Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

What’s A Good Entrepreneur To Do? Make A Profit, Thereby Serving Society In The Best Possible Way.

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A January 2020 Forbes Magazine article titled “Why Doing Good Is Good For Business” clearly left out critical information: who is the good or bad entrepreneur? According to the author, good entrepreneurs are doing good if their primary objective is not to make a profit. And bad entrepreneurs are doing bad if their primary objective is to make a profit.

Basically, the author suggested that, to be good, a business should not pursue profit and, along with it, customer satisfaction. Ignoring the profit motive is deemed more important than the entrepreneurial reward of profit that comes from providing a service or product to customers who demand value. The bad entrepreneur is only concerned with making money, surviving in the market, and serving consumers. The bad entrepreneur pursues charitable deeds but not at the cost of what consumers demand. You see, being the good entrepreneur only helps a few concentrated groups but ignores the diffuse effects of many consumers, profit rewards, and potential failure. What is the good entrepreneur to do?

Let’s be honest. If the entrepreneur is not primarily motivated by profit, what happens if the business fails or can no longer service its customers due to profits invested in nonmarket activities that do not serve them? Unfortunately, there is a public perception that does not allow entrepreneurs to pursue a profit motive only, because others must choose for them—they call them good entrepreneurs. They call them good if they subordinate the profit motive to lofty, nonmarket, eleemosynary endeavors outside the scope of producing consumer value.

Professor Walter Williams wisely advised: “Profit guides resources to their highest valued uses as determined by people’s wants and desires.”1 Should entrepreneurs disregard the profit motive, making it secondary, and replace it with nonmarket motives? What would the effect of nonmarket motives be on the entrepreneur and the customer? When Coca-Cola changed its formula, said Williams, it was because of customer preference. Consumer preference was a warning sign to the potential loss of profit which brought back the original formula! Actually, good entrepreneurs focus on nonmarket motives—endeavors that are outside their division of labor in the first place. Ludwig von Mises once asked, “What is the good entrepreneur to do?”2

Shouldn’t the primary goal of entrepreneurs be to remain profitable so that, at a minimum, they are able to run their businesses and continue production, which then serves customers who choose to buy their products and services? Don’t entrepreneurs deserve to earn a reward for taking risks and putting their livelihoods in jeopardy to procure materials and goods to bring to the market? To eliminate the profit motive is to ask entrepreneurs to provide their vital service to consumers perhaps at a higher cost than they would otherwise. Profit is not only the reward given by satisfied customers, but is also a market signal of what to do more of and what to do less of. You see, the good entrepreneur, not having a profit motive, primarily focuses on motives that do not serve customer needs.

Market Customers Are Ignored

For example, your local pizzeria owners generally do not know you personally, but they know that you want hot delicious pizza. That’s their motive. Fortunately for pizzeria owners, there’s a reward for preparing that pizza for you. But if your local pizzeria owners do not make a profit, they will no longer exist in your community to serve pizza. End of story.

Therefore, we must ask: are good entrepreneurs, motivated not by profit but by nonmarket issues, likely to be successful and stay in business? Why is there an expectation that entrepreneurs run a business without a profit motive? They can’t. The good entrepreneurs are nonmarket oriented and put profits into nonmarket endeavors aside from producing value for their customer; these nonmarket motives are placed before the profitability of the business and a value-added process for customers.

Having a motive other than profit poses a critical problem. Mises asked, “How can a conscientious entrepreneur persuade a banker or a capitalist to lend him money if he himself cannot see any prospect of a profitable return on his investment?”3 The good entrepreneur, in fact, must ignore customers and forgo profit for nonmarket activity, in which the entrepreneur has a great chance of failing due to financial instability and loss of customers.

What Is the Good Entrepreneur to Do?

When the profit motive is taken off the table as a primary objective, there are several consequences. There ceases to be a way to reward the entrepreneur over and above the costs of doing business. Someone must bear the consequence if the business isn’t profitable and struggles financially. Customers leave.

Good or bad entrepreneurs, if they wish, can be motivated by other things than profit. But the question remains: what cost are they willing to pay to keep the business from failing? Surely, there are other motives that can come into play, but does the entrepreneur who decides not to do what’s in vogue become a bad entrepreneur? Survival of the business comes first; serving consumers comes next. If good entrepreneurs fail, who subsidizes them? If bad entrepreneurs survive and continue to provide value, are they not doing what they are rewarded to do? Bad entrepreneurs can choose what they want to do with their profits, as long as it does not interfere with market exchanges and customer satisfaction.

There is nothing better than to support one’s community and do good deeds for others. However, we must examine a simple fact. If an entrepreneur is not driven by profit first, then a profit-driven entrepreneur will come along, do things better at a better price, and obtain a greater market share. This is a fact of the market process. The problem comes when the good entrepreneur is asked to be guided by nonmarket activities, as Mises stated. He said that entrepreneurs are viewed as “hard and selfish” if they are guided by a market position instead of a nonmarket position and asked, “What is the good entrepreneur supposed to do?”4

Market Consequences

How soon we forget that, as Mises noted, it is “consumers and not the entrepreneurs that determine the direction and scope of production”? In order to serve customers, entrepreneurs must maintain a profitable operation—this is what a good entrepreneur does. If the entrepreneur chooses to disregard the profit motive, customers will not be served. If they are served, at what cost?

Some expect to interfere with an entrepreneur’s business endeavor to pressure them to provide nonmarket outcomes. Basically, they expect the entrepreneur to run a business without a profit. But the same people demand products and services from the entrepreneur. The nonmarket profit motive does not work.

The entrepreneur operates in a market economy, where consumer signals regulate the production or service offerings of businesses. Is it feasible to ask that entrepreneurs use their privately-held resources for nonmarket endeavors notwithstanding the profit motive? Should I ask my favorite pizzeria owner to not be motivated by profit, yet demand he keep making those hot, yummy pizzas? Whatever motive the entrepreneur decides to assume, there surely will be a market consequence.

Nonmarket pressure groups demand that good entrepreneurs only be motivated by what they think is important or the latest nonmarket trend. The fact is, as individuals, entrepreneurs can decide what motivates them and pursue the means to that end. The main concern should not be whether the entrepreneur is primarily motivated by profit or not, but the diffuse effects on customers. Further examination is needed as to the costs in the market.

How do motives that are not based on profits bring results in a market economy? Does a secondary motivation other than profit negatively affect the survival of the good entrepreneur and/or consumers? If so, then we can assume that “the wishes of customers can be safely ignored because there’s no bottom-line discipline of profits.”5

Are you the good entrepreneur?

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  • 1.Walter E. Williams, More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1999).
  • 2.Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Irving-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1940).
  • 3.Mises, Interventionism.
  • 4.Mises, Interventionism.
  • 5.Williams, More Liberty Means Less Government.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

They’ve Shattered Society, Suspended Most Civil Liberties And Prohibited Most Activities For Future Vaccine Profits.

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On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks. The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that: TED Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.”

Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of the interview – which well over three million views now – about a ‘Perspective’ article by Gates that was published February 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“You wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.

“Well, it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.

“But, in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But] it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”
Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global economy later in the interview.

“We need a clear message about that,” Gates said starting at 26:52.

“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But … bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death dimension.”

However, this goes directly against the imperative to balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example, the Choosing Wisely campaign – to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole.

As noted in an April 1 article in OffGuardian, there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from COVID-19 itself.

“By all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and long-lasting,”
Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’

Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from the response to COVID-19.

Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical interventions for COVID-19.

Gates said at 30:29 in the interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals, vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as possible.

The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate therapeutics]…

You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world.”

The accelerator was launched March 10 with approximately $125 million in seed funding. Three days later Gates left Microsoft.

Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular clamp’ platform” that “enables targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of an mRNA vaccine against COVID.

“The programs will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.

Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID infection can be used to treat others.

“I heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson.

“Talk a bit about that and how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”
[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead, just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity. As at least one expert has observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical treatment” to recover.]

“This has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates.

“So people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the immune cells.” However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated – compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”

Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another bomb:

We don’t want to have a lot of recovered people…

To be clear, we’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering]. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”

It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.

And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, again selling billions of test kits and medical interventions.

Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there.

Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…

…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly.

You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.

So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

[Some time on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview. Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]

In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemic simulation co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”

This will be tremendously lucrative.

Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article, for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20 years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.

Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017 Politico article. (While over the same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body, particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating approximately 50 groups around the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.

The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” and that Gates is one of the most influential people in global health.

Meanwhile, officials around the world are doing their part to make sure everyone social distances, self-isolates and/or stay locked down.

For example, here’s Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen DE Villa, at her and Toronto Mayor John Tory’s March 30 press briefing:

“We find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. We should expect some more people will get sick – and for some, sadly, will die.

This is why it is so important to stay at home to reduce virus spread. And to protect front-line workers, healthcare workers and our essential workers, so they can continue to protect us. People shouldn’t have to die, people shouldn’t have to risk death taking care of us because others won’t practice social distancing or physical distancing.”

Yet look how close Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, is sitting to Haley Chazan, Senior Manager, Media Relations, for Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health of Ontario.

This was on Friday, March 27, just before the start of that day’s daily press conference by Dr. Williams and Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe:

They were sitting two seats, or just a couple of feet, apart. A short time later Chazan got up and stood even closer to Dr. Williams for a little while:

Dr. Williams and Chazan do not live together. Rather, Dr. Williams very likely knows – just as Gates knows – that there is little any reason to worry about being in close contact with other people unless you or they are vulnerable to developing a severe illness from COVID-19. He surely knows, also, that if you contract COVID-19 and you’re otherwise healthy you’ll very likely have few symptoms, if any, and recover quickly. And that this exposure in fact is beneficial because in the process you will develop antibodies to the virus and have natural, long-lasting immunity to it.

Yet in the March 27 press conference, just like all the others he has participated in during the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Williams lectured the public about maintaining social distancing. He told people not to go outside on the coming weekend to enjoy the nice weather because, otherwise, they might walk past someone and not be two metres apart.

Dr. Williams is among the large cadre of powerful officials who’ve crashed the global economy by forcing tens of millions of small- and medium-sized businesses to close in the name of the need for forced, severe, social distancing and lock-downs.

They’ve shattered society, suspended most civil liberties and prohibited most activities and connections that kept people mentally and physically healthy. At the same time the officials have prioritized COVID-19 care over everything else and, as a result, severely limited billions of people’s access to life-saving healthcare services ranging from acquiring medication and blood transfusions to having organ transplants and cancer surgeries.

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Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Canada. You can find her recent detailed investigative analysis of COVID here and follow her on Twitter.

Scholar, Gentleman, Freedom Fighter and Poetic Justice Warrior Murray Rothbard’s Radically Unique Sense of Life.

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Words mean things. Words like Center for Disease Control. Food and Drug Administration. National Institutes of Health. Yet in this cowardly new world of the Wuhan virus, those particular words have become anti-concepts like gender neutral pronouns, social justice, or better yet, “We’re all in this together.” The cheerleaders for this latest collectivist chant include network and cable news outlets from PBS to FOX. On a daily basis, they flood the airwaves with emotional stories of self-sacrifice, but very little new information about things that really matter.

Instead of learning how many fast and reliable new test kits have been produced, we are hearing about kids sewing face masks. Instead of data about Americans who have tested to be immune to the virus, and are donating plasma, we hear about empty cathedrals delivering mass. Instead of hearing how much new technology for ventilators is being manufactured each day, we see big crowds cheering health care workers; the ones who would rather have badly needed protective gear and equipment to do their jobs.

Conveniently, there is little mention of the fraudulent computer models that inspired all of this. Instead, the Surgeon General warned that this week will be the worst for America since Pearl Harbor. If he meant the colossal intelligence failure that led to December 7, 1941, he is doing a public service.

What we are witnessing is Mediocrity Worship. National media and their compliant audience are nominating a career government bureaucrat to sainthood. In January 2020, the Director for the National Institute for Infectious Disease told America that the Wuhan virus is not a serious threat. But how could he know? He’s been in charge for only what, forty years?

What’s missing is objective reporting, economics driven solutions, and heroes of stature – The precise, impolitic analysis of Poetic Justice Warrior Murray Rothbard!

The Libertarian Manifesto

One way to identify possible greatness is to discover who someone’s enemies are. With Rothbard, not so much; that list is too broad and deep. As Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. explains about Murray’s 1973 book, For A New Liberty, “More than any other of his works, this book explains why Rothbard seems to grow in stature every year. His influence has vastly risen since his death, and why Rothbardianism has so many enemies on the left, right, and center.”

As Rothbard explains best about the recent confluence of conservative and progressive big government objectives,

The ideal of conservatives and liberals is to cage everyone and coerce him into doing what they believe to be the moral thing. Differently styled cages, but cages just the same. The conservative would coerce everyone to act according to his version of moral behavior. The liberal would place everyone in a box to be run by a benevolent dictator.

Regarding the collectivist “We’re all in this together” virus, the Libertarian Manifesto says,

Society is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding “rights” of its own. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, and that “society” is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts serves to obscure the real forces at work.

And it is interacting individuals we must lean on, and reward them with Moral Sanction and profits,

It is infinitely better to rely on the pursuit of economic interest than to depend on the dubious “altruism” of government officials. The ultimate Libertarian program may be summed up in one phrase: the abolition of the public sector into activities performed voluntarily by the private-enterprise economy.

Once considered the State’s Greatest Living Enemy, Rockwell summarizes, “Rothbard forged a blend between Austrian economics and natural-rights political theory of the old liberal school to create a modern Libertarianism.”

Mises, Rand, and Anarchism

To describe Murray Rothbard as maverick would be an understatement. As a college student, he became an ardent fan of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, began to write a college textbook explaining Mises’ masterwork Human Action, and ended up writing his own classic Man, Economy, and State in 1962. In fact, Rothbard’s devotion to the primacy of individual human action transcended Mises, and on the subject of morality and ethics they differed.

In the essential Is – Ought Dichotomy, most philosophers (and Mises) believe that what Is, existence defined as objective reality, is unrelated to what Ought to be, meaning a person’s subjective values. According to historian David Gordon,

Rothbard dissented, maintaining that objective ethics could be founded on the requirements of human nature. His approach, based on his study of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, is presented in his major work The Ethics of Liberty (1982) of political philosophy.

Of course this is no accident, in the mid-1950s Rothbard was a member of philosopher Ayn Rand‘s inner circle for several weeks, one that she satirically named “the collective.” It was an informal group that would meet at Rand’s apartment to discuss philosophical ideas. One of those was in the realm of Objectivist Ethics – “the fact that a living thing is, determines what it ought to do.” After Rand published Atlas Shrugged, a novel that won Rothbard’s admiration, they reconnected but eventually parted company again over the issue of anarchism.

Rothbard and Rand shared a common commitment to individualism – the idea that we own our lives, and the pursuit of our happiness is our highest moral purpose. But what about the role of government? Rand believes government is essential to protect morally derived rights. Rothbard believes government rooted in objective law is impossible to maintain.

He named his system Anarcho-Capitalism, meaning all customary functions of government could be performed more efficiently and peacefully by private enterprise. On a similar note, he supported the ideas of the authors of America’s Anti-Federalist Papers.

To that end, Rothbard founded The Journal for Libertarian Studies in 1977 with a symposium on Robert Nozick’s 1974 classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which directly refuted the social justice and government redistribution ideas of political philosopher John Rawls. As poetic justice would have it, this symposium could easily have predicted the failures of the CDC, FDA, and NIH in anticipating, preventing, and isolating the Wuhan virus.

We Are All Austrians Now

The absence of an Austrian style pricing mechanism for health care finance and delivery is the root cause of the Wuhan shortages, the disastrous government response, and the collectivist public reaction. One of Rothbard’s greatest achievements, singlehandedly and poetically, was the revival, recognition, and respect for Austrian school economics we can use today to stop the Leviathan. As Gordon reveals,

Rothbard established in 1987 another journal, the Review of Austrian Economics, to provide a scholarly venue for economists and others interested in Austrian theory. It too is the key journal in its area of specialty. It has continued to the present, after 1997 under the new name Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

As poetic justice would have it, Gordon writes that Rothbard’s scholarship was vast, and there were no sacred cows to the truth.

Adam Smith, contrary to general belief, was not the founder of modern economics. The heroes of Rothbard’s study were the Spanish scholastics, who long before Smith had developed a subjective theory of value.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Say, Mises, Garret, and Rand produced words that mean things. They were the Poetic Justice Warriors, real heroes deserving of moral sanction, that helped Murray Rothbard formulate his radically unique sense of life. For all of us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flatten The Curve! Who Talks Like That? Those Without Empathy Or Sympathy.

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The expression “flatten the curve” has become part of everyday conversation in this time of coronavirus pandemic panic. It means to defer some of the inevitable illness and death inevitably caused by the virus until later in its natural cycle. The purpose is to supposedly reduce pressure on the healthcare system, although it does not seem to working out that way.

Who talks like that? Who uses terms like “flatten the curve” in conversation? Geeks. Mathematicians. Dispassionate technicians who don’t care about people. Theorists. Those with no empathy, and no sympathy.

There is no thought of people. Those cases on the curve are somebody’s Mom, or brother, or nephew or niece. They are nervous feelings of wondering whether symptoms warrant a call to the doctor. They are the discomfort and pain of coughs and fevers and shortness of breath.

Do the “flatten the curve” geeks think about these human feelings? Apparently not. All wrapped up in their data and their charts and their models, they forget the human angle. A curve is theoretical. Getting the theory right is what matters to them. 

Now, as it emerges they are generating the wrong response to the wrong data, they are even more exposed in their inhumanity. Hospitals are emptying, not filling, because non-coronavirus related elective surgeries – around which people planned their lives and made provision with their families and jobs – are postponed awaiting the yet-to-arrive crush of COVID-19 cases. Non-medical staff are being furloughed. No matter. The curve is being flattened.

These mathematical technicians are the product of teaching STEM in schools and universities, and not developing character, or accountability or a sense of personal responsibilities. They’re the consequence of parents and students abandoning the humanities and non-STEM subjects because they became dominated by the cultural Marxism of the extreme left. We abandon civilized thinking in order to flatten the curve.

Lockdown

Lockdown is the term for the economic destruction and the shattering of society that is ordered upon us by the politicians who are attracted to the opportunity of translating the “flatten the curve” language into the political action of ordering people to stop working, stop socializing and stop sending their kids to school.

Who talks like that? Authoritarians. Totalitarians. People consumed with power and control. People who seek to overwhelm the citizenry with more regulation, more rules, more restraint until they finally submit.

We can no longer excoriate them as failed planners, because they have now demonstrated they can shut down the entire economy. They can no longer be characterized as fearful and incompetent administrators because – look! – they are exercising the ultimate powers of coercion and control. They’ve ascended to the peak of power.

There is no thought for the human feelings of business owners whose life’s work has been undermined, and whose ambitions have been thwarted. There is no consideration that business is a work of love and devotion, the privilege of serving others for the reward of economic and personal achievement. There is no thought of community and co-operation. Just lock them all down.

 CARES Act

After precipitating the highest unemployment rates the US has seen since 1933, the political class implemented the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (the “CARES Act”). Who talks like that? Who makes PR-tuned acronyms out of destruction? Bureaucrats. The soul-less. Those with misplaced priorities.

The people who concern themselves with cute and catchy acronyms for their massive wealth transfers are those with the desire to rule irrespective of elections or individual rights.

Clinical Testing

The medical bureaucrats seem delighted to have turned our entire nation – and indeed the world – into a clinical experiment. The biggest of big data! They are the scientists who want to decide who lives and who dies and who is permitted to receive treatment and who is denied it in the cause of science. They decide who lives in confidence and who lives in fear. When they talk of COVID-19’s incidence and penetration into the population, they don’t use that word to identify a number of people, but a data set. They want us to be points in a model, not people with families and hopes and ambitions and desires and freedom.

How did we get divided into people with feelings versus people with bureaucratic and political power?

Hard To Believe: San Francisco Quarantines The Homeless In Commandeered Luxury Hotels.

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As the United States continues its “pause,” shuttering businesses and public spaces in order to prevent transmission of the coronavirus, residents are compelled to shelter inside their homes. Meantime, those who live on the streets remain outside. San Francisco is well known for its persistent homeless population, made up heavily of drug addicts, the mentally ill, or both. For now, individuals congregate in tents and encampments and drug suppliers continue to deal.

Before Covid-19 struck, San Francisco officials took no meaningful action to address the squalid conditions under which so many homeless people live. They threw money at the problem, but the problem grew. Homeless activists and some city leaders have argued that living on the street is a right, but today it presents a serious public-health dilemma: how will officials get homeless people to comply with social-distancing requirements, and what should they do with those who’ve contracted the virus?

The city is working to set up the Moscone Center as a shelter, a sensible idea. An even better one would be to revive the recently closed California Pacific Medical Center hospital campus and erect MASH-style medical units. These would allow for closely monitored and efficient care. In fact, the city could use this as an opportunity to provide intensive integrated treatment, including substance-abuse services.

Instead, Mayor London Breed and the Human Services Agency came up with the plan to route over 3,000 people currently living in shelters and navigation centers into hotels. The city is planning to put thousands of physically and psychologically sick people into private hotel rooms, in some of the most luxurious hotels in San Francisco—the InterContinental, Mark Hopkins, and The Palace. Occupants would receive three meals per day, hygiene products, and access to nurses.

At first glance, the plan appears sensible. The shutdown has devastated the hospitality industry, and hotels stand empty. Filling rooms with guests of any kind is attractive for hotel owners, especially since tax dollars will foot nearly all of the bill.

On closer examination, however, serious problems emerge. According to Matt Haney, a city supervisor actively promoting the proposal, occupants would be quarantined to their assigned rooms and be required to follow strict rules. But many of these future luxury hotel guests are hardcore drug addicts. How will the city manage their drug needs in the midst of a pandemic?

Haney concedes that intravenous drug use presents a major challenge to the city’s plan. It’s likely, for instance, that many guests will overdose in their rooms. Others may detox, alone and in agony. Providing addicts with access to maintenance medication such as Suboxone or methadone is a good idea, Haney says, yet these treatments require precise administration. No one has figured out the logistics of providing drug treatment to thousands of addicted residents who may not be interested in receiving it.

Additionally, if the hotels are quarantined, and drug dealers aren’t allowed in, what will prevent the contagious residents from leaving to score the substances they seek? As cravings intensify, violence may erupt that can put hotel staff and other occupants at risk. Armed security guards patrolling the halls and buildings might be required to keep the right people in and the wrong people out. Could the police be expected to maintain order and prevent antisocial drug addicts from leaving their rooms? Apparently the city will offer some type of case management, but there’s already a dearth of needed homeless services, including high-quality psychiatric care. Treating this service-resistant population is challenging under the best circumstances. “It’s not going to be a perfect system,” says Haney.

There’s also no exit plan. A four-month contract for the room occupants is being considered, but where all these people will go afterward is undetermined. California law stipulates that a person lodging in a hotel room for longer than 30 days is considered a tenant. Therefore, thousands of homeless people who have stayed in the posh hotels would become legal permanent residents, with protections against eviction.

Even Haney acknowledges the problem. “The city should make it clear that they would not be considered tenants,” he says. “It needs to be temporary. Once the emergency is over, they should leave.” Yet sending people back onto the streets will surely be met with resistance from homeless-rights activists, some government officials, and the homeless themselves. Who would want to pack up and move from The Palace, after all?

Few of the city’s decision-makers are looking at the long-term effects of placing sick, drug-addicted homeless people into hotel rooms. Once again, San Francisco is ignoring the law of unintended consequences.

Erica Sandberg is a widely published consumer-finance reporter based in San Francisco.  As a community advocate, she focuses on homelessness and crime and safety issues.

If You’re Not A Libertarian After This Crack-Up, You Should Have Your Head Examined.

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Amid all the negativity of late, one bit of good news has come via the internet. In particular, Americans haven’t suffered slower internet speeds despite a reported uptick in home computer use related to work, along with the frenzied streaming of movies and documentaries on portals like Netflix.

About all this, Farhad Manjoo ought to apologize to his readers. Back in 2017 he wrote a piece for the New York Times titled “Without Neutrality, Say So Long to the Internet.” Whoops!

Funny about it is that readers can bet Manjoo is scribbling yet another misguided column from home as you’re reading this. He’ll file it on his WiFi-enabled computer with ease, before engaging in all manner of internet-based activity despite his downcast prediction from just a few years ago.

Oh well, enough about Manjoo. The remarkable internet speeds that Americans are enjoying speaks to a crucial truth about what powers the productivity without which there is no economic growth. The latter is a consequence of private investment. Thanks to copious investment in broadband by the profit-motivated, Americans are more and more productive. Better yet, they can be quite a bit more productive from anywhere thanks to ceaseless investment in technology that makes it possible for us to be connected at all times.

Thinking about all this through the prism of a tragic economic lockdown that is harming everyone, but that is hurting those with the least the most, one reason tone deaf and economically illiterate politicians arguably feel comfortable shutting down the economy is a consequence of the ubiquity of high-speed internet. Where politicians live, and with whom they rub elbows, work is increasingly what we do anytime, from anywhere thanks to internet speeds that rise all the time.

Unfortunately and tragically, the political class forgot that not everyone’s like them such that they can “work remotely” for several weeks, or months. For the less fortunate, work is a destination. It frequently involves meeting the needs of people in person. Which means a high number of workers are experiencing layoffs, business closures and financial ruin as a consequence of the brutally cruel non sequitur foisted on them by politicians: a virus threatens, so shut down the very economic engine that has been crushing virus and disease for decades. It makes one sick to think about. Unfortunately, the same politicians who’ve brought on economic devastation and ruin for all too many are in the process of adding to their egregious error.

To understand why, consider the $2 trillion “stimulus” bill already passed. That it won’t stimulate is a statement of the obvious. The growth already occurred. That’s how Congress was able to raise the $2 trillion.

To clarify the previous assertion, consider a poor country like Peru. It’s not as though its politicians aren’t hopelessly Keynesian like the ones in the U.S. Rest assured they are. They spend less simply because Peruvians are exponentially less productive than Americans are. Politicians in Peru have arrogated to themselves a percentage of Peruvian private sector production that’s likely similar in percentage terms to what U.S. politicians take from us. The government spending difference is a result of Peruvian production that is a tiny fraction of the size of U.S. production. To be clear, governments can only spend insofar as the private sector creates wealth that they can tax, then redistribute.

Repeat again and again: governments cannot stimulate with spending. The growth already occurred, hence their ability to wastefully spend.

All of this must be considered with the high-speed internet example that began this piece very much in mind. We have internet speeds that continue to soar, and because they do, work for a growing number has yet again become a productive endeavor from anywhere. In other words, 4G internet speeds on phones and home internet speeds much greater led to abundant job creation that was impossible before those speeds (think Uber, for example), along with soaring work portability.

Imagine then, what 5G will bring to individual productivity, along with jobs previously unimaginable. And if 5G is amazing, in time even more investment will render the 5G that people talk about now in awestruck fashion as wildly pedestrian and primitive. Investment relentlessly pushes individual productivity upward, all the while transforming how and where we produce.

Please now consider the happy truth about investment in terms of shrinking job prospects for everyone, but most cruelly shrinking prospects for those with the least. It’s apparent politicians are about to bring even greater harm to those already devastated by their actions.

Having wrecked their economic situations via lockdown, politicians who bring new meaning to self-unaware arrogated to themselves even more of the wealth always and everywhere produced in the private sector with an eye on sending checks to individuals and businesses. Basically politicians put people out of work, and put businesses on the verge of bankruptcy, only to then throw money at those victimized as if $1,200 would make up for jobs lost, and businesses destroyed.

This rates a lot of attention when it’s remembered that the $2 trillion redistributed from those most likely to invest to those least likely to invest is set to increase by many trillions. Translated, politicians put millions of Americans out of work, and now they’re in the process of extracting trillions more from the private economy that, if not redistributed, would exist as investment necessary to get Americans working again.

The money not spent by Congress would, among other things, fund future internet speeds and communications advances that would make the present seem dated by comparison. Crucial is that some of the advances authored by private investment would put even more of us in the position to at least somewhat work around the errors of politicians who, when presented with a virus, chose to destroy the jobs of millions as a response.

Alas, future progress will be slower thanks to politicians who, having wrecked all too many lives, decided to wreck more through even more spending.

If you’re not a libertarian after this crack-up, you should have your head examined.

It’s The Bureaucratic Mindset That Is Killing Us: Over-Credentialed, Entrusted With Too Much Power, And Dangerously Incompetent.

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he New York Times on Tuesday reported: “The numbers the health officials showed President Trump were overwhelming. With the peak of the coronavirus pandemic still weeks away, he was told, hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon.”

These numbers, many millions of infections, hundreds of thousands of deaths, were ones that “health officials” had been spreading through a sensation-hungry media for some time. Together with a poll question that framed the choice just so, they had already helped produce another set of numbers: “Voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.”

This, the Times crowed victoriously, had stampeded President Trump to abandon his goal of restoring normal life by Easter.

Trouble is, though, these numbers come from just some doctors—they reflect neither reality nor broad medical opinion. They are synthetic products that hide the (often ignorant) assumptions that they reflect, substitute for reason, foster panic, and ruin the country.

The following shows how “soft” and hence divorced from reality these numbers are, what it would take to produce “hard” numbers—i.e. ones reflective of reality—and the manner consistent with self-government in which such matters should be debated and decided.

All admit that the numbers that are scaring the sense out of the country are mathematical projections. All projections are based on assumptions about the ever-changing numbers of “confirmed cases” of COVID-19, as well as of deaths resulting therefrom. But few—and here it seems we must include many “health officials”—consider that the latter numbers are themselves “soft” and tell us next to nothing about how much, how little, or what kind of dangers the virus poses to us.

Certainly, they give no guidance about what restrictions any of us should apply to ourselves, never mind what the government should do to the country.

How’s that? Because the number of “confirmed cases”—meaning cases that have come to the attention of the medical profession—tells us nothing about the number of people infected. Nor does that number tell us what happens to the gamut of those infected. Nor is the number of deaths “hard,” because it does not distinguish between those who die of the virus and those who die merely with it (that is, they might have died even without it).

To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers. Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses, that will feed more models and more disputes.

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

But we don’t know how many of these asymptomatic people there are. Hence, meaningful epidemiological testing must include a random representative sample of the population, regardless of whether they are presumed to be infected or not. The numbers resulting from monitoring what happens to the health of individuals in this sample over a few weeks would tell exactly what percentage of people in each category and subcategory suffer what consequences from whatever contact with the virus they happen to have.

As it happens, a sizable chunk of such data is about to come into existence. The virus is rampant among the 5,000 or so personnel aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. Everyone aboard is being tested. By the time that is done, as the ship sits off Guam, and it returns to the United States, we will have a good idea about the rate of infection and some factual notion of what happens to those infected—at least among the sailors’ demographic group.

The question of lethality is not resolved by mere counting of individuals who test positive and die. We have some data showing that COVID-19-positive people who suffer from certain diseases are likelier to succumb than others who suffer from other diseases or who are otherwise healthy.

Sorting out causes of death is properly a medical judgment. The doctors who are scaring the hell out of the country in general might better spend their time using their medical skills to sort out the virus’s specific consequences—and recommending what currently available drugs may keep the sick from dying.

President Trump, as well as the governors of some states, have been stampeded out of their common sense into shutting down the country until further notice. The bureaucratic-media complex has done this on the supposed basis of medical authority. But the doctors have not been speaking as doctors on the basis of knowledge of the human body while offering cures or even palliatives. No. Their judgments are based on speculation about the meaning of mathematical models.

They are not acting like good doctors but rather like bad politicians.

Fauci showed how thoroughly he and his cohorts have subordinated common sense to bureaucratic authority. Having strenuously campaigned to deny the usefulness of hydroxychloroquine, having been confronted by the fact that physicians on the front lines of the battle against the virus are using it themselves, and having been asked whether he—were he to come down with illness from the virus—would use it, he weakly conceded that he would but only as part of an approved study. He cared less about describing what the drug can do and can not do than about affirming his agency’s and the FDA’s prerogatives.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Decisions affecting each and all of us rightly belong to ourselves directly and indirectly through elected representatives. Congress and the legislatures should be making decisions on the basis of open debate and recorded roll call votes.

Surely, President Trump’s low point came when he supported bypassing roll call votes in the passage of a $2.2 trillion bill as part of his and other executive officials’ decisions to shut down the country. Making decisions on the basis of meaningless curves and bureaucratic authority rather than through open debate about hard facts followed by roll call votes is not just undemocratic. It’s stupid.

Integrity is Not Negotiable. Neither is Classical Composer Alma Deutscher’s Fidelity to Her Music

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This series began with Great Athletes, human achievement in general, and how it is rewarded or punished by society. Our later post titled Mediocrity Worship tacked the other way. If envy is leveraged to punish what is good, what happens when mediocrity is rewarded? The answer boils down to objective versus subjective values, and their consequences.

Henry Rearden and Simone Biles achieved their ambitions by pursuing objective values, through independence. They expanded their consciousness, and invented new standards for a steel alloy and a gymnastics routine, respectively. Their goals and self-respect were unique to them, and deserved an objective system for scoring and rewarding success. By choosing conformity, Peter Keating and Bernie Madoff opted for the approval of others; their self-respect was derived from the subjective whims of their masters. Favorable press and beating the market were their respective rewards, until they turned to dust.

The difference between the former pair and the latter is integrity. In Ayn Rand‘s philosophy, integrity is much deeper than the honesty of fair dealing or the trust of keeping promises. It is the integration of one’s mind and body, the unity of actions and convictions, of rational and steadfast principles for living. In her breakthrough novel The Fountainhead, Rand created such a character in Howard Roark. In 21st century Western art, the classical composer, pianist, and violinist Alma Deutscher is a wonderful example.

Twentieth Century Malaise

According to a March 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial, “Something terrible happened to classical music during the 20th century. The great preponderance of classical music written over the past 75 years is deliberately opaque and aggressively ugly.”

This observation about classical music also applies to 20th century political and educational institutions, and is rooted in the dominant philosophy of  the 19th century. The rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Nazis in Germany, and the Communists in China ultimately meant the starvation and murder of nearly 200 million people. This can be directly attributed to the ideas of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. As Rand explains in her novel Atlas Shrugged, their mindset demands that “Nobody is right or wrong, we’re all in this together.”

Alma Deutscher faces the same relentless pressure to conform to their subjective values, and refuses to offer herself as a human sacrifice,

Lots of people have been telling me that I have to compose music that will reflect the ugliness of the modern world. I don’t want to do this. I want to compose music that I find beautiful.

The Wall Street Journal continues, “Some recent composers have resisted the tendency to equate serious with dissonant or difficult – Arvo Pärt in Estonia, the late Dominick Argento in America. But none have done so in quite the guileless manner of English composer Alma Deutscher.” For example, in an interview with CBS Alma says,

I love getting the melodies. It’s not at all difficult to me. I get them all the time. But then actually sitting down and developing the melodies and that’s the really difficult part, having to tell a real story with music.

Composing beautiful music that tells a real story harkens the listener back to the 19th century, the Age of Reason, and ethically superior era of great Romantic art. Its artwork integrated the other branches of philosophy and reflected society’s guiding principles. Yet its morality of self-creation and capitalism came to a crashing halt with World War I. Great art is difficult to produce in a values-deprived culture, and classical music became “atonal, obsessed with shock value, and incoherent.”

Free Will or Fate

Art tends to  express a culture’s philosophy, and it can be the volition of free will or the determinism of fate. Great art can inspire emotions and cognitive development, and illustrate moral principles that guide decisions and actions. As Alma tells us, abstract concepts are complex,

The difficult bit is to sit down with that idea, and to combine it with other ideas in a coherent way. Its easy to throw a soup of ideas that don’t make any sense together. To tweak it and polish it, that takes ages.

Like Howard Roark has clients in order to build, Alma Deutscher has an audience in order to perform her original solos, sonatas, and concertos. It is her fidelity to the integrity of beautiful, inspiring, classical music that make her a singularity. As Roark instructed the Dean of the architecture college that expelled him,

The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose.

Regarding conformity, Deutscher refuses to acknowledge the subjective morality of our postmodern world. “While her critics don’t fault her for a lack of technical sophistication, they dislike her music for the same reason audiences love it. They object to its traditional tonality, its straightforward emotional appeal, its refusal to acknowledge the repugnance of human life.” This has no effect on her,

People loved it. The audience stood many times. They were elated, uplifted. What matters is what the audience thinks. What the critics write, I don’t read it anyway, doesn’t bother me. I see the reaction of the people. They say what they mean.

Or when asked by his tormentor, “What do you think of me?” Howard Roark replied, “But I don’t think of you.” What Deutscher and Roark have done is expose the smallness of their detractors. By refusing to accept the arbitrary premise that human life is repugnant, they refuse to accept as guilt, their own existence. They refuse to accept that their freedom to create masterpieces is predicated on subservience to the public good. Their integrity is non-negotiable.

Cinderella Story

In an interview with CBS News, Alma relates about one her musical heroes, “Of course, I love Mozart and I would have loved him to be my teacher. But I think I would prefer to be the first Alma than to be the second Mozart.” When asked, “So you improved the cadenza of Mozart? Well, yes” she answered. About her opera Cinderella she says,

I think that it makes much more sense if he falls in love with her because she composed this amazing melody to his poem, because he thinks that she’s his soul mate, because he understands her.

With her, Howard Roark laughs.

Why Ayn Rand Laughs – Talented and Dedicated Workers Keep Our Polite Society Humming Along

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This article was originally published in February 2019 because productiveness is a fundamental human virtue. During this year’s sudden and worldwide suspension of routine human interaction, some categories of work are being recognized anew. Essential to everything we take for granted, talented and motivated people work. Its who we are. The satisfaction of a job well done is an important part of our compensation.

In her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, philosopher Ayn Rand imagined the consequences of men and women of the mind going on strike. While the main protagonists are manufacturers, the strikers included artists, physicians, managers and skilled trades. In the novel, they have another thing in common. They no longer sanction their own victimhood at the hands of the failed regulatory state. 

In the month prior to the 2016 presidential election, Poetic Justice Warrior Mike Rowe gave an interview with outdoorhub.com and was asked about voting. His recommendation was,

Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with Economics in One Lesson. Develop a worldview you can articulate and defend. Test it with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy.

And don’t vote until you do this. Voting is not a duty anyway. The message is stunning, and perfect. Rowe is saying that economics is life and moral philosophy is essential. As the Poetic Justice Warrior Society Manifesto says, “Our lives are spent accumulating knowledge, learning from mistakes, and establishing principles for living that can only be altered through rational consideration, empirical evidence, and solving contradictions.”

Dirt Is Not The Enemy

Rowe’s opinions about education and work are nearly identical to those of Booker T. Washington. Washington taught his students skills for honest work, making a living, becoming prosperous, and integrating into mainstream society.

Rowe’s hero was his maternal grandfather who “dropped out of the eighth grade to work. He had to. By the time he was 30, he was a master electrician, plumber, carpenter, mason, and mechanic. That guy was, to me, a magician.” His grandfather’s education never ended, and the value he brought to himself, his family, friends, and community are inestimable. This is what entrepreneurs do, and no bureaucracy could plan it. And Rowe has dedicated himself to this work ethic, and to self-creation with his iconic television show Dirty Jobs.

The thing that makes ‘Dirty Jobs’ different is that it doesn’t highlight the drudgery. Instead, it highlights the humor. In order to make ‘Dirty Jobs’ authentic, I really can’t be overly informed. It’s a very tricky business paying a tribute to work, because TV is very bad at it.

Rowe’s genius is making abstract concepts simple. “Dirty Jobs is maybe the simplest show in the history of TV, with the possible exception of The Gong Show.” He does it by establishing fundamental principles, “I can say the willingness to get dirty has always defined us as a nation, and it’s a hallmark of hard work and a hallmark of fun, and dirt is not the enemy.” It’s the economic way, but the political way is our dominant philosophy, and the currency of the political class is complexity. To them, everyone needs a public university indoctrination. As Rowe explains,

The idea that a four-year degree is the only path to worthwhile knowledge is insane. It’s insane. You’ve got a lot of very, very smart people standing by waiting for somebody else to do the work. Not a recipe for long-term solvency in my opinion.

As a result, there are millions of well-paid career opportunities in America waiting to be filled. As poetic justice would have it, Mike Rowe is doing something about it, he is offering scholarships to individuals who aspire to life-fulfilling work in the skilled trades.

S W E A T

The one size fits all solution of the political way, such as obscenely expensive college for all, avoids reality, and has consequences. Rowe calls this the skills gap. Revolutionary teacher Maria Montessori believed that education should develop the mind of each child, the purpose is for them to develop principles that will guide their actions. In many cases this means an alternative path toward productive work. According to the Mike Rowe Works Foundation website:

Skilled workers keep our polite society humming along. They are entrepreneurs running successful businesses. They are happy people who have a positive work-life balance. They don’t resemble workers portrayed in the media.

Not only is Rowe educating America about the 7 million high-paying vocational career opportunities awaiting human minds, his scholarships are available to anyone who meets some simple qualifications:

We’re looking for aspiring workers who will work smart and hard. We don’t focus on test scores or grammar. It’s about people who share our values and understand the importance of personal responsibility, delayed gratification, and a positive attitude.

But its not quite that easy; there is the Skill and Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo (S.W.E.A.T.) pledge for these Poetic Justice Warrior apprentices. The first pledge is “I believe I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I am alive. I walk the earth. I live in America. Above all things, I am grateful.” The last pledge is “I believe that all people are created equal. I also believe that all people make choices. Some choose to be lazy. Some choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.”

The Greaseman Cometh

In March 2017 Rowe released one of his famous The Way I Heard It podcasts, and used it to pay tribute to other individuals who are worthy of gratitude. This is what Poetic Justice Warriors do.

In the podcast Rowe read an excerpt from Lawrence W. Reed’s book Real Heroes. In it, he tells the story of a skilled laborer, inventor, and entrepreneur named Elijah. He was a young man who worked as a greaseman on America’s early railroads, and the son of a slave who escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad. Why does Mike do this? “I’m addicted to paved roads, working electricity, and flushing toilets.” Life is good.

“Danagger Coal was late in delivering fuel. He could not help it if some of the superintendents and foremen had quit him without reason. Men who had been with the company for ten to twenty years. It was only one day’s delay. It caused three days delay in the run of fifty nine carloads of lettuce and oranges. When it reached New York, the lettuce and oranges had to be dumped into the East River.”

Now is a good time to imagine: What if those who work inside the cab of a big rig or delivery van, an ICU or urgent care clinic, a plumbing, mechanic, or HVAC toolbox, warehouse or supermarket, went on strike? National and social media ingrates would accuse them of price gouging, and their sanctimonious celebrity patrons would descend helplessly into A World Lit Only by Fire. 

Crisis and Leviathan is Why We Need Modern Poetic Justice Warriors Like Robert Higgs

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Defense Production Act Coordinator Peter Navarro claimed during a live TV interview on March 29th that “we know exactly what we need” to reduce the spread of the Wuhan Virus and treat infected Americans. He continued, “We have to expand and repurpose our industrial base.” It gets even better, “We have to make sure we’re able to make the medicines we need, the medical equipment, and the supplies. That’s going to create millions of jobs for this country.”

Superficially, this makes sense. After all, the shallow surface is where most public discourse takes place, thanks to compulsory progressive education and national media nitwits. As political economist and Poetic Justice Warrior Robert Higgs explains in his vital 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan,

The most important legacy of the New Deal is the now-dominant ideology of the mixed economy, which holds that the government is an immensely useful means for achieving one’s private aspirations. That one’s resort to this reservoir of benefits is perfectly legitimate.

In the spirit of the public good, it would he helpful to give Navarro’s comments some depth. Beginning with, “we know exactly what we need,” is typical collectivist fantasy. With all due respect, he was speciously correct – for the few seconds prior to the next segment of the broadcast. It featured a new 3D printed ventilator being developed independently at Rice University. While the proper use of ventilators is very complex, this one will cost $300 to produce compared to $10,000 for Navarro’s government approved machines.

To “repurpose our industrial base” is simply authoritarian economic planning, right wing and left wing. Its only a matter of degree. Navarro’s purpose is to “make sure the components are there when we need them.” This sounds good to passive minds, but who or what is “we?”

To the progressively schooled listener it means “the public good.” To active minds, it is evidence of coercive government overreach. The tactic is merely bucolic and ambiguous language to mask the primary purpose of concentrated decision making. As Higgs continues,

To take – indirectly if not directly – other people’s property for one’s own benefit is now considered morally impeccable, provided that the taking is effected though the medium of the government.

Yet Navarro’s poorly trained economic mind claims omniscience over the manufacture and distribution of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and protective gear for health care professionals. Never mind that it is in short supply because of legacy government intrusion in nearly every aspect of American health care finance and delivery. Combined, they show little regard for specialization, division of labor, and price discovery that are fundamental achievements of Western civilization.

As Higgs explains in his 2002 essay titled The Rise of the West,

The individualism of Western culture, and the political fragmentation of the European peoples in the high Middle Ages, fostered the institutional and technological experimentation by which entrepreneurs could discover how to make labor and capital more productive.

“Going to create millions of jobs” denies reality, government can only create government jobs or get out of the way. Yet this phrase is prized by both left-wing and right-wing political minds, and disregards the real job creators. Economic minds understand employment as Say’s Law, or the Law of Markets – production creates its own demand. It is the foundation of all rational economic theory, and Higgs’ example of economic reality,

Europe’s governments that made life difficult for traders tended to lose their business, and hence a tax base, to competing jurisdictions. Such losses motivated rulers to curb their predation and to allow businessmen room to maneuver.

As illustrated by the Atlas Society, the novel contagion fomented in bat caves in China, ferried to Wuhan’s wet markets, festered in human hosts, and was fostered by its ultimate guardian – the paranoia of China’s totalitarian regime. While Western civilization is built on the solid footings of the scientific method (reason), free markets (purpose), and self-creation (pride); for the East, not so much. As Higgs relates,

In contrast to Europe, businessmen in China suffered an inescapable clampdown. In the Islamic world, an imperial government failed to protect private-property rights. The Soviet empire likewise embraced the imposition of one big bad idea, central economic planning.

In today’s 21st century America, the Crisis is the Wuhan Virus, and the Leviathan is our political, media, and education institutions. However, it’s different this time. Pretend for a second that you’ve never heard that before. During the previous one hundred years, the Leviathan created economic crisis and prescribed economic solutions rooted in the Keynesian myth of aggregate demand, supported by its nonexistent multiplier effect.

Today however, the solution for the epidemic includes castration of supply-side of economic activity. You know, the side that prevents poverty, despair, and death. This stark reality is deeper than a health crisis solved by urgent “flattening the curve” public policy, social distancing, and hygiene. It is the suspension of Constitutional rights and human life-sustaining purpose.

What’s disturbing is the willingness of so many people to accept the repeal of their personal liberties based on projections using unreliable data sets. As Robert Higgs observed,

Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

Media pundits are also vulnerable. Considered predominately right-wing, FOX News is pushing massive government spending to replace individual livelihoods by using the left’s own rationale for social justice: “through no fault of their own.” On the surface, this makes sense because of the government forced shutdown, but ignores the deeper economic and philosophical damage, and merely robs from past and future productivity.

A market’s price discovery mechanism is too complex to mess with, and the longer people are denied the freedom to produce, the longer it will take to rebuild supply chains. The emotional and financial damage to millions of Americans will be inestimable, and is being pumped by shows like CBS 60 Minutes who seem to take pleasure in the demise of the West. In contrast, local news outlets are reporting stories of civil disobedience in their medical and business communities against FDA hegemony, and having wonderful outcomes.

As poetic justice would have it, this pandemic is a lesson in the proper role of government for defending individuals from the clear and present danger of epidemic disease. It is also shining a bright light on the superiority of free-market health care delivery, the generosity of a society rooted in personal liberty, and the ability of minds unleashed by economic freedom to solve any problem. Here, Higgs invokes the combined genius of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises,

Like all who inherit the Lockean tradition, Mises believed that a strong but limited government, far from suffocating its citizens, allows them to be productive and free.

The popular Western interpretation of ‘crisis’ in the Chinese language means opportunity. Will the breakdown of health care regulations wake America up to their disastrous effects, or we will ratchet up a more powerful Leviathan? Teacher Lisa VanDamme gives us the principled answer, “Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions; of the great discoveries of science and what they made possible. These are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.” As Poetic Justice Warrior Robert Higgs advises,

The two issues call forth moral considerations. They involve not questions of what is technically better or worse. Rather, they involve good and evil. Those who propose to deal pragmatically with such questions are doomed to fail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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