoning it.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. This article appeared at issuesinsights.com

From The Optimism Department: Are We Headed Into A New Roaring Twenties?

August 14, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

We seem to be living in unprecedented times. We always seem to be living in unprecedented times, according to conventional wisdom, mostly because we don’t spend enough time studying history. There’s certainly a precedent for our current times in the past, one that was truly unprecedented back then.

World War I was followed by the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which infected an estimated 500 million people and killed as many as 50 million. Given that the world population was 1.8 billion back then, that implied a 28% infection rate and nearly a 3% death rate. Both stats are currently significantly lower for the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the global population is 7.5 billion. There have been 20 million cases and 735,000 deaths worldwide as of yesterday.

The good news is that the bad news during the previous precedent was followed by the Roaring Twenties. So far, the 2020s has started with the pandemic, but there are plenty of years left for the prosperous 1920s to become a precedent for the current decade. If so, the driver of the coming boom will be technology-enhanced productivity, as it was during the 1920s.

Before we go there, let’s go back to the late 1700s and recall the grim forecasts of Thomas Malthus. He was the first economist, and he was a pessimist. In other words, he was the first Malthusian. During the late 1700s, he predicted that populations would grow faster than food production; the result would be a regular cycle of starvation and death. He was dead wrong. Agriculture was among the industries that benefited the most from the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. Technological progress always confounds the pessimists by solving scarce-resource problems. It also fuels productivity and prosperity, as it did in the 1920s and could do again in the 2020s. Consider the following:

(1) Technology during the 1920s. In 1920, 51% of the US population lived in cities, up from 23% in 1870. This remarkable urbanization was enabled by innovations in electricity and plumbing. Electric grids provided clean, bright light without emitting smoke. Urban water networks supplied clean water, and sewer systems removed waste without the pungent odors of chamber pots and outhouses. Telephones allowed people to converse with distant friends.

Henry Ford’s Model T, built between 1908 and 1927, was the first car invented and helped people to live an easier life by making transportation easier and faster. In 1900, just 8,000 motorcars were registered in the US, but there were 9 million in 1920 and 23 million in 1929. Streetcars and subways, unheard of in 1870, were in all the major cities by 1920. Intercity trains were becoming steadily faster and more reliable. Detroit Police Officer William Potts came up with the idea of traffic lights, taking inspiration from railroad traffic signals. General Electric bought the idea for $40,000, and traffic lights soon were everywhere.

Ford’s assembly line innovation boosted productivity in many manufacturing industries, including the processed food industry. National food brands—including Heinz, Campbell’s, Quaker Oats, Jell-O, and Coca-Cola—began to fill cupboards. Refrigerated railroad cars and in-home iceboxes meant that vegetables were available in winter. Restaurants began to proliferate early in the 20th century. When people out and about in their Model Ts got hungry, their options were few, but the first fast-food chain opened its doors in 1919, an A&W (better known today for its root beer). White Castle hamburger stands opened in 1921, and the first Howard Johnson’s restaurant in 1925.

Increasingly, anything not available in a local store could be obtained by a mail-order catalog. The Montgomery Ward catalog was first issued in 1872, the Sears catalog in 1894. By 1900, Sears was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day, and its catalog featured fur coats, furnaces, furniture, and much more—including homes. Sears sold more than 70,000 mail-order homes between 1908 and 1940. The catalog business was helped along by Parcel Post, which arrived in 1913.

Penicillin is considered one of the most important inventions to come out of the 1920s. It was created by Sir Alexander Fleming, Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, after studying bacteria in 1928. The antibiotic kills or prevents the growth of bacteria.

The bulldozer—used today in all kinds of construction the world over—was invented in 1923 by James Cummings and J. Earl McLeod, originally to dig canals.

Another popular invention found in almost every home by the mid-1900s was the radio. Listening to the radio became a national pastime, and many families gathered in their living rooms to listen to sports news, concerts, sermons, and “Red Menace” news. The phonograph—invented in 1877 and widely used by the 1920s—offered another entertainment option: listening to professional-quality music at home, unheard-of in earlier generations. Outside the home, going to motion picture shows—which were silent until 1927—was a very affordable and popular pastime.

(2) Technology during the 2020s. Today’s doomsters could be confounded by biotechnological innovations that deliver not only a vaccine for COVID-19 but for all coronaviruses. Scientists are investigating a dizzying array of approaches to fight COVID-19. Hopefully, beyond finding a cure or a vaccine, one of beneficial outcomes of all this research will be that scientists learn many more ways to combat illnesses in general and viruses in particular. Typically, it takes roughly a decade for a new vaccine to go through the various stages of development and testing. However, the urgency of the pandemic has mobilized global medical resources as rarely seen in human history. Billions of dollars, provided by both the public and the private sectors, are funding the global campaign to develop tests, vaccines, and cures for the virus.

My colleague Jackie Doherty and I have been writing about disruptive technologies for some time, usually in our Thursday commentaries. (See our archive of Disruptive Technologies Briefings) The awesome range of futuristic “BRAIN” technological innovations includes biotechnology, robotics and automation, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. There are also significant innovations underway in 5G for cellular networks, 3-D manufacturing, electric vehicles, battery storage, blockchain, and quantum and edge computing.

As I wrote in my 2018 book Predicting the Markets:

“Economics is about using technology to increase everyone’s standard of living. Technological innovations are driven by the profits that can be earned by solving the problems posed by scarce resources. Free markets provide the profit incentives to motivate innovators to solve this problem. As they do so, consumer prices tend to fall, driven by their innovations. The market distributes the resulting benefits to all consumers. From my perspective, economics is about creating and spreading abundance, not about distributing scarcity.”

Now consider the follow stats on technology capital spending in the US: High-tech spending on IT equipment, software, and R&D rose to a record $1.32 trillion (saar) during Q2-2020 (Fig. 1). It jumped to a record 50.1% of total capital spending in nominal GDP during the quarter (Fig. 2). Equipment and software accounted for 31.1%, while R&D accounted for 19.1% of capital spending in nominal GDP (Fig. 3).

The 1920s ended with a stock market meltup followed by a meltdown. The 2020s may already be seeing a meltup, begun on March 23. We live in interesting, though not unprecedented, times. The Roaring 1920s could be a precedent for the Roaring 2020s. As Mark Twain observed: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Will John Tamny’s New Book Start the Anti-Lockdown Movement?

August 13, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Up here in Maskachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills, we have a new form of fascism that might well be called “phasism” as our Governor Charlie Baker phases out our freedoms and our economic life. Banning music and theater and Tanglewood concerts and tennis tournaments and baseball games and track meets and schools and colleges, he has put his knee on the arterial flow of our tourist and services dependent economy and it can no longer breathe.

For the last couple months, I’ve been hunkering down and hiding out from this mad-phasist Fuhrer with his menacing black mask inscribed Science will Win and his new COVID forever police state.

Imposing a new travel ban and new alcohol prohibition rule early in August while COVID deaths sink to virtually none, the Governor has been rescinding “step 2 of phase 3” of his reopening plan. He storms at reports of a “recent [beer] kegger in Chatham, that graduation event in Chelmsford, the booze cruise in Boston Harbor, the football camp in South Weymouth, the lifeguard party in Falmouth, the prom in Cohasset,” as the inimitable Howie Carr recounts in the Boston Herald. Like some demented puritan divine, the governor seethes at “troubling clusters” of “private recreational activity”.

Hey, I’m guilty as sin. I still watch unmasked TikTok dancers, and pruriently ponder Doctor Anthony Fauci’s porno YouTube “film clips” of nude happy faces of people dancing in the streets. I travel freely about the country. I’m trusting you not to tell Governor Charlie!

Skulking under my sheets, I write timidly in the knowledge that Baker has scores of thousands of apparatchiks hounding down any secret hoarders of residual capacity to think for themselves without gubernatorial guidance and medical counsel.

I only cherish a futile hope that Baker doesn’t amend his mask order with Doctor Fauci’s proposed mandate for goggles. I can hardly breathe in a mask, and I sure don’t know how I can prophesy in goggles.

But I’m relieved to report that righteous scriveners and saner doctors, academics and statisticians across the land are publishing books debunking this amazing COVID madness. I’ve told you already about my Discovery Institute colleagues Jay Richards and Douglas Ax and statistician William Briggs and their demonstration in The Price of Panic (available in October) that lockdowns do no good whatsoever in suppressing epidemic but do effectively devastate much of the economy. I’ve written of my Moonshots colleague John Schroeter’s stirring ebook, already available on Amazon: Covid19: A Devil’s Choice.

With cogent authority, these books present all the statistical arguments on the insignificance of COVID compared to earlier, more deadly epidemics that brought no lockdowns or mask edicts.

Once to every man and nation, however, comes a moment to speak truth to power without statistical distractions or utilitarian extenuations. Now John Tamny, the libertarian star of Forbes’ Real Clear Markets, has unleashed a devastating tract, to be published as soon as possible (AIER possibly), entitled When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason.

Naming names and describing the endless carnival of outrageous overreach, Tamny vividly shows that Governor Baker is just one of many demented governors reveling in power like a Charlie Chaplin Fuhrer during this mass media madness.

Tamny is not much interested in COVID-19 data, except to dismiss the virus drama as just another epidemic event like scores of others over the centuries. He derides the call to continue lockdowns until the arrival of vaccines. He quotes Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal,

“There were no vaccines for the ’57 Asian flu [that caused 70 thousand US deaths, including many young people (nearly equivalent to Covid-19 deaths adjusted for population)], or the ’68 Hong Kong flu or the 1918 Spanish flu [50 million world deaths]. They were never ‘cured.’ They ended when people decided to accept and adapt to the virus’s existence.”

Nothing offers any answer to the all-cause death data that show COVID to have been a trivial event in medical terms, with some 300,000 lives lost, average age over 80, in the face of some 58 million global all-cause deaths in 2019. COVID deaths, even according to the Imperial College of London, will be drastically fewer in 2020 than the some 1.4 million new tuberculosis deaths resulting from the lockdowns and COVID hospital distortions.

As Tamny points out, the relative triviality of Covid-19 was blatantly evident as early as March 18, 2020, when Fred Smith, the venerable FedEx founder-CEO, was interviewed by Fox News’ Bret Baier. Smith had extensive operations in the epicenter of the virus in Wuhan, China, and 907 employees there, delivering packages for weeks all over the stricken city. All employees were tested for the virus and only four tested positive. Of those four, two proved to be false positives. None of the FedEx workers got exceptionally sick and all recovered.

Tamny concluded: “That [Smith’s Wuhan] employees were largely spared the virus’s spread, and that none had died from it, reads as a reasonable market signal going back over two months (and realistically much longer than that) [discrediting] the presumed lethality of Covid 19.” COVID seems chiefly to threaten people already dying and physicians who expose themselves repeatedly to a load-dependent viral attack.

What we have undergone is an egregious and perhaps criminal and certainly unconstitutional power grab by politicians. Whether merely stupid or demagogic or driven by polls or by a nefariously political media, the politicians from Trump on down simply blundered like no others in the history of public policy.

“Proper history,” Tamny writes, “will indicate that what happened in 2020 was a global debacle…The reaction by pols…amounted to the biggest crime against humanity [in two centuries]. When politicians panicked, those with the least suffered in unimaginable ways…According to a UN study he cites, some 285 million people may die of starvation [because] of “an American upper middle class that was making decisions for everyone and for whom lockdowns were merely an inconvenience or vacation.”

“To blame this on the coronavirus is to excuse ineptitude that is the norm when the combined decentralized knowledge of millions and billions of humans is ignored in favor of the centralized and highly limited knowledge of very few politicians, and even fewer experts.”

“In robbing us of our freedom to live and work as we wanted…politicians suffocated wealth creation along with the information necessary to save us from the maladies and death brought by the virus. [It was] tragic…The expert standard replaced the market standard…”

Tamny understands economics with an intuitive and uncanny contrarian eye that penetrates beyond all the macroeconomic fantasies of conventional economists. He points out: “If the virus had been lethal, the lockdowns would have made even less sense…The biggest enemy of life is poverty.” Lockdowns simply cause poverty without relieving disease in any way.

“Let’s never again fight disease with the taking of freedom and wealth so essential to knowledge, prosperity, and by extension life itself.”

As AIER’s Jeffrey Tucker declares: “This country needs a serious anti-lockdown movement, one that is not just political but cultural and intellectual, one that is deeply educated on history, philosophy, law, economics, and all sciences, and can rally around traditional American civic postulates concerning individual freedom and the limits of governments, and also around universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down.”

Tamny is giving us a heroic book just in time to lead this movement. We have been suffering not from a medical crisis but from a political and economic and institutional crisis. We have undergone a vast breakdown of moral, educational, intellectual and journalistic standards. Tamny tells this story better than anyone else. All should read his shocking tale.

This article by George Gilder appeared at aier.org.

Fauci Continues To Lie To Us In His Attempts To Maintain His Power Position.

August 12, 2020/in News /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

In recent congressional testimony Dr. Anthony Fauci, the primary architect of the Trump administration’s COVID response, painted a bleak picture about the United States’s ability to contain the pandemic. According to Fauci’s narrative, the United States is experiencing a resurgence in regional COVID outbreaks because it failed to sufficiently lock down back in March, and failed to comply with the existing lockdown orders. Fauci specifically contrasted this situation to several European states that imposed lockdowns around the same time, claiming the latter as a successful model for COVID containment.

There are several immediate problems with Fauci’s arguments, including the fact that COVID cases are showing clear signs of a summer resurgence in the same European countries that allegedly tamed the virus through harsh lockdowns in the spring. The American news media however has seized on Fauci’s narrative, and used it to call for renewed lockdowns. The New York Times and the Washington Post both editorialized in favor of a second stricter wave of nationwide lockdowns lasting until October – this despite there being no clear evidence that lockdowns actually work at taming the virus.

So how does the evidence behind this narrative stand up under empirical scrutiny? Let’s consider the claims.

Did the United States react too late?

According to the pro-lockdown narrative, the United States is experiencing a second COVID wave because it took a lackadaisical approach to locking down. We allegedly closed too late and reopened too early, leading to a failure to tame the virus in the spring. This same narrative often holds up Europe as a counterpoint for what a cautious, responsible, and evidence-based reopening process supposedly looks like.

I’ve investigated this claim previously using start and end dates for the lockdowns in various countries. Simply put, it is entirely without merit.

Most of the United States went into lockdown during the second and third weeks of March, following a set of Trump Administration recommendations that were based on the now-discredited Imperial College epidemiology model of Neil Ferguson. In total, 43 of 50 American states imposed shelter-in-place style lockdowns, with the holdouts consisting almost entirely of rural western states with low population density and few signs of the outbreaks that plagued the cities of the northeast at that time.

As far as timing goes, the US lockdowns came into effect at almost exactly the same time as not only Europe but the majority of the world. A few early outbreak hotspots such as Italy preceded this shutdown by about 2 weeks, and a handful of countries (Sweden, Taiwan, Belarus) bucked the international trend. But otherwise, the timeline clearly confirms that the American response directly coincided with most other countries.

Our Country Needs A Serious Anti-Lockdown Movement.

August 11, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

This country needs a serious anti-lockdown movement, one that is not just political but cultural and intellectual, one that is deeply educated on history, philosophy, law, economics, and all sciences, and can rally around traditional American civic postulates concerning individual freedom and the limits of governments, and also around universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.

What should this movement – which need not be formally organized – study, believe, and teach?

Because property rights are the first violated in lockdown, the movement needs to embrace and champion the right of private ownership and control: of businesses, homes, and ourselves. The liberal tradition has long affirmed this principle, and it is nothing but appalling that the lockdowns took place as if private property doesn’t exist. Suddenly everything and everyone belonged to the state, and it would be the state to declare what is or is not essential, or even what is elective vs. nonelective for your medical care.

It should embrace the freedom to choose our associations, since that is what came under attack next: we couldn’t gather in groups, hold conferences, go to the movies, do anything not “socially distant” (I’m so sick of that phrase, with dubious origins, that I could barely type it), or even go to another state to visit friends and relatives.

This movement needs to celebrate and defend religious freedom, since, incredibly, most houses of worship were forcibly closed by government. The modern idea of freedom came about in the late Middle Ages when exhaustion from religious wars gradually gave rise to the idea of tolerance. Religious toleration was the first great freedom that came to be codified in law. It’s stunning that it was so flagrantly violated this year.

It must come to terms with free enterprise and the innovation that comes with it. How much wealth and creativity has been lost in the lockdowns? It’s unfathomable. The biggest victims have been small and medium-sized businesses, whereas the large tech firms have thrived. To start and manage a commercial enterprise is a human right, the realization of which was the great achievement of modern life, as it spread prosperity throughout the world and lifted up the world’s people from the state of nature and to levels of the entrenched hierarchies of old.

Part of this liberal ideal is free trade, which has come under fire from both the left and right. Don’t forget that Donald Trump kicked off this dictatorial frenzy with his sudden and shocking bans of travel from China and Europe, which resulted in a frenzied and frantic mass crowding of airports in the days following. He did it with a stroke of a pen, overriding all his advisors. He still brags about it.

How much did his extreme reaction here inspire governors to do the same? Of course, his actions reflect his persistent isolationism on not only trade but immigration too. Even now, Trump is refusing to allow foreign workers into the U.S. (except for emergency cases) because he incorrectly believes this will help the American job market. It’s an outrage: free enterprise entitles the employment of anyone from anywhere. This is a policy that is good for everyone.

So long as we are talking about freedom fundamentals, let’s talk about masks. They have become exactly what the New England Journal of Medicine called them: a talisman. They are symbols of social commitment and political loyalty. A free society rallies around individual choice, so if masks make a person feel safe, or if it makes them feel they are keeping others safe from their breath, fine. But when people attack others for resisting wearing them, and are apparently upset at the seeming appearance of rebellion from rules, this is imposition and intolerance – perhaps understandable given the times, but still illiberal.

Laws requiring face coverings in public would never have been tolerated even six months ago. And yet here we are, not only with laws but a growing number of recruits within the public to enforce them with appalling rudeness. It’s hardly the first time in history. American sumptuary laws in Colonial times mandated that people not dress in fancy clothes for reasons of piety and social conformism. Part of the capitalist revolution included the freedom to dress as one wants and the mass availability of fashion for everyone. The mandatory mask movement and its shock troops among the public is but a revival of puritanism.

The lockdowns crushed the economic prospects of millions, and government attempted to make up for that with wild spending of other people’s money and an unprecedented use of the printing press, as if government can somehow paper over the destruction it caused. Therefore, the anti-lockdown movement needs a commitment to fiscal sanity and sound money. We now know that a government with the capacity to create unlimited amounts of paper money cannot be constrained. This needs to be fixed.

As for health, the topic or excuse that unleashed the lockdowns in the first place, we surely should learn from this experience that politics and medicine need to be separated with a high wall. We have medical professionals who are traditionally in charge of mitigating disease, and they do so in line with their own professional associations and best judgement. Politics should never override the doctor/patient relationship, nor presume to know what is better for us than our own physicians.

On the matter of education, governors all over the country cruelly locked down all the schools, though there is near-zero threat to kids from the virus and there is no verified case of a child passing C-19 to an adult. Perhaps a small silver lining is that we have learned more about how parents can exercise more control over education than they have previously had. The anti-lockdown movement needs to embrace a multiplicity of educational alternatives including the possibility of full privatization so that education can again be part of the free enterprise matrix.

It’s true that anti-lockdown carries a negative connotation. Is there a better word to convey the positive dimension? My preference: liberalism. Progressives have abandoned it. It is also correct from a historical and international perspective. Liberalism and modernity are inextricably linked in history, says Benjamin Constant. A liberalism of the future needs to be prepared to understand, advocate, and fight for freedom in a non-lockdown world. No exceptions.

Which takes us to the final point. Whether this movement is working in the realms of academia, culture, journalism, or politics, there is an absolute urgency that it exercise unrelenting moral courage and integrity. Ferociously. It should be uncompromising on crucial points. It must be willing to speak even when it is unfashionable to do so, even when the media is screaming the opposite, even when the Twitter mob floods your notifications, even when you are shamed for thinking for yourself.

This time around, as you have surely noticed, even the voices of good people with good ideas fell silent in fear. This fear must be banished. The blowback against this despotism will come but it is not enough. We need character, integrity, courage, and truth, and this perhaps matters more than ideology and knowledge. Knowledge without the willingness and courage to speak is useless, because (as E.C. Harwood taught us) for integrity there is no substitute.

In the end, the case for unlocking society is a spiritual matter. What is your life worth and how do you want to live it? How important are the hard-won freedoms you exercise daily? What of the lives and liberties of others? These are everything. Freedom has never prevailed without passionate and courageous voices to defend it. We have the tools now, many more than before. They can throttle us but can’t finally shut us down. The notion that we would fail to speak for fear of the Twitter mob is absurd.

This movement, whether it is called anti-lockdown or just plain liberalism, must reject the wickedness and compulsion of this current moment in American life. It needs to counter the brutalism of lockdowns. It needs to speak and act with humane understanding and high regard for social functioning under freedom, and the hope for the future that comes with it. The enemies of freedom and human rights have revealed themselves for the world to see. Let there be justice. The well-being of us all is at stake.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. This article first appeared at aier.org, and has been shortened.

Reliving We the Living Teaches Living Is Not the Avoidance of Death.

August 10, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

You can have your cake and eat it too; so say Soviet authorities in 1920’s Russia. Just not today. The Party needs the cake, and will be consuming their share of it first. The consolation prize for patience is lice infestation, literally it’s free; figuratively, not so much. This describes the package-deal offered to the human cattle in Chapter 1 of Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living.

As they arrived in Petrograd riding boxcars from Crimea in the south, Alexander Dimitrievitch Argounov and his family were among them. Appearing first is the determined, idealistic, and naive 18 year old (and 1920 Russian Gen Z’er) daughter Kira, “with the defiant, enraptured, solemnly and fearfully expectant look of a warrior who is entering a strange city and is not quite sure whether he is entering it as a conqueror or a captive.”

Our We the Living Study Group accepted the challenge of understanding this important novel last week, and Chapter 1 presents a sharp contrast between Kira’s optimism and the despair of her family and their fellow travelers. Lurking in the shadows of the Facebook private forum, Doctor J explains and gives us a modern example,

She could not relate to shallowness. It’s OK to miss things, but obsession can lead to depression and suicide in challenging times. I miss root beer barrel candy but it’s not something I need to be talked off the ledge for, though the Beer Police in Central Planning (Congress) are working on outlawing that.

The absurdities of socialism are presented immediately in We the Living, “From the border of Poland to the yellow rivers of China, the red banner rose triumphantly to the sound of “Internationale” and the clicking of keys, as the world’s doors closed on Russia.” While humor is a great weapon for maintaining dignity in the face of brutality, it’s not easy to find, but here Rand inserts a little sarcasm and irony,

“Could you please step out for a moment, citizens?” Two gentlemen were were traveling comfortably in that private little compartment, one of them on the seat, the other stretched in the filth on the floor. Left alone where no one could watch, the lady in the fur coat unwrapped a little bundle of oiled paper. She had a whole boiled potato.

This economic system, known affectionately in 2020 America as Democratic Socialism, is what leads to the cherished equality of a train toilet becoming a private dining room. Thankfully, it is expertly explained by a passenger as: “if you’re not a speculator, you’ll starve, but if you are, you can buy anything you want, but if you buy you’re a speculator, and then look out.”

Another way to illustrate this cognitive dissonance is the greeting the train passengers received upon arrival at Petrograd station in Chapter 2. The first banner read: Comrades! We Are the Builders of a New Life! The other banner read: Lice Spread Disease! Citizens, Unite on the Anti-Typhus Front! The comparative irony Rand presents with these is stunning – to be a comrade is to be lice, citizens are builders where building is forbidden, and life is defined as avoiding death.

The death avoidance premise also defines 2020’s progressive economic lock-down banners, We’re All In This Together! Flatten the Curve! Wear a Mask, Save a Life! Their consequence was “peaceful protests” in Democratic party strongholds like Minneapolis, Seattle, Brooklyn and Portland, which are now eerily similar to the scene witnessed on 1920’s Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd,

New signs were cotton strips with glaring, uneven letters. Gold letters spelled forgotten names on the windows of new owners, and bullet holes with sunburst cracks still decorated the glass. There were stores without signs and signs without stores.

One of those forgotten names was that of Kira’s uncle. “Vasili Ivanovitch spoke seldom. He said only: Is that my little friend Kira? The question was warmer than a kiss.” Here Ms. Rand gives us another glimpse into Kira’s character, it seems she adores her uncle Vasili. Much like Kira’s father Alexander, he was a self-made man, “his backbone had been as straight as his gun; his spirit as straight as his backbone.”

Independence is what commands Kira’s attention and respect, to a fault, and clarity is what Ayn Rand commands in her writing, to the vexation of her critics. Lurking in the corridors of our Facebook forum, Mama Bear relates one such experience while Reliving We the Living,

Ayn Rand’s description of worn and weary people is so realistic: such as the woman left at the train station with her eight children because there was no room in the box car. She really defines her characters and the era, many readers could not imagine that type of life.

The conversation continued with The Padre saying “we are able to personalize, through the Argounov family, what confiscation of private property truly means. The family is physically and emotionally devastated.” Except Kira refuses to be devastated, and most people cannot imagine the type of life she envisions.

In Chapter 3, Rand brings clarity by focusing on Kira’s childhood during the Argounova’s vacations at their summer residence. While the house faced their spacious, manicured lawn and gardens, it had its back to the side of the hill overlooking a river “like a mass of rock and earth disgorged by a volcano and frozen in its chaotic tangle.” Kira preferred to face reality, unconditionally, because there are none,

Kira was left alone to spend her days in the wild freedom of the rocky hill, as its undisputed sovereign. She swung from rock to rock, grasping a tree branch, throwing her body into space. She made a raft of tree branches and, clutching a long pole, sailed down the river.

“Some enter life from under temple vaults, head bowed in awe. Some enter with a heart tramped, crying for the warmth of the herd. Kira Argounova entered life with the sword of a Viking pointing the way and an operetta for a battle march.”

She knew she had a life and it was her life. She knew the work she had chosen and which she expected of life. Her future was consecrated, because it was her future. Over Lydia’s bed hung an ikon, over Kira’s – an American skyscraper.

The Media Tries To Exploit Economic Ignorance When It Derogates American Prosperity.

August 9, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

A few days ago, I went to the grocery store with the express purpose of buying some junk food. We don’t usually keep junk food in the house (my wife is a bit of a health nut), but the kids have been having friends over a lot this summer, and I think I got caught up in a wave of nostalgia—remembering what it was like to hang with friends, and how I always loved the houses that had tasty snacks that we got to eat our fill of.

Of course, those were the days before parents knew that sugar is literally like crack to a kid’s developing body and brain. Ah, the eighties and early nineties—when kids, including yours truly, subsisted on sugary, over-processed foods and neon-colored drinks. I think we turned out okay for the most part, but we’ve definitely been more careful in choosing what our kids consume than our parents were with us.

Every now and then, though, the dad in me just wants to cram the freezer full of unnatural colored and flavored goodies and sit back as my kids and their friends run through the sprinkler—buzzing on high fructose corn syrup, and sporting Kool-Aid-colored smiles.

As I stood in the freezer section of our local grocery store, I was floored at the variety of products. Dozens of brands and literally hundreds of varieties all vied for my attention. They competed with bright packaging, creative logos, and low prices. Some promised to be healthier than their competitors, and others played heavily on nostalgia—I see you, red-white-and-blue bomb pop.

The fruity popsicles and abundant ice cream options were surrounded by ice cream sandwiches, Klondike and Dove bars, and much more. I spent a while exploring all my choices, and finally settled on a pretty mixed bag of nostalgic, cheap, and chocolaty options.

The kids and their friends were thrilled, and I have enjoyed all the sprinkler mayhem and sugar-highs I anticipated.

This morning, I was reading an article on FEE and it reminded me of my popsicle adventure. It took to task a totally biased and purposely misinformed video the New York Times put out last year about this time.

The short clip, titled “Please Stop Telling Me America is Great,” aimed to convince its audience that America is terrible because it has fallen well behind Europe in many ways, and that it’s actually more akin “to a developing country than we’d like to admit.” They go on to say that, “America is the richest country… but we’re also the poorest, with a whopping 18% poverty rate—closer to Mexico than Western Europe.”

The whole video pretty much follows that narrative, and paints the U.S. to be a wrecked country—cold and indifferent to the suffering of its poorest citizens, and uninterested in rising above how terrible it has become. The only way to fix it, they imply, is with more government, more social programs, and more “free money.”

Of course.

Thankfully, the folks at Just Facts saw red flags in the way the Times interpreted the data used to make their claims and put in the work to get to the truth of the matter. They looked at the economic data catalogued by several organizations and found that not only was the Times wrong, but they were reporting the actual exact opposite of what the data really showed.

The reality is that the poorest in the United States are actually more prosperous than most of Europe—not most of Europe’s poor, but most of Europe’s everyone. Here’s another way to look at it: if the poorest people in America were a country of their own, that country would be richer than most any European nation. The article notes that,

The high consumption of America’s “poor” doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace, like Spain, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. This is because people’s quality of life also depends on their communities and personal choices, like the local politicians they elect, the violent crimes they commit, and the spending decisions they make.

So while quality of life can’t be measured by income, or purchasing power—see: money can’t buy happiness—it certainly cannot be said that the United States is akin to a developing nation, or that our poor are worse off than the poorest people in Mexico like the Times claimed.

But why would they do that?

Why would any country’s media outlet put in so much effort to make their nation look less prosperous and less “great” than it actually was? I mean really—have they never been to the grocery store for popsicles??

The answers to this question are so numerous that we could probably fill a whole book with them. We could talk about how the left hates self-reliance and entrepreneurship, how they hate the idea of poor people lifting themselves out of poverty and creating wealth, how they want a population totally dependent on politicians and the wealthy elite for every aspect of their lives from buying groceries to educating their children to paying their mortgages.

I think any and all of these examples feed the agenda of the Times and others of their ilk. I also think there’s a lot of truth to an agenda for a “new world order,” and a “reset” of capitalism and the “western” way of life. Our country, with all of its many flaws, stands in the way of a leftist, globalist agenda. The programs they have been trying to push by hook or crook for the last decade or more are the very reason that European nations rank below America’s poor, and that fact cannot be denied. The data has proven it time and again, and yet world powers continue to ignore it in their push for The Great Reset.

I believe that the powers that be are dependent on American’s ignorance of their own history. I think that they know that if they can keep us distracted by party politics and feed us on a steady diet of misinformation and economic illiteracy, then they can convince the rising generations that America is terrible, and in need of a total makeover.

The makeover, of course, will be a Marxist one.

Murray Rothbard, on whose, Anatomy of the State we based The Tuttle Twins and the Fate of the Future, is often quoted for saying,

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

I used to agree with Murray, but I think I might be changing my mind. Maybe it isn’t okay to be ignorant of economics after all. Maybe it isn’t okay to consider it a “dismal science” and leave it to those who would apply themselves to its study. We live in a world where we have the information of all the best minds the world has ever known at our fingertips and in our pockets every day. If we are ignorant of the way the world works, if we are easily led about by a deceitful media, and tricked into calling good bad, and bad good, then who—really—do we have to blame but ourselves?

How many people take the garbage the Times puts out at face value, and never look at the data for themselves? I’d venture to say most. Even those who don’t agree with it don’t do the research to be able to discuss with others why it’s wrong. They might say, “Oh the Times is garbage! It’s just a leftist rag,” but how does that help teach people that there is an actual anti-freedom and anti-prosperity agenda, that can be disproven with unbiased data, being pushed by that “rag?”

We have to do better. We have to stop allowing ourselves and our kids and communities to be dumbed down by the media, the government education system, and those with a special interest in fundamentally remaking the world into some dystopian Marxist “utopia.”

It’s no longer enough to not be ignorant of economics and the way the world around us works; we must be actively anti-ignorant.

Don’t Worry So Much About The Politics Of Big Tech, Focus On The Economic Benefits.

August 8, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

During last week’s antitrust hearing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) provided a sound bite that served as a salvo: “In the 19th century we had the robber barons, in the 21st century we get the cyber barons.” But with sound bites, much like bumper stickers, there’s no room for nuance or scrutiny.

The news media has extensively covered the “questioning” of the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon (collectively “Big Tech”). Of course, most of this questioning was actually political posturing with little regard for the actual answers or antitrust law. But just like with the so-called robber barons, the story of Big Tech is much more interesting and complex.

The myth of the robber barons: Market entrepreneurs vs. political entrepreneurs

The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (1934) by Matthew Josephson, was written in the midst of America’s Great Depression. Josephson, a Marxist with sympathies for the Soviet Union, made the case that the 19th century titans of industry were made rich on the backs of the poor during the industrial revolution. This idea that the rich are wealthy due to their robbing of the rest of us is an idea that has long outlived Josephson and Marx down to the present day, as exemplified by the writings of Matt Stoller and the politics of the House Judiciary Committee.

In his Myth of the Robber Barons, Burton Folsom, Jr. makes the case that much of the received wisdom on the great 19th century businessmen is wrong. He distinguishes between the market entrepreneurs, which generated wealth by selling newer, better, or less expensive products on the free market without any government subsidies, and the political entrepreneurs, who became rich primarily by influencing the government to subsidize their businesses, or enacting legislation or regulation that harms their competitors.

Folsom narrates the stories of market entrepreneurs, like Thomas Gibbons & Cornelius Vanderbilt (steamships), James Hill (railroads), the Scranton brothers (iron rails), Andrew Carnegie & Charles Schwab (steel), and John D. Rockefeller (oil), who created immense value for consumers by drastically reducing the prices of the goods and services their companies provided. Yes, these men got rich. But the value society received was arguably even greater. Wealth was created because market exchange is a positive-sum game.

On the other hand, the political entrepreneurs, like Robert Fulton & Edward Collins (steamships), and Leland Stanford & Henry Villard (railroads), drained societal resources by using taxpayer money to create inefficient monopolies. Because they were not subject to the same market discipline due to their favored position, cutting costs and prices were less important to them than the market entrepreneurs. Their wealth was at the expense of the rest of society, because political exchange is a zero-sum game.

Big Tech makes society better off

Today’s titans of industry, i.e. Big Tech, have created enormous value for society. This is almost impossible to deny, though some try. From zero-priced search on Google, to the convenience and price of products on Amazon, to the nominally free social network(s) of Facebook, to the plethora of options in Apple’s App Store, consumers have greatly benefited from Big Tech. Consumers flock to use Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple for a reason: they believe they are getting a great deal.

By and large, the techlash comes from “intellectuals” who think they know better than consumers acting in the marketplace about what is good for them. And as noted by Alec Stapp, Americans in opinion polls consistently put a great deal of trust in Big Tech, at least compared to government institutions:

Leo’s Edge of Night and Andrei’s Secret Storm Galvanize Kira’s Search for Tomorrow

When The Government Takes A Dollar From Your Pocket And Spends It, It Doesn’t Mean The Economy Grows By A Dollar.

Cato’s Letters Remind Us How Far We’ve Moved From The Intentions Of America’s Founders.

From The Optimism Department: Are We Headed Into A New Roaring Twenties?

Will John Tamny’s New Book Start the Anti-Lockdown Movement?

Fauci Continues To Lie To Us In His Attempts To Maintain His Power Position.

Did the United States react too late?

Did the US reopen too early?

Were the US lockdowns less stringent than Europe?

Is the US less compliant with public health mandates than Europe?

Making sense of it all

Our Country Needs A Serious Anti-Lockdown Movement.

Reliving We the Living Teaches Living Is Not the Avoidance of Death.

The Media Tries To Exploit Economic Ignorance When It Derogates American Prosperity.

Don’t Worry So Much About The Politics Of Big Tech, Focus On The Economic Benefits.

The myth of the robber barons: Market entrepreneurs vs. political entrepreneurs

Big Tech makes society better off

The economics of multi-sided platforms: How Big Tech does it

Conclusion

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