Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

End The Shutdown Now.

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The shutdown of the American economy by government decree should end. The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people—individuals, families, businesses—must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives.

Neither the Trump administration nor Congress has the legal authority to shut down American life absent at least baseline due process. As Judge Andrew Napolitano recently wrote, business closures, restrictions on assembly and movement, and quarantines are not constitutionally permissible under some magic “emergency” doctrine. At a minimum, the federal government must show potential imminent harm by specific infected individuals at some form of hearing or trial.

These due process requirements are not suspended.

State and local officials may claim, or even possess, lawful police powers to shut down their communities. We offer no analysis of such powers or claims under the myriad of state constitutions and authorizing legislation. But they should resist exercising these powers. The governor of Virginia, in particular, deserves admonition for unilaterally imposing a lengthy period of virtual house arrest.

We do not know, and cannot yet know, how many Americans will become sick or die from the virus. We do know that predictions regarding infection and death rates are highly unreliable. Even actual deaths attributable to COVID-19 are not so easy to count, as Italy has discovered. Age, general health, and comorbidity are difficult variables to assess, and people may die “with” the virus but not “from” it. It is also very difficult to assess the lethality of the virus relative to previously known types of flu and colds.

To date, COVID-19 deaths in the US are far fewer than deaths in ordinary flu seasons or from past pandemics such as the H1N1 virus. This understanding is critically important to put the virus, and the government response to it, in perspective. Even during past pandemics, depressions, and world wars, Americans went to work.

In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat helped the world understand the “seen and unseen costs” of state policies. It is simple to see how quarantines and lockdowns will slow the spread of COVID-19. It is critical, but not so simple, to see the costs and harms caused by the economic shutdown.

Only then can we rationally understand the tradeoffs involved.

How many Americans suffering from other illnesses cannot see a doctor now? How many Americans will lose their jobs, their life savings, their retirement prospects, and their incalculable feeling of self-worth? How many will succumb to depression, drug or alcohol abuse, and suicide? How many will lose their homes, divorce their spouses, or suffer abuse? How many will never recover in their careers? How many small businesses, including the vital ones of doctors, dentists, and veterinarians, will vanish from your community? How many young people will “fail to launch”?

Worse still, will grocery stores and gas stations remain open and stocked? Will crime spike? Will the American social fabric, already thin from politics, tear apart?

These questions are not rhetorical. All of these things happened, to a degree, following the Great Recession of 2008. They will happen again—very soon—if we fail to act immediately. Tomorrow, on April 1, millions of Americans will not pay rent or mortgages. Millions of small businesses will shutter, just as many large employers such as Macy’s, Kohl’s, airlines, and hotels already have. Millions of service workers are unemployed already, but many more jobs will be lost. The effects will cascade.

There is no conflict between humanitarian and economic concerns; in fact they are flipsides of the same coin. A poorer America will be a much less healthy America, one more vulnerable to future illness and disease. Technology, modern medicine, and market actors can address a virus; already we see entrepreneurs producing cheaper ventilators and doctors using cheap generic drugs with very promising results.

This local, bottom-up approach is the only effective way to confront the virus. The federal government, as we see now and have in the past, is comically incapable of competence in times of crisis.

On a fundamental level, freedom really is more important than security—or, in this case, an illusion of security. We all demonstrate this in our personal lives every day, from flying to driving to riding bicycles, to consuming unhealthy food and drink simply because we like it. Security has never been the sole or even primary goal for a country born in rebellion.

Government cannot decide what aspects of our lives are essential or nonessential. The American people cannot simply sit at home and wait for government checks written on funds that government does not have.

End the shutdown.

Here are 4 Big Social Changes That Will Follow After The End Of The Coronavirus Panic.

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No-one can predict the future, other than to be sure things will change. Here are 4 developments we anticipate will occur following the disturbing government suppression to which we have been subjected during the coronavirus panic.

The majority will completely stop listening to and believing in government.

In the coronavirus pandemic crisis, we have been ill-advised and misled, and confined and suppressed and coerced and controlled. By the time the virus panic is over, millions of economic lives will have been destroyed, with collateral damage to mental and physical health, friendships, families and other relationships, institutions, and business loyalties. Our faith in many things will have been damaged. One of those things is government.

Faith is an irrational belief in the truth of a proposition irrespective of evidence to the contrary. It is not boundless or endless. The more the believer’s faith is contradicted by reality, the greater the test. Government – using the term to mean the institution, irrespective of which political party is at the helm at any point in time – has asked us to believe that they are justified in shutting down the economy on the basis of a wildly erratic interpretation of wildly erratic data. It has asked us to pledge obedience to mad scientists posing as experts. It has asked us to accept draconian limitations on our movement, our socializing, our working and earning a living and our freedoms in general. It has threatened military action and legal action.

It’s hard to discern a motive for this destruction. Probably, governments prefer greater control over a diminished system than less control over a thriving population. 

But it seems rational that intelligent people will now cease to believe a single utterance that comes from government, whether the executive, legislative or judicial branch. That they could mislead so deliberately as to drive a highly productive and highly civilized populace into depression and dysfunction must be viewed as shocking. Evil is a word that’s hard to use with accuracy, but it may fit.

The consequences of a loss of faith are impossible to predict. But change in the arrangements of the society and the polity are inevitable. Loss of faith in the dominant and hegemonic Catholic Papacy centuries ago led to the Reformation and a cascade of positive, civilization-advancing changes. Perhaps we can anticipate similar breakout progress when the people sever the cord of faith binding them to government.

We’ll all stop believing in data and models.

A central feature of the pandemic phenomenon has been the prominent role of data, models, and modelers. There is an increasing modern pretense that there is no limit to the amount and type of data that can be collected to shed light on wicked problems. Once collected, the data can be processed to identify patterns and trends. Once processed, it can be plugged into so-called models, riddled with assumptions about the unknown and the unknowable, and these models then claim to predict the future.

Our faith in these models knows no bounds. We believe we can predict how many coronavirus deaths there will be 10 days from now. We believe we can predict the warming of the planet’s atmosphere 10 years from now. We believe we can predict the extinction of species and the rate of growth of the economy.

But, of course, we can’t. And the reason is well-known, albeit ignored or suppressed. The quantification principle of modeling does not apply in human behavior. Every human is different, every individual reacts differently to changes in the environment and context, everyone makes their own arrangements, every value judgment is subjective, emotional, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. Value judgments precede behavior, and so behavior is equally unpredictable. Human populations are not subject to modeling.

Exacerbating the problem, the models are voracious for data – “big data” is preferred, but not necessarily good data or relevant data or accurate data. In the coronavirus panic, we do not know how many people are infected with the disease, or how communicable it is. We do not even know the death statistics, since identifying COVID-19 as a notifiable disease results in people who died with conditions that included COVID-19 being recorded as dying of COVID-19. In every single instance, that piece of data may or may not be accurate. Or, as we used to say, truthful. The projections of the models are worthless at best, misleading at worst, and provide the fuel for government misbehavior.

The credibility of models and modelers has taken a fatal blow.

We will start to press harder for the dismantling of regulation, and reverse its hitherto unstoppable growth.

A telling observation about government behavior in the Coronavirus crisis is that, at the same time as imposing their draconian new restrictions, they are finding the need to rescind their previous draconian restrictions, those given the name of regulation. For example, it is regulation that limits the number of firms that can produce masks and ventilators. But the government’s panic pronouncements increase the demand for masks and ventilators. Government belatedly recognizes that it is its own regulatory restrictions that are causing the bottleneck, and increasing anxiety among the populace. Since the last thing they can accept is social disruption and disobedience, they quickly relax the regulations to open the bottleneck again. 

This realization that regulation is anti-productive, restrictive and damaging may be enlightening, at least to the governed if not to the government bureaucrats and regulators. We can expect a surge of anti-regulation sentiment and protests, and a welling up of support for anti-regulation activists.

We’ll abandon cities.

Governments and politicians love cities: concentrated locations of regulation, control and surveillance. Housing control, wage control, zoning control, educational control, health control, and mobility control are all concentrated and exaggerated in cities.

But cities have turned out to be critical culprits in the pandemic. Close living quarters, cramped mass transit, teeming office buildings and apartment buildings, crowded sports and concert venues, and poor sanitation combine to create virological time bombs that are now exploding. 

Smart people will start making better trade-offs. Perhaps more will move to the greater separation afforded by suburbs, working from home or commuting solo despite the urging of urban planners to crowd into mass transit. Perhaps apartment buildings and their crowded, virologically suspect elevators will no longer be so attractive. Perhaps more people will seek jobs – or start companies – that don’t require an urban anchor. Perhaps many will permanently abandon live sports and concerts in favor of digital remote participation that, quite possibly, will enhance the experience rather than diminish it. 

Happily, we can expect the decline of the city as a prerequisite for social and economic interaction.

A Politician Admits: We Were Wrong. Sorry To Have Ruined All Your Lives.

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Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, is moving up in the betting odds for getting the Democratic presidential nomination, even though he is not running. The reason is that binge-watching newshounds have noticed something about his comportment during this crisis. He seems just slightly struggling to know what’s true. Sometimes he is even honest.

Consider this. On Thursday March 26, Cuomo dared question the orthodoxy that has wrecked countless businesses and lives. He revealed what actual experts are saying quietly all over the world but had yet not been discussed openly in the endless public-relations spin broadcast all day and night.

He said the following:

“If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say quarantine everyone. I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people was probably not the best public health strategy because the younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection. “

Further:

“What we did was we closed everything down. That was our public health strategy. Just close everything, all businesses, old workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people. Every school closed, everything.”

It’s true that anyone following the unfolding fiasco and the gradually emerging data behind it knows that Cuomo is right. The response has not been modern and scientific. It has been medieval and mystical. The theory behind the policy has been nothing but a panicked cry of run and hide before the noxious gas gets you. Lacking reliable data – which is the fault of the CDC and FDA – we replaced knowledge with power.

In the end, this fiasco is an epistemic crisis. As Ed Yong has written in a beautifully detailed article for The Atlantic, “The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure.” Even the wide acceptance of social distancing as a norm, however much it helps curb the spread, presumes this absence of knowledge. Stay away from everyone as much as possible: a slogan that reveals how little we know.

And yet lacking that knowledge, the politicians, cheered on by the media, acted in ways that have fundamentally wrecked life as we knew it, all in the course of a couple of weeks.

The massive knowledge gap was filled by a cascade of predictive models made possible by modern statistical packages readily available by subscription to any member of the clerisy. If this, and this, and this, and if this and this and this, then ENTER. Out pops what appears to be a precise presentation of our future under the following conditions, along with an overlay of embedded cause-and-effect assumptions about certain policies followed or not followed. Day after day we were bombarded with such predictions, and we paid close attention because we had little in the way of actual on-the-ground facts that have been available to us in previous disease panics.

It then became the perfect storm. Risk-averse politicians deciding to do something, anything, to avoid blame. Bureaucrats doing what they do best, which is telling people no, you cannot innovate, you cannot produce, you cannot distribute. Local tyrants stopping price gouging and therefore preventing the price system from working. A howling media famished for eyeballs, ears, and clicks. A public panicked about disease and death. An egregious dividing of people into essential and nonessential. Policy snares, tangles, missed opportunities all around.

The cacophony of information chaos has been palpable, unbearable.

All the while, a few knowledgeable experts have been trying their best to weigh in and get some slight attention for rationality. My heart, in particular, goes out to the esteemed Professor John Ioannidis who has been exposing fake science based on bad data his entire life and has been previously celebrated for doing so. He writes as often as he can, while still trying to be as precise and accurate as he can. Apparently such high-end people have a private email list in which they share observations and data, while doing their best to bring calm while civilization is falling apart.

His first salvo appeared March 17. God bless The National Post for publishing Ioannidis’s latest exasperated piece.

At the moment, we are enacting extremely severe measures in an effort to do something. However, we have very little evidence-based data on how to guide our next steps. We really don’t know where we are, where we are heading, whether our measures are effective, or if we need to modify them. There is a possibility that many of our aggressive measures could be doing more harm than good, especially if they are to be maintained in the long term. There will be major consequences in terms of lives lost, major disruptions to the economy, to the society, and to our civilization.

At this juncture we need to act swiftly. At the same time, we need to act equally swiftly to collect unbiased data that will tell us how many people are infected, the chances that someone who is infected will have a serious outcome and die, how the epidemic is evolving in different settings and places around the world, and what difference we are making with the measures that we’re taking. This information can make a huge difference and there is a lot that can go wrong if we don’t have the right data.

This has been an acute situation. At the same time, collecting reliable data should not take time and should not halt our decision-making process. Getting information on representative samples of the population is very easy. It has been done in Iceland, where they have a cohort covering most of the national population looking at samples that have been provided. They see that they have an infection rate of 1.0 per cent, and up until now only two people have died. So, out of the 3,500 infected people in Iceland there have been two deaths, which corresponds to an infection fatality rate lower than the common flu. Of course, some people may be infected later, but nevertheless, these estimates would be very different compared with the original claims of case fatality rates of 3.4 per cent that were circulated.

At the same time, we have other pieces of evidence that the number of people who are infected is much larger compared with the number of cases we have documented. In most places, with few exceptions around the world, we are just testing people who have substantial symptoms who have come to seek health care or even to be hospitalized. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The Iceland experience and other data from Rome and Italy where entire city populations were tested shows that the vast majority of people are either completely asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic in ways that you would not be able to differentiate from the common cold or common flu. This information makes a huge difference while we are proceeding with aggressive measures of social distancing and lockdowns that may have tremendous repercussions, especially in the long term.

As the song says, stop making sense.

I write on Saturday morning March 28, and right now there are two contrary strains about to collide. On the one hand, you have scientists reducing their death-rate predictions further and further, lopping off zeros by the day. On the other hand, this is accompanied by appalling levels of despotism, even to the point of National Guard checkpoints at state borders and restrictionson what you can buy even at “essential” stores. This gigantic gap between emerging professional medical consensus and appalling policy ignorance is revealing as never before the practical impossibility of scientific public policy.

Then you have the cascade of unintentional and unexpected outcomes of the rush to coerce. It began with Trump’s disastrous block on flights from Europe that sent millions scrambling for tickets and led to an unspeakable crush of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at our nations’ airports, contradicting the demand that people social distance just when the virus was revealing itself as highly contagious. The very opposite of intended results!

That’s just the beginning. I doubt seriously that the political class in this country, as low a regard I have it, set out to destroy all that we call civilized life, instantly generating millions of unemployed workers and bankrupt businesses all around, not to mention a pandemic of utter hopelessness on the part of vast swaths of the world’s population. Still, this is what they have managed to achieve. This is what their pretense of knowledge – as opposed to actual wisdom – has unleashed on the world, with incalculable human cost.

As for economics, are we talking recession? Depression? Those words indicate cyclical changes in business conditions. My friend Gene Epstein suggests another term for what we are going through. The Great Suppression. There will be months, years, and decades in which to more clearly observe the countless ways in which the supressors piled error upon error, blockage upon blockage, to add to the grotesquery.

What truly should inspire us all right now are the grocers, pharmacists, truck drivers, manufacturers, doctors and nurses, construction workers, restaurant workers, service station attendants, webmasters, volunteers of all sorts, philanthropists, and specialists in a huge variety of essential professions who keep life functioning more or less. And let us not forget the “unessential” people (it’s an incorrect and vicious term) who have innovated ways around the Great Suppression to continue to serve others, keep the rent being paid, and food on their tables. They are the means of salvation out of this mess.

The market, hobbled and bludgeoned, still loves you.

As for the politicians, Andrew Cuomo has admitted some of the error. In a much-welcome change, he has even deregulated medical services. There’s just a hint of humility and humanity embedded in these statements and actions. We need more of that, vastly more, if only to contribute to calming things down long enough to gain some perspective, and, hopefully, some eventual realization that in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” a virus should be regarded as a disease to mitigate and cure, not an excuse to bludgeon life on earth as we know it.

The COVID-19 Models Are Inaccurate. So Are The Climate Change Models.

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It wasn’t long ago, just in recent days, in fact, that we were being told the coronavirus was going to kill more than 2 million Americans. But some researchers are indicating the forecasts of doom were driven by faulty models.

What then, are we supposed to make of the models that have been fueling the global warming hysteria?

The forecast used to predict 2.2 million U.S. deaths and 510,00 deaths in Great Britain was produced by Imperial College in London. It is “the epidemiological modeling which has informed policymaking in the United Kingdom and other countries in recent weeks.”

OK, but is the information reliable? Epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta is doubtful.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” he said in the Financial Times.

Gupta’s team of researchers at Oxford believe both the hospitalization and mortality rates are much lower than the worst estimates, and immunity is more widespread than previously thought.

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed from professors of medicine at Stanford who said “projections of the death toll” reaching 2 million to 4 millon “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for” a number of important factors.

We can’t say for sure which model has it right. Will deaths be in the millions? Or will coronavirus be less lethal than the seasonal flu?

But we can say that at least one of the models is wrong.

So what does this tell us about the climate models that officials keep telling us are evidence that man is overheating his only planet?

The lesson is that we shouldn’t put our full trust in the global warming alarmists’ claims. But then independent thinkers have known for some time the climate models are far from perfect:

  • Six years ago, Reason’s Ronald Bailey noted that “most temperature records show that since 1998 the models and observed average global temperatures have parted ways. The temperatures in the models continue to rise, while the real climate has refused to warm up much during the last 15 years.
  • In 2017, Bailey reported that, according to a “fascinating new study” in Nature Geoscience, “climate computer model projections of future man-made warming due to human emissions of carbon dioxide are running too hot.”
  • Last year, John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Hunstville, told the British Parliament “an early look at some of the latest generation of climate models reveals they are predicting even faster warming. This is simply not credible.”
  • Also last year, author Guy Sorman wrote in City Journal the models used by United Nations scientists cannot “explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age.”
  • Climatologist Judith Curry has also said the models “seem to be running too hot.”
  • Christy’s university colleague Roy Spencer, a former NASA climate scientist, says “global warming projections have a large element of faith programmed into them” because “we have no idea how much warming” is caused by carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas the political left has chosen to vilify.
  • A little more than a year ago, climate researcher Patrick J. Michaels noted the authors of a paper published in Nature Climate Change “show that the aggregate models are making huge errors in three of the places on earth that are critical to our understanding of climate.”

Despite the healthy skepticism from scientists who have been studying the climate for decades and have held prominent academic positions, the Democrat-media powered narrative never sleeps. But that’s what we expect from those who are ever searching for a crisis to take advantage of.

 

Sweden Is Betting Against Draconian Restrictions And In Favor Of The Free Movement Of People And Goods.

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The lights are going out all over Europe, the U.S., and increasingly the rest of the world. Borders are closing, cities are shutting down, and governments are imposing export bans. It looks like one of the first victims of the new coronavirus is globalization.

The World Bank has estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the economic damage from epidemics usually comes from aversion behavior, not from disease, deaths, and the associated loss of production. This time, due to the massive scale of the shutdowns, that cost is going to be much bigger.

Perhaps not in Sweden, though. It’s hard to predict even the next few hours or days, but it is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.

With beautiful exaggeration, Bloomberg News reported that “Swedes Try Laissez-Faire Model in Controversial Virus Response.” Sweden did not do this out of libertarian zeal, but because of a tradition of listening to experts and health authorities, who thought it better to track individual cases within the country than to shut everything down. When everybody is awaiting the latest epidemiological data to make decisions, there is less room for political grandstanding and strongman rhetoric.

There is also a case to be made that the culture of personal responsibility and interpersonal trust makes it easier for the Swedish government to leave the ultimate decisions to the people. When the public health agency recommends working from home and avoiding unnecessary gatherings, most Swedes abide by it, even without putting police on the streets and imposing stiff penalties. That leaves necessary room for local knowledge and personal needs. Individuals, organizations, and businesses can go ahead anyway, if their particular situation makes it especially important that they remain open or move around freely.

And by the way, it might help that Sweden is a country of introverts, famous for distant relations between generations. Swedes did social distancing before it was cool.

There are reasons to fear that this near-consensus toward cordoning off whole nations will strengthen an already ongoing global reactionary impulse against the movement of people and goods across borders. If we can’t find our way back to an open world after this, our reaction to COVID-19 will hurt us even more than the virus. After decades of unprecedented progress at combating poverty, hunger, and disease, these trends would be reversed, and we would be even less well prepared for the next nasty surprise nature throws at us.

Despite the popular perception, our best hope against pandemic is continued trade and cooperation across borders. Travel bans are mostly “political placebo” as U.K. health researcher Clare Wenham puts it, and the World Health Organization is advising against it, for the simple reason that COVID-19 is already everywhere, but vital supplies and medical equipment are not.

In fact, one reason why Italy has suffered terribly seems to be that closed borders gave them a false sense of security and made them underestimate the spread already going on within the country.

It is easy to see the political logic behind bans on the export of essential equipment, implemented by countries like Germany and France at an early stage. You have to serve your own population first, right? But it’s the same logic as toilet paper hoarding, and it has the same result. It forces others to do the same, which means that it is not on the market when you really have to go.

During the global food price crisis of 2010–11, many governments banned food exports to secure local supplies. But afterward, we found out that those bans were part of the problem. In fact, they accounted for 40 percent of the increase in the world price of wheat and almost a quarter of the increase in the price of corn.

So even though the world often moves in a nationalist direction during crises, it is exactly the time when we have the most urgent need for international agreements to forego beggar-thy-neighbor policies.

Wealth, communications technology, and open science have made our response to new diseases faster than ever. In a poorer and more closed world, without mass transportation, microorganisms traveled slower but they traveled freely, recurring for hundreds of years, until they had picked almost all of us off, one by one. Today our response is also global, and therefore for the first time, mankind has a fighting chance.

Hospitals, researchers, health authorities, and drug companies everywhere can now supply each other with instant information. They can coordinate efforts to analyze and combat the problem. By organizing clinical trials of therapeutics in many countries simultaneously, they can reach a critical mass of patients they would never have found at home.

The pace of the response has been extraordinary. After having tried to conceal the outbreak for weeks, China announced that it had found a new coronavirus on January 2. Using technologies developed on the other side of the globe, Chinese scientists could read the complete genome of the virus and publish it on a new global hub for medical research in just a week. This information enabled researchers in Berlin to develop a test to detect infections in just six days. This is what we now use to track infected people around the world—except in the U.S., where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on keeping it out and developing a domestic, faulty test, which set back American efforts several weeks.

When someone reveals the mechanism of the virus, researchers and algorithms everywhere can get to work on ways of attacking its weak spots. On March 25, not even three months after China admitted a new virus was on the loose, America’s National Library of Medicine lists 143 potential drugs and vaccines against the virus, already recruiting (or preparing to recruit) patients to participate in clinical trials.

Those companies are, just like our health care systems, disproportionally reliant on immigrant workers. According to the immigration advocacy nonprofit Partnership for a New American Economy, eight out of 10 medical patents from leading U.S. universities are invented by someone born outside of the country. In other words, immigration bans kill Americans.

That is not all. Globalization might even prevent many pandemics from happening. A 2019 study by researchers at the universities of Oxford and Tel Aviv showed that frequent travel between populations makes us catch a lot of bugs, but also increases immunity against new strains. So apocalyptic outbreaks become less likely. This is the reason why previously isolated populations are most at risk—from Native Americans after 1492 to the swine flu in 2009, when 24 of the 30 worst affected countries were island nations.

Human mobility is like a “natural vaccination” says Oxford’s Robin Thompson. The researchers speculate that this might help explain the absence of a global pandemic as severe as the Spanish flu in the last 100 years.

That doesn’t help at all when a virus that previously only affected animals mutates and jumps to humans, like the new coronavirus. Then we have no resistance and it can spread quickly.

But if the researchers are correct, the jet engine has saved millions of lives from pandemics only in the last few decades. And as even Sweden’s governing Social Democrats emphasize right now, the greatest threat to our economy, our jobs, and our health is that the planes stop flying and the trucks get stuck at the border.

That is also worth taking into account before we turn off the last lights.

The Biggest Threat To American Health Is A Shutdown Economy. Don’t Let The Machine Stop.

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As many Americans are now realizing, the worst part of working from home is the unsettling feeling that comes with waiting. Our livelihoods and dreams are suspended, and thoughts turn. We’re seeing Congress react with a massive spending binge that may ultimately do more harm than good and the economy is rapidly cratering.

America has been blessed throughout its history to avoid such widespread upheaval.  We have fought no major wars on our soil since the Civil War. In the past couple of decades, we’ve been through the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well as the 2008 recession, but COVID-19 is a different crucible.

Just a month ago we could sleep well knowing the United States was considered the most prepared country in the world to deal with a pandemic. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta revised upwards its projections for the first-quarter GDP growth to a robust 3.1 percent.

Yet today, we’re living in a radically different world. We are watching our economy and stock market crater before our very eyes, which has led many to speculate that we may be in for a lengthy recession, if not a devastating depression during which businesses – large and small – will be eviscerated. Such a threat was unthinkable just two weeks ago.

The COVID-19 pandemic is no “hoax” or laughing matter. Precisely because it, we must get the economy moving again. If we do not, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic risks becoming more destructive in both lives and capital than the disease itself.

Small businesses need liquidity, but that’s only a bridge to an unknown time. The nearly $2 trillion dollar package the Senate is considering as a response to the pandemic is merely a band-aid fix to get the economy and pandemic under control, and it may do more harm than good in the long run.

History is a guide. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt managed to get Congress to pass all sorts of legislation wrapped up in his New Deal, which represented a massive centralization of government at the federal level. The level of intervention undoubtedly prolonged the depression and led to a recession in 1937. The actions Congress is considering now won’t be temporary, no matter how they spin it, because history teaches us that government very rarely lets go of its grip on power.

How do we begin to re-open our economy? Looking at data from Italy, the average age of patients who have succumbed to the virus is 78.5, not the age of the American workforce. A full 99 percent of those who have perished in Italy have a major pre-existing condition. We know exactly who the most vulnerable are, and we need to protect them.

I don’t take this lightly. My parents back in Ohio are within the at-risk category. The truth is, I can’t help my parents if I’m unemployed. We have to open up the economy by mid-April or the consequences will be a lost generation. It will be harder to do so when the news is counting deaths in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands. There are steps we can and must take to re-open our economy in a careful and deliberate manner.

First, we must quarantine and support the old and at risk.

Second, we ensure we have the capability to institute mass testing. This involves not only test kits but the temperature guns that are so ubiquitous to East Asia.

Third, if you are sick, stay home. If you are not sick, you can return to the labor force. Businesses should support flexibility for employees to work from home and care for sick family members.

This is a reasonable, multi-pronged approach to help get the economy moving again, protect the most vulnerable, and buy time to develop the vaccine. We need to learn to live with the virus, however deeply unsettling that thought is. We must think back to Churchill and Great Britain in WWII. As the bombs fell during the Blitz, Londoners were asked to “keep calm and carry on” and return to work knowing the risk.  Moreso, planners during WWII knew that eventual victory would not come without casualties.

We cannot support our elderly and sick if we are mired in a depression. If we wait until August, we risk not having the economy to support our government and our healthcare system. Our healthcare system is based on resources produced by our strong economy. Our government’s ability to function is based on the resources produced within our economy. If our economy stops, our way of life comes to an end.

Once the machine stops, it may take years to bring it back to where it was before this unprecedented situation. It’s a dangerous world, and this is not the time to turn off our economy. After all, China will not stop building its economy.

We will not be perfect in our steps to restart our economy. In fact, doing so will evoke the painful memories of a wartime economy. A vaccine for COVID-19 and a policy solution to our long-term growth and debt issues will come in time. But first, we must take the right steps to restart an American engine of prosperity that will make fighting present and future viruses exponentially more manageable.

Adam Brandon is President of FreedomWorks. 

Regulations Are Always A Restriction On Production. In This Crisis, We Become Newly Conscious Of The Damage They Do.

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Why are people shocked to find stores running out of essential goods, hospitals suddenly lacking supplies and equipment (even beds), the general lack of flexibility by actors, whether government or private business, to respond to the crisis? It is exactly what we should expect from an economy that is heavily regulated. So, we need to talk about regulations, because they are at the core of many of the problems we are dealing with.

Regulations make economies function poorly–and much, much *worse* in times when we need solutions urgently. People have a romantic view of regulations as something inherently beneficial, but the fact is that they are simply restrictions: regulations stipulate that some actions are not allowed or are otherwise penalized (added cost, such as a fine or tax).

In normal times, this means it is more difficult for entrepreneurs to freely figure out how to best serve their customers. But in normal times we do not feel the effects because we don’t know what we’re missing. Perhaps entrepreneurs would have invented a new means of transportation, new forms of communication, new types of healthcare or immunizations? We don’t know, and thus do not feel the pain. (But we’re not getting what we could have, so we are worse off.)

Enter some crisis or panic, and suddenly we would benefit greatly from quick solutions, even if they are subpar (non-perfect). Such as repurposing industrial respiratory protection masks for medical use. In normal times, the problem appears limited. It may even seem like a good thing that hospitals are not allowed to use masks that are not “medical grade.” But if something happens so that many, many more masks are needed urgently, the requirement that masks are of a certain “grade” means there are not enough masks available. It may not even be possible to manufacture them quickly. So medical staff is unnecessarily risking their health going without.

Why not use the second best option when no medical grade masks are available? Regulations. They are not allowed. This is no fluke, folks. It is what regulations do and are *intended* to do: restrict the use of masks to only medical grade.

When such masks are easy to come by, when they’re not needed in great numbers, then we don’t feel much of the pain. The masks just cost more than they should. No big deal, right? Except when something unexpected or unusual happens. Then, suddenly, what seemed like a great idea–to restrict (prohibit) hospitals from using anything but medical grade masks–becomes a problem. Certainly, hospitals and medical professionals could be trusted to choose masks themselves? No, says the regulators. They cannot be allowed to use other masks. So their choice in crisis is to work without masks or break the law and risk fines or even prison. Just when we need them the most, their job is made a lot harder.

Again, this is no fluke. This is what regulations are intended to do. The CDC even brags about it on their web site. How well did they respond to the need for testing for the #coronavirus? The CDC is the appointed monopolist–everybody else is restricted from conducting such tests. So on February 4 the CDC issued an Emergency Use Authorization, i.e. a temporary deregulation, to allow more labs to conduct tests.

This is likely “by the book”, but why is it not pure madness? Ask yourself, now that we are experiencing a pan[dem]ic, what could possibly be the reason for restricting who can test whether you have contracted the virus? There are plenty of labs with competent personnel to conduct (and develop) tests, so why not let them?

Sure, one can argue that this is exactly what the EUA does–but it only opens for some specially appointed labs to act on CDC’s behalf. Why not have every medical lab in the country freely conduct tests? It is prohibited. Because a seemingly reasonable argument can be made in normal times for tightly controlled medical testing. I say “seemingly,” because it has the appearance of being sound but is not. With less draconian regulations, virus testing could be as hard to come by as glucose meters. With no regulations, medical entrepreneurs would compete to provide the best solution possible limited only by their imagination.

Who knows what that might look like? If experience and theory are any guide, we would see greater quantities of better and cheaper tests. Note that what we’re seeing is not a result of this unique situation. A time of crisis only makes it obvious what the results of regulations are: we see the effects, because we feel the pain. But these effects are always present–and by design–only we do not see what it is we’re missing. Regulations do not work in normal times and fail in exceptional times. Regulations *always* work: they always restrict possibilities and thus deny opportunities. This is what they are intended to do, and we need to realize what it is we are asking for when calling for something to be “regulated.” It is never anything but a restriction.

You can still favor regulations, but it is irresponsible to support them without knowing or even considering the real effect. The fact is, if you support(ed) regulations on hospitals that require them to only use medical grade masks, you are the reason there are no masks available. Learning about how the world works is the antidote to causing unintended madness. I felt compelled to write a book summarizing how regulations affect us and the world, whether we like it or not. Check it out:

The Seen, The Unseen, And The Unrealized

The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives

This book shows the effects and implications of regulation on how the market functions, with an emphasis on how regulation affects economic actors in other parts of the economy. Learn More

Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer Painted Every Day Subjects While Opening the Universe to Humanity

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The Declaration of Independence was signed and executed during an armed revolt against a despotic monarch. The document listed numerous transgressions by the King against the natural rights of his citizens, their collateral oppression, and the de facto forfeiture of sovereignty by the King. While the member States were to exercise self-government under the Articles of Confederation, that failed after a few years, and a federal-style republic was formed under the Constitution.

A primary reason for the revolt was religious freedom. Protestants had migrated to live and worship as they saw fit, and were eventually joined by Jews trying to escape religious persecution. Their spirit of independence, self-reliance, and industry eventually created a vibrant middle class of shop keepers, lawyers, doctors, ministers, industrialists, and bureaucrats. Social mobility was finally possible, and lower class laborers enjoyed a relatively higher standard of living. Combined with an advantageous geographic location for international trade, it became the wealthiest and most scientifically advanced society in the world. Once a luxury reserved only for elite aristocrats, leisure time became commonplace.

This unprecedented accumulation of wealth, including many well-heeled entrepreneurs, freed capital for tremendous works of fine art. The creative genius of great artists was unleashed, and they produced images for the entire world to see how life could and should be lived. Of course, this was the Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s and early 1700s; and among the greatest of these Dutch Masters was Poetic Justice Warrior Johannes Vermeer.

A Romantic Sense of Life

Vermeer was uniquely talented in the two most basic elements of great art – subject and style. These two choices are separate, become integrated by fine artists, and reveal their sense of life. The subject an artist chooses is a declaration of what they believe to be notable. For example, a human subject can be virtuous, a mediocrity, or depraved. For Vermeer, his subjects were at peace because they were free to engage in the activities of daily living, social engagement, and creative work. Very rare in annals of human history, they were not desperately striving for a meager existence, or spellbound by the sinister projections of wannabe despots.

One of Vermeer’s remarkable achievements was to draw the observer into the canvas of his paintings, imagine the contemplations of his subjects, and experience the soothing textures of their surroundings. This brings us to an even greater achievement: Vermeer’s unique style was more than visual perception, it was a non-visual abstraction. In her 1971 collection of essays titled The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand describes Vermeer’s genius.

He has isolated the essential, distinguishing characteristics, and integrated them into a single visual unit. To the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight. What his style projects is clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power. A universe open to man.

The distinguishing characteristic of Vermeer’s paintings was his portrayal of pure, radiant, austere light. In fact, the placement of the people, tapestries, furniture, wall hangings, and windows serve this stylistic purpose. It is this combination of subject and style that expose the Poetic Justice of Johannes Vermeer’s sense of human consciousness, our life’s efficacy, and its proper method of functioning. Reason, purpose, pride.

The Hole in the Box

Like The Astronomer uses a telescope to magnify and clarify the natural light of celestial bodies, Vermeer used the technology of his day to clarify the natural light that illuminated the space occupied by his subjects. Known as camera obscura, it was a box whose interior was painted white, and was equipped with a lens and mirrors that intensified the light and shadows they reflected.

This tool was also essential for him to capture the fine details of the cloth and other objects with his vibrant color palette and brush strokes. More importantly, it helped prime the neural flow between Vermeer’s conscious mind and its subconscious framework, and produce great works of art that exceed their photographic quality. Or as Arthur K. Wheelock, former curator of the National Gallery of Art observes,

Vermeer is one of those rare artists whose works transcend the limits of time and place. His images, whether a young girl in an exotic turban, an intimate ensemble in a sunlit interior, or a view across a quiet street, have an immediacy that is as vivid today as it was to viewers in seventeenth-century Delph.

The countless hues and qualities of light transmitted by his subjects entered the hole in the box from one side, and reflected through Vermeer’s eyes from another side. Four hundred fifty years later, we also peer into the hole in the box (the picture frame) and observe the light the painting reflects. But instead of witnessing the exact reality of the past, we see his integration of the philosophical themes that were essential to him. For example, in Officer and the Laughing Girl, as Wheelock explains,

Vermeer uses the sunlight falling on her to enliven her expression and to create shimmering highlights. He furthered this effect by dressing the soldier in deep red, a color associated with passion and power. He used the dramatic perspective of the window frame to draw the viewer into the scene.

Like John Harrison, a century later, harnessed the fourth dimension of time to solve the three dimensional problem of longitude, Vermeer harnessed the time inherent to space, light, and his creative activity to project his abstract conceptualization of reality into the future.

Time and Economic Freedom

During his lifetime, at least until 1672 (when Catholic-dominated France invaded The Netherlands and the art market collapsed), Vermeer lived comfortably. He was a local celebrity, enjoyed the moral sanction of his work, and painted his amazing details very slowly. His low time preference is a wonderful testament to the entrepreneurial culture of the Dutch Golden Age.

Because of the economic freedom they earned with independence, North Netherlands became the nerve center for commerce and banking, the wealthiest state in Europe, and the light of the world. The new country’s understanding of the nature of time, in particular the time value of money. Its moral sanction of interest on loans was becoming a primary value. As Austrian economist Eugen Bohm von Bawerk reveals in his 1884 book Capital and Interest,

Among the ever increasing adherents of the new theory, stands out prominently the renowned and influential lawyer Gerhard Noodt, who in his three books discusses the whole interest question very thoroughly, and with great knowledge of facts and literature.

Surrounded by church dominated English and French cultures that literally demonized interest, and the heavy cost of taxes to fund wars, the Dutch economic empire eventually fell apart. It wasn’t until a century later that French economist Robert Jacques Turgot recognized interest on loans as the equivalent of property rights. In the meantime, Vermeer had become heavily indebted, died in 1675, and fell into obscurity. As Poetic Justice would have it, Vermeer’s works were rediscovered in the 1800s.

In our postmodern world of bastardized money, vilified profit, lionized mediocrity, and the recent suspension of daily, life-sustaining creative work, we would be well served to contemplate Johannes Vermeer’s romantic sense of life. To sanction the independent virtues intrinsic to such a society, as it could and should be; and to free ourselves of the sinister projections of wannabe despots.

 

 

 

 

 

The Trump DOJ Should Have Filed Lawsuits To Defend Private Businesses From Being Shut Down By State And Local Governments.

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“The Pothole” is the title of episode 16, season 8 of the classic television series Seinfeld. In this one Jerry accidentally knocks girlfriend Jenna’s toothbrush into the toilet, only for Jenna to use it before Jerry can tell her about his accident. This rated a plotline given Seinfeld’s known aversion to germs. Readers can imagine where the story went. Seinfeld was surely a comedy defined by manufactured situations “about nothing,” but one reason the show was so popular (and still is) is that people could relate.

Certainly they could relate to Seinfeld’s obsessive aversion to germs. We all know people like this, or we are those people. These individuals never open doors by the door handle, wipe down tray tables and armrests on airplanes, and particularly if they have young kids, they require all visitors to wash or disinfect their hands upon entering their house or apartment.

In a work sense, most readers can probably remember their first job, or jobs. They paid hourly. If so, no doubt some can remember how holiday work paid double the hourly wage, or sometimes more. Eager to remain open for customers whose wants and needs didn’t and don’t cease on holidays, businesses pay workers extra to make sure they’ll serve their customers on days when most aren’t working.

These anecdotes have come to mind a lot while witnessing the mass shutdown of the U.S. economy on the city, state, and national level.  As this is being written, California’s 40 million residents are on lockdown per the order of Governor Gavin Newsom. The mayor of Hoboken (NJ) banned restaurants and bars from serving food, plus instituted a 10 pm to 5 am curfew. As all too many already know, Austin’s mayor canceled South by Southwest, thus devastating local businesses. On the national level, President Trump has ascribed to himself “wartime” powers, plus the federal government he leads is in the process of voting itself over $1 trillion to hand out to individuals and businesses.

About this extraction of enormous wealth from the U.S. economy, it barely rates mention that the Founders wrote the Constitution to severely limit the power of the federal government to do anything. Where then, is the outrage over a federal government set to spend $1 trillion?

In fairness to the American people, it’s arguable they’re too stunned to protest after seeing politicians on all levels so rapidly take from them their ability to work and enjoy the fruits of their work. They’re told the crushing of the economy by the political class is “for their own good,” and that they should respect the “science” informing their decisions. Don’t the American people get it, politicians are fighting to save our lives! Since they are, we apparently must forfeit our liberty and prosperity.

Seemingly lost in all this alleged governmental beneficence is that people broadly get it. See once again Seinfeld. The episode was relatable because we yet again know all-too-many people who are exceedingly careful about being around the sick or those they presume to be germ carriers. This is true even in times free of viruses like Covid-19. Translated, people are self-regulating when it comes to their health. They don’t need a law.

That they don’t raises at this point a counterfactual question: what would have happened on the city, state and national levels if politicians had quite simply done nothing in response to the spreading virus? If so, does anyone seriously think that the death rate would be substantially higher, and that information about this potentially lethal virus wouldn’t have reached a population increasingly connected to the internet all day, and every day?

To the above, some might reply that rural types don’t always have internet access similar to that which cityfolk do, but then per demands of politicians around the world, they’re already isolated or socially distant. If our political minders are to be believed, their chosen isolation would make their being exposed to the virus highly unlikely assuming what’s even less likely: that they wouldn’t have been informed of the spread of a health-sapping virus well ahead of time.

So what of cities, and suburbs of cities? No doubt the risk of exposure would be greater for a variety of reasons, but then it’s safe to say that germaphobes in the best of times would be positively OCD in times like this. Not needing a law, they would socially distance themselves simply because that’s what they already do when viruses aren’t spreading.

Some will respond that others wouldn’t or won’t do as politicians demand. Yes, that’s true. And your point? Heroin is illegal, so is cocaine, but people still consume both. Lockdowns or none, some will disregard the risks that come with contracting Covid-19 much as they disregard the much-reported-on risks of heroin and cocaine use. Laws don’t factor with these individuals, at which point their interactions with one another, and potential infection with the virus, would have and realistically will provide crucial information about how rapidly the virus spreads, how lethal it is, etc.

What about businesses? What if there had been no lockdowns? It’s safe to say that many would have operated short-staffed as is with germaphobes top of mind. Rather than forced furloughs, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a good percentage of workers on all levels of the economic food chain would have voluntarily opted out. Others fearful of contracting the virus would have used this time to take a well-needed and rather isolated vacation somewhere, including one of the “staycation” variety.

The main thing is that as opposed to businesses shutting down, it’s not unreasonable to contend that in concert with certain workers opting out or vacationing during the period of greatest Covid uncertainty, patronage of bars, restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks, stadiums, arenas, hotels, motels, casinos and everything else would similarly decline naturally, thus shrinking the need for fully staffed operations. This would once again materialize not by law, but based on the germ-obsessed and virus-averse choosing to stay at home, or away from crowds. An informed citizenry, one that is better informed than ever thanks to the internet, would revert to relative isolation in a numbers sense to mitigate the close interactions that doctors and scientists say are problematic.

And what if some businesses stayed packed no matter what? If so, high customer demand would have given businesses fearful of morphing into contagion zones a reason to limit customer inflow by yes, charging higher prices for said food or service. Assuming broad aversion on the part of the public to being in public, other business entities would have advertised their adherence to strict customer limits in order to bring in consumers who would have otherwise studiously avoided public places for fear of big crowds.

Still other businesses, perhaps newly opened, would have used this period of uncertainty to stay open while gaining market share that would be harder to attain during periods of normalcy. And if the newer, suddenly busier businesses were to find it challenging to staff for relatively larger customer inflow, they might offer holiday style or hazardous duty pay to attract quality help. The crucial point here is that as opposed to a one-size-fits-all shutdown of businesses that is wrecking the finances and dreams of tens of millions, market forces and market fears would have made it possible for many more businesses to stay open; albeit in a way that wouldn’t imperil workers or customers.

Mentioned earlier were movie theaters, stadiums and sports arenas. Unknown is the why behind the mass shutdown. Here, perhaps absent politics, those staging events and films might have used prices, and in particular high prices, to limit the size of crowds as opposed to canceling events altogether. If the game plan is distance, let price signals arrived at in the marketplace shrink crowd sizes not just in restaurants and bars, but in all manner of venues.

Turning to the federal level, one imagines in a perfect and rather sane world the president doing much less than nothing. It’s shooting fish in a barrel, but government cannot produce abundance. At the same time, it can provide the personal and economic freedoms that lead to abundance.

President Trump was going to be vilified by the major media no matter what. And precisely because they were going to make him out as the devil no matter what, Trump should have made plain that the federal government’s only Coronavirus plan was freedom on the correct assumption that creative, free, profit-motivated minds matched with capital would arrive at a virus vaccine quite a bit quicker than would a team led by Mike Pence.

Trump might have also made plain that his DOJ would file lawsuits in defense of private businesses around the country being shut down by local and state governments. To the latter some might reply something along the lines of “abuse of power,” that states are where policy should be enacted, but it seems these shutdowns amount to a “taking”? Yes or no, the Trump administration could have at least slowed down the horrid vandalism of the economy rather than his administration vandalizing it on its own with a $1 trillion spending plan that, while perhaps good cosmetics in the eyes of some, will logically weaken a U.S. economy already devastated by command-and-control.

To all of this some will yet again respond that a “business as usual” approach doesn’t work in the face of that which is potentially lethal. Such a view is insulting. Implicit there is that absent the guiding hand of government, people would approach what some say has the potential to kill by the millions with no regard for their own individual wellbeing. That’s not serious. In fact it’s obnoxious to presume that Americans need to be forced to protect themselves.

No, there’s a strong incentive for Americans and those of any other nationality to do what’s in their best interest. That this is true speaks to what a tragedy we’re in the middle of, both in terms of liberty and prosperity.

Free people naturally prosper, and they do precisely because their individual wellbeing means so much to them. Had governments done nothing in response to the Coronavirus, individuals and businesses would have done much more, and done so without going out of business. The Ruling Class overseeing this crack-up deserves the mother of all comeuppances that goes well beyond losing in the next election cycle. The architects of this wholly avoidable debacle need to be publicly shamed and ridiculed.

This piece originally ran at RealClearMarkets.

John Tamny is a research fellow of AIER, and editor of RealClearMarkets. His book on current ideological trends is: They Are Both Wrong (AIER, 2019)

The Decline In The Institution Of Journalism Has Dragged Us Back To The Eighteenth Century.

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Journalism has not always been understood as a formal profession, but in the course of the twentieth century it went through a transformation that left it with all the characteristics of one, and with links and similarities to many other core professions. Like those other professions, journalism in our day confronts a crisis.

Journalism is not in crisis in every respect, of course. Demand for its offerings is strong, as public interest in current events, and politics in particular, has soared in this era of political turbulence. The supply of journalism is plentiful too, and its quality—while obviously variable—is surely on par with any golden age of reporting we might point to. The economics of journalism in the information age has been brutal, but some journalistic outfits large and small have gradually been finding effective ways to deal with it. The freedom of the press, which has not always been secure in our country, is in no real jeopardy now, or even in much question or dispute. So what’s the problem?

The crisis now confronting American journalism is a crisis of public confidence—a crisis of integrity and trust. President Trump has frequently given vent to the attitudes underlying this loss of trust. “The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty. Purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate. Sad!” So Trump wrote on Twitter on June 13, 2017. This was a thoroughly characteristic statement of his regarding the press—unusual neither in tone nor in substance. That the president of the United States would speak about the profession like this and that he would do so on a social media platform that affords him direct access to many millions of Americans on his own terms are marks of the peculiar situation of journalism, and especially political journalism, in contemporary American life.

The trouble, moreover, is not so much about trust in individual journalists, or even about trust in particular publications, networks, or platforms—though some come in for more criticism than others. Rather, it is a matter of trust in American journalism as a whole, or at least trust in so-called mainstream journalism as an institution, understood as part of the array of institutions that compose the American establishment.

American journalists have never been at ease understanding their work as part of such an array of institutions. Journalism in a democracy always prides itself on its ability to hone a certain civic skepticism, to hold leaders to account, to uncover important facts hidden from the public, and to enable citizens to assess government officials. In this sense, American journalism sometimes imagines itself to be countercultural or an anti-establishment force like the muckrakers of old.

There are, of course, elements of this way of thinking and operating in the work of contemporary journalism. But journalism in America underwent a multi-decade process of institutionalization, over the first half or so of the twentieth century, that fundamentally transformed its character. By the latter decades of that century, political journalism had largely come to be practiced by highly educated cultural elites in America’s major cities, and many of the most prominent media enterprises came to be owned by large corporations or the very wealthy. Journalists fell into the habit of applying their skepticism mostly toward critics of elite institutions and challengers to elite norms, and their work had come to be implicitly protective of what might be called an establishmentarian status quo.

Yet most political journalists never came to conceive of themselves and their work in this way and so were not prepared to defend themselves against a rising tide of anti-institutional sentiment. That tide has continued to rise in this century. American journalism, like most of our major institutions, has been subject to intense social, cultural, and economic pressures that have undone some of its institutional forms and character—undermining its ethic and its social standing and increasingly subjecting it to competition from a range of upstarts. America’s media giants are still largely populated by highly educated elites and largely owned by major corporations or extremely wealthy individuals, but they are now engaged in a struggle for dominance with less-established competitors of various types.

No one imagines that the major newspapers or television networks have some inherent claim on our trust or attention. In this sense, American journalism offers an instance of a larger pattern in our national life, as public trust in nearly every profession has plummeted in recent decades while the culture has grown far more variegated, fragmented, and diverse. But the crisis of American journalism is especially acute because journalism conveys information that is only valuable to the degree it is deemed reliable, so a crisis of confidence presents it with a distinctly challenging problem.

Perhaps above all, the media landscape now resembles the circumstances of journalism in the early republic—when barriers to entry were relatively low and the media environment was teeming with mostly small voices. One telling artifact of that era is a brief essay published anonymously by Benjamin Franklin in 1789 called “An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz., The Court of the Press.” Like much of Franklin’s writing, this short essay is at least partially satirical. But it advances a very serious point: that anyone with access to a printing press can make wild, unfounded accusations and destroy the reputation of anyone he might choose to target. The press has great power with no clear limits on its use, Franklin worried. It is in this sense like a court without law. “It may receive and promulgate accusations of all kinds against all persons and characters among the citizens of the State, and even against all inferior courts,” he wrote, “and may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, etc., with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court’s direction.”

This court, Franklin noted, is not governed by any clear rules: The accused is allowed no grand jury to judge of the truth of the accusation before it is publicly made, nor is the name of the accuser made known to him, nor has he an opportunity of confronting the witnesses against him, for they are kept in the dark as in the Spanish court of Inquisition. Nor is there any petty jury of his peers, sworn to try the truth of the charges. The proceedings are also sometimes so rapid that an honest, good citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accused, and in the same morning judged and condemned and sentence pronounced against him, that he is a rogue and a villain. Yet, if an officer of this court receives the slightest check for misconduct in this his office, he claims immediately the rights of a free citizen by the constitution and demands to know his accuser, to confront the witnesses, and to have a fair trial by a jury of his peers.

The danger of this pseudo court abusing its power is thus immense, Franklin suggested. The press has the power to purvey lies—fake news, we might say—or (to recall President Trump’s terms above) to spread “purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate.” At the core of this complaint is the assertion of an absence of standards. As Franklin understood, this was a function not of the concentration of media power but precisely of its dilution. The power of the press in his time, Franklin wrote, was available to anyone who, “by education or practice in scribbling, has acquired a tolerable style as to grammar and construction, so as to bear printing; or who is possessed by a press and a few types.”

Anyone could become a menace in the court of public opinion, and his victims would have little recourse. “For if you make the least complaint of the judge’s conduct,” Franklin wrote, “he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you; and, besides tearing your private character to flitters, marks you out for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.”

To Franklin, there seemed no real remedy to this problem except placing constraints upon that liberty of the press. “If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please,” he wrote. “But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law, and shall cheerfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.”

That remedy has, with good reason, generally been ruled out of bounds in our politics, at least beyond very narrowly constructed libel laws. Franklin wrote just over a year before the Bill of Rights was ratified, but he was well aware of the abiding commitment to the freedom of the press in American public life—a cause he had championed himself at times. He seems to have intended to raise the question of how the power of journalism to abuse its subjects might be contained.

This extract is from Levin, Yuval. A Time to Build (pp. 71-79). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. Copyright (c) 2020 by Yuval Levin.

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