Before 2020, government, and especially campaigning to be part of it, as we were forced to endure it, routinely embraced massive mud- and blame-slinging as standard operating procedure. The “other guys” were always unprincipled black hats blocking self-defined white hats’ solutions. Then COVID-19, BLM, rioting, efforts to defund the police, etc. combined with the 2020 election piled onto that already onerous approach, attached only by the thinnest thread to promises that the winners will then bring us more into harmony. We can only hope that this year’s political and electoral torture of citizens will teach us that the government we suffer from does not expand harmony, but is rather the greatest cause of our disharmony.
The reason is that continually leveraging government power into ever-more areas where people’s views differ dramatically increases how frequently some people’s preferences are forced on others. That guarantees acrimony, not harmony. And the COVID-19 crisis, with a major recession triggered by what amounts to government prohibition of production and exchange in vast areas of the economy, has only supercharged the disharmony.
To understand how our disharmony comes from those who constantly promise to unite us, we could learn much from studying what Frederic Bastiat, among history’s ablest defenders of freedom, had to teach in his “Economic Harmonies.”
All men’s impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern … the practical solution … is simply not to thwart those interests or to try to redirect them.
Coercion … [has] never yet done anything … except to eliminate liberty.
If you entrust men with arbitrary power, you must first prove that … their minds will be exempt from error, their hands from greed, and their hearts from covetousness.
[But] It is not necessary to force into harmony things that are inherently harmonious.
Let men labor, exchange, learn, band together, act, and react upon one another … there can result from their free and intelligent activity only order, harmony and progress.
The question is whether or not we have liberty … not profoundly disrupted by the contrary act of institutions of human origin.
Social order, freed from its abuses and the obstacles that have been put in its way … [is] the most admirable, the most complete, the most lasting, the most universal, and the most equitable of all associations.
The laws of Providence are harmonious … only when they operate under conditions of freedom …Therefore when we perceive something inharmonious in the world, it cannot fail to correspond to some lack of freedom or justice.
The state always acts through the instrumentality of force … What are the things that men have the right to impose on one another by force? … I have no right to force anyone to be religious, charitable, well educated, or industrious; but I have the right to force him to be just: this is a case of legitimate self-defense.
If, therefore, the use of force by the individual is justified solely on grounds of legitimate self-defense, we need only recognize that government action always takes the form of force to conclude that by its very nature it can be exerted solely for the maintenance of order, security, and justice. All government action beyond this limit is an encroachment upon the individual’s conscience, intelligence, and industry—in a word, upon human liberty.
Accordingly, we must [turn] … to the task of freeing the whole domain of private activity from the encroachments of government.
Restrict the public police force to its one and only rightful function … from what source could come all our present ills … which teach the people to look to the government for everything … to the ever increasing and unnatural meddling of politics into all things.
Many causes of disturbances, friction, disaffection, envy, and disorder would no longer exist … it reduces evil to the smaller and smaller area left open to it by the ignorance and perversity of our human frailty, which it is the function of harmony to prevent or chastise.
Bastiat’s “Economic Harmonies” aptly identified individual rights and freedom as central to social harmony and progress. But such freedom required government “exerted solely for the maintenance of order, security, and justice.” Every expansion beyond that narrow bound, often triggered by crises such as our current ones, where government expands its role as dispenser of goodies and garnishments, inherently destroys the harmony that self-ownership and voluntary arrangements could provide. The acrimony of coercion displaces the harmony of freedom.
And the solution, now as always, is not to expand coercion to match growing wish lists of what people want government to do for them at others’ expense, but to contract it as quickly and completely as possible.
Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. Bastiat drawing: LefontQ via issuesinsights.com (creative commons license).
When will Americans push back against the lockdowns? There is no scientific justification for them; they are a pure power play.
Early this week, three of the world’s top epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration, a short treatise that advocates a controversial approach to managing the coronavirus pandemic. Professors Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University argue that societies across the globe should reopen immediately and completely.
Instead of observing measures designed to slow the spread of the virus, the young and healthy should resume normal activity in order to incur herd immunity and thereby protect those vulnerable to severe illness. The authors urge the adoption of this strategy, which they call “Focused Protection,” in light of increasing evidence that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. . . Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”
As of this writing, the Declaration has been signed by 3,089 other medical and public health scientists, 4,532 medical practitioners, and around 70,000 members of the general public.
While these scientists are not the first to express such views, given the degree to which their stance conflicts with the prevailing wisdom that everyone has a moral obligation to participate in efforts to “stop the spread,” it is not surprising that they have already encountered significant opposition. Among their primary detractors is Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who considers their proposal akin to a suggestion that society “cull[] the herd of the sick and disabled. It’s grotesque.”
It is hard to see where Gonsalves reads into the Declaration, which seeks to balance the interests of all demographics, a call to “cull[] . . . the sick and disabled.” This accusation is merely part of the drama in what has become coronavirus theater.
Gonsalves’s more measured, and conceivably legitimate, argument is that, since around fifty percent of the United States population is vulnerable, those most likely to experience severe illness cannot simply be separated out from the rest of society. Some version of this notion – that the strategy is logistically unfeasible and therefore must be discarded– is the most prevalent critique of the document. Gonsalves and others, for instance Dr. Michael Head at University of Southampton, also contend that the declaration’s premise is false, because no one in the scientific community is calling for either extended or extensive lockdowns.
But this latter claim is simply untrue. Manyprominent scientists have called for extreme lockdowns in the United States, as recently as last month. While they claim this would eradicate the virus entirely, it is becoming increasingly evident that such suppressive measures last only as long as they are in place.
Once lifted, the virus simply resurges, as has been demonstrated by countries such as Peru,which initially implemented one of the world’s most extreme lockdowns and now has one of the worst outbreaks. Melbourne, Australia, has been under a severe lockdown for over a month, despite having declared early victory against the virus. The United Kingdom has been enacting various forms of shutdown for several weeks after having been more or less open for the summer, and the mayor of New York City and governor of New York State have been threatening to impose localized lockdowns in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods in which cases are rising. Thus, whether endorsed by the scientific community or politicians, forced closures of schools and businesses are the default mechanism for managing rising cases in many parts of the world.
Lockdowns are no strawman, contrary to the claims of Gonsalves et al.
As for Gonsalves’s more compelling concern, it is true that protecting vulnerable members of society who do not reside in nursing homes, while allowing the rest to go about their lives, is not a simple feat. But the many scientists who conclude that, therefore, Focused Protection is not viable are woefully misguided. Initially, some portion of the vast resources that societies are expending to lock down could be diverted to this project. But more importantly, the critics’ position drastically underestimates the harm lockdowns inflict on a society.
Oxfam recently published a report concluding that 130 million more people will probably die of starvation due to supply chain disruptions resulting from lockdowns around the world. As Time magazine explains, that is exponentially more people than will succumb to the virus itself. The CDC has estimated the probable occurrence of more than 93,000 “non-Covid ‘excess deaths’ this year, including 42,427 from cardiovascular conditions, 10,686 from diabetes and 3,646 from cancer. Many are due to government shutdowns of non-essential medical care.” That is in this country alone.
Likewise, mental health is deteriorating; substance, child and domestic abuse are increasing; and children, especially those who come from families without means, are falling behind in school. Countless businesses have closed, many for good, spelling financial disaster for their owners and hardship for employees. All of this is due to lockdowns, despite the common misattributions in headlines to the “coronavirus” itself.
While Gonsalves and the other critics are quick to argue that Focused Protection is “grotesque,” at no point do they address the crux of the matter, which is that the harms of locking down and social distancing, especially to the young, outweigh the benefits. Their opposition stems from the myopic worldview that led to lockdown and social distancing strategies in the first place: that the pandemic is a uniquely horrible problem that justifies sidelining all others in the quest to solve it.
Instead, as we have seen over the past seven or eight months, the coronavirus is just one among countless difficulties that the world faces; when contemplated dispassionately, it does not stand out the way that, for instance, nuclear war or a truly apocalyptic pandemic would. At 1.05 million deaths over the past nine or ten months, the coronavirus appears to be a problem along the lines of, for example, traffic accidents, which cause 1.35 million deaths per year, or tuberculosis, which results in 1.5 million deaths annually.
Most of us understand and accept that preventing these deaths must be balanced against other interests. If, for instance, we banned vehicular travel in order to avoid deaths resulting from traffic accidents, but doing so caused 130 million deaths from supply chain disruptions, we would immediately recognize this as a failing proposition. Clearly, the same logic ought to apply here.
Critics of the Great Barrington Declaration correctly observe that we will not be able to prevent every death from coronavirus among the vulnerable. But their argument rests on the false assumption that preventing coronavirus deaths is more important than anything else, and while efforts can be made to mitigate collateral damage, in the end all must give way to this overarching goal.
Rather, like all else in life, mitigation efforts must be balanced against the injury those measures cause. Since lockdowns will probably cause more deaths by starvation alone than the coronavirus, never mind the myriad other harms, the critics’ position simply does not withstand any scrutiny. By contrast, the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration expressly recognize both sides of the equation and seek to minimize coronavirus deaths among the vulnerable and suffering inflicted upon the nonvulnerable. It should be obvious which is the better approach.
Jenin Younes is a public defender in New York City
Why we chose this article:We’ve learned a lot via the COVID-19 pandemic policy errors that were based on expert models, research, advice, and opinions. Why were they so wrong? There’s a general principle to be drawn. Experts are always going to be wrong when they employ a very narrow knowledge base and ignore the distribution of information that exists in society in decentralized form, rather than in siloed “expert” form.
When the coronavirus first began showing up in America in February 2020, both President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were arguing that the average citizen of the United States did not need to worry and that wearing masks wouldn’t do much to prevent one from getting or spreading the virus.
Shortly thereafter, the President invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to compel domestic companies to prioritize government Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) orders. FEMA and other federal agencies began seizing PPE stockpiles and redistributing them.
Taken independently, these actions seem contradictory; the federal government was simultaneously saying PPE wasn’t necessary for the virus and yet were taking steps to hoard the equipment.
Recently, both Trump and Fauci have attempted to address this seeming contradiction. They acknowledge that the virus was actually more deadly than they initially let on and the downplaying was done to prevent panic among the American people and ensure that necessary PPE could get to the hospitals rather than end up solely in private hands.
Let us take this explanation as correct: Trump and Fauci’s actions were motivated entirely by public concern. Let us assume there is no malice, self-interest, ignorance, or politics involved in their February actions. (As the reader will note, weakening these assumptions does not undermine the conclusions drawn in this article. If anything, it strengthens them.)
Trump and Fauci’s actions have failed to achieve their intended goals. Here we are, 7 months into the pandemic and 6 months into the federal government essentially taking control of PPE production in the US, and the equipment remains in short supply. Panic did indeed set in, with state and local governments acting in an unprecedented, destructive, and arbitrary manner. Second waves across Europe, spikes in schools, and fears of “super seeding” events continue to spread fears.
Why did the experts fail so badly, not just in the US but across the world?
Experts are just like us. They are experts in their specific fields, but not beyond them. The problem with a pandemic is that it is not simply a medical phenomenon. There are economic issues at play, political issues at play, mental health issues, educational issues, etc. Dr. Fauci may be a brilliant immunologist, but he is no economist.
Trump may be a civic-minded public servant, but he is no logistical expert. In other words, these experts fall into a problem that Roger Koppl calls “siloing.” These experts make decisions based upon their understanding, training, and knowledge. They do not necessarily know (or even know to consider) how their actions affect other elements of society.
From a political perspective, the February actions of Trump and Fauci may make sense. Containing panic may be wise during a pandemic, and the “noble lie” may be worthwhile. But, from an economic perspective, their behavior was foolish. Ultimately, the question of PPE production and distribution is an economic one. Economics is, partially, the study of the allocation of scarce resources to desired ends, according to early 20th century economist Lord Robbins. Economic theory gives us strong predictions about how the noble lie and subsequent seizure of PPE manufacturing would turn out: persistent shortages and hoarding by private citizens. Lo and behold, those predictions came true.
The expert failure of the Federal Government’s various agencies has a dynamic effect as well. Because they did not understand why they had failed, the experts began to rely on more and more regulatory solutions to the problems they faced. The noble lie that masks were not necessary was told in February.
By March, the fact that was a lie was quite obvious and people began stocking up on equipment and cleaning supplies. In order to make sure enough was available to hospitals, the federal government invoked the Defense Production Act, which capped prices and forced firms to prioritize federal contracts.
Firms, now facing rising costs and increasing demand for their products, could not raise prices to the federal government. They attempted to raise prices for private consumers. However, state and local governments began to impose anti-price gouging legislation to prevent price increases of PPE, toilet paper, paper towels, and other necessities.
Without rising prices to encourage conservation and search for alternative means to protect one’s self (e.g., cloth masks versus N95, staying at home, voluntary social distancing, etc), consumers continued to engage in risky behavior and search for PPE. As the shortages began to manifest, consumers started to panic (a panic which was fueled by media coverage of mass graves and overwhelmed hospitals).
This panic, in turn, led to various “shelter-at-home” orders, more price controls, and the disastrous lockdowns. But prices were still not able to rise (again, discouraging increased production and conservation) and the shortage persisted.
As the virus continued to spread, more and more draconian measures were imposed, both by the government and through intense (and Orwellian) social pressures. People were made to feel guilty about basic human desires for social contact. Feelings of claustrophobia from being cooped up in the house were dismissed as antisocial.
Predictably, however, the shortage persisted, leading to justification of more and more draconian measures. The experts continued to fail and they could not figure out why. As each day passed, more and more measures were imposed. The avalanche may have started small, with a single noble lie to contain panic, but the resulting destruction will be discussed and analyzed for years to come.
There is a tendency to analyze events as though they incur in a vacuum (this tendency is especially true in conversations among economists in regard to externalities, but that is a discussion for another time). But actions and events are not independent of one another; they are quite interlinked.
One of the advantages of liberalism (that is: the idea that people, except in rare cases, should generally be allowed to make their own decisions; that they should be protected from other people, including government, messing with their stuff) is that it prevents the cascading expert failure we’ve seen here in 2020.
When there is a multiplicity of plans, as opposed to a single, overarching plan, various failures can be canceled out and people can react to one another. As we have seen, when the feedback mechanism of personal interaction is overruled by a grand scheme, even if it is noble and (seemingly) virtuous, there can be strong negative results that cause the central planner to double, triple, or quadruple down on his failed scheme, resulting in even more problems.
Of course, if the experts are vicious, if Trump was actually trying to sow the seeds of panic and Fauci was truly ignorant of the nature of the virus, then the need to prevent their overarching control on our lives becomes all the greater.
Jon Murphy is an economics Ph.D. student at George Mason University. This article first appeared at aier.org.
Why we chose this article:We frequently post about the destructive effect of politics and politicians. It’s a core problem of our time. How does democracy survive the evil nihilism of politicians and their institutions? How, indeed, does civilization survive? John Tamny is excellent at highlighting the errors of politics without taking sides.
“We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November.” Those are the words of a west coast health director. No in-person schooling until after the election? Hmmm.
Please think about what was said. It reads as kind of a ransom note. Vote for science-reverent candidate Joe Biden, or else….
Really, what else could the utterance mean? What does November 3rd have to do with re-opening schools? Why would it be safer to open on the 4th of November versus the present?
Unless the implicit point is that corona-reverence is far more political than the believers have previously felt comfortable admitting. If so, what’s happening borders on child abuse. Kids will be held hostage by an election?
Think about what this means. For one, not every parent can afford a babysitter. More than some want to acknowledge, there’s a “day care” quality to schooling. And when school isn’t in person, parents without the means to hire babysitters either must reduce work hours, leave their kids without supervision, or quit work altogether.
Day care aside, what about the kids? While there’s an argument that the learning aspect of education is a tad overstated, does anyone think virtual learning will be very effective? With kids? For the adult readers done with school, think back to how attentive you were on substitute teacher days. Does anyone think a lot of learning is happening remotely?
What about kids with disabilities? How can they be instructed effectively via Zoom?
On a Frontline episode from last week titled “Growing Up Poor In America,” one of the impoverished kids had an ADHD problem. She was expected to learn virtually. Anyone want to guess how this will turn out? Some may respond that ADHD says much more about young people than it does a specific affliction, which is precisely the point. Young people need the structure of a classroom. They need to know they could be called on in class only to face the stares of fellow students if they lack an answer. Pressure concentrates the distracted mind.
The girl with attentiveness problems has an older sister. Understand that the Frontline episode followed three poor families during the spring. Her older sister was supposed to attend the prom. It was going to be her first date. Compassionate politicians and teachers took this exciting first from her.
Is the point that public school teachers don’t feel safe? If so, isn’t the right answer to give those uncomfortable returning to work an out, as opposed to discontinuing in-person schooling altogether?
Of course, if teachers don’t feel safe, a not unreasonable question is why they don’t? It’s not unreasonable to ask simply because retailer Target recently reported its strongest quarterly sales growth in decades. Target was “allowed” to remain open during the lockdowns, and while the political picking of winners and losers brings new meaning to reprehensible, the fact remains that Target has done very well amid the economic contraction forced on us by witless politicians. Translated more clearly, Target stores have at times been very crowded. So have Walmarts, Safeways, Ralph’s, Whole Foods, etc. etc. etc.
That they have raises an obvious question: have workers at those stores been falling ill or dying with any kind of frequency? Half-awake readers know the answer to this question, as should teachers reluctant to return to the workplace. Those employed at the major retailers have largely avoided illness and death. If they hadn’t, media members and politicians desperate to promote a blood-in-the-streets narrative would be letting us know the horrid stories in detail.
Who knows why, but it probably goes back to the statistics reported by the New York Times deep within articles that are proceeded by alarmist headlines, but those who pass with the virus tend to be quite a bit older. Or in nursing homes. According to the Times, over 40 percent of U.S. coronavirus deaths have been associated with nursing homes. The latter isn’t meant to minimize the cruelty of a virus as much as at least as of now, virus deaths skew toward the much older who also have pre-existing conditions. In short, just as retail workers have largely been spared illness and death, so logically would teachers who would be exposed to exponentially fewer people each day than retail workers. There’s also the distance thing. Instructors tend to be at the front of a classroom. Get it?
One more thing about businesses that have remained open: another impoverished child profiled in the aforementioned Frontline episode talked of missing being with his friends. Missing playing sports with them. It’s not allowed. There’s that distance thing. One bright spot in his day is McDonald’s. The one near his family’s home in The Plains, OH offers free lunches for school-age kids. Hopefully readers have this truth internalized the next time some know-nothing decries big business, or “excessive profits,” or calls for increased taxation on the big and successful. They somewhat uniquely have the means to help those who can’t always help themselves.
Back to the quote that begins this piece, some with the ability to keep schools closed are literally tying their re-opening to the presidential elections. This is shameful on too many levels to list; the most obvious being that kids shouldn’t be the victims of political brawls. It’s really very sickening.
And it yet again raises a question about the why behind the continued limits placed on people, schools and businesses. They’ve never made sense in consideration of how thankfully rare death (or even serious illness) has been as a consequence of the virus, especially in recent weeks.
Unless it’s always been political; as in, the most actively corona-reverent have been stoking ongoing virus fear as a veiled ransom note. If so, those who would mess with people, schools and businesses for political reasons are truly the sick ones.
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets. His book on current ideological trends is: They Are Both Wrong
A curious but fortunate characteristic of virus epidemics is their limited life spans. No one knows why, but guesses include herd immunity and mutations of the virus.
The following graph from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics shows the time profile of the COVID-19 weekly death counts from February onward. (For an interactive version of the graph, go here.)
In the U.S., the virus got underway in March. For the week ending March 14, the total number of deaths nationwide was 52. During the following month, the number of deaths increased rapidly, peaking in the week ending April 18 at a count of 17,026.
From that time onward, the death count declined rapidly to a weekly number of 3,684 in late June. A second “wave” began in July. The peak of that second wave was 6,794 deaths during the week ending July 25. After that, a steeper decline commenced and accelerated.
The peak death count for Americans under age 25 was 28 (for the week ending April 11) and has been under that number since. Only a single death occurred in that age group during the latest reported week, and there were no deaths recorded in the 25–34 age group.
Virus epidemics behave differently from virtually all other diseases. If you graphed timelines of the number of cancer deaths, fatal heart attacks, and fatal strokes, those timelines would be virtually flat.
Virus epidemics, however, have relatively short time profiles, like what we’re seeing with COVID-19. There’s nothing unusual about the fact that the coronavirus death count is dying a natural death. That should have been anticipated, and it should now be widely publicized. Why are we pretending not to know this good news? These facts are easy to find. We ought to be celebrating as we did when WWII ended.
This COVID-19 death profile is extremely significant yet is almost totally ignored by the media. Their focus is on cases, not deaths. The number of cases has not decreased as rapidly as the number of deaths. Only a small percentage of cases now end in death, and the death count is vastly more important than the case count. The case count may linger, but that problem is becoming increasingly manageable.
The latest reported weekly death count (August 29) was 370. That’s out of a population of 330 million people. In a single week, between August 8 and August 15, the number of deaths dropped 85 percent (from 3,169 to 455). The COVID-19 death rate in the U.S. is now barely more than one per million and dropping like a rock. Coronavirus deaths are currently half the number of weekly vehicle fatalities. We’re now seeing the pandemic in our rearview mirror.
Ron Ross, Ph.D. is a former professor of economics and author of The Unbeatable Market. He can be reached at rossecon@aol.com.
The governors of all 50 states, and the mayors of many large cities, have assumed unto themselves the powers to restrict private personal choices and lawful public behavior in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.
They have done so not by enforcing previously existing legislation but by crafting their own executive orders, styling those orders as if they were laws, using state and local police to enforce those so-called laws and — presumably when life returns to normal and the courts reopen — prosecuting the alleged offenders in court.
It is hard to believe that any judge in America would permit a criminal trial of any person for violating a standard of behavior that has not been enacted into law by a legislature. We know this because under our system of representative government, separated powers and guaranteed liberties, only the legislative branch can craft laws and assign punishments for noncompliance. This is Constitutional Law 101. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has written that the executive branch cannot enforce a law that it has written. If it does, we will have approached tyranny.
Have we approached tyranny already?
During the past eight weeks, governors and mayors have closed most businesses, public venues and houses of worship, prohibited public assembly and restricted travel — all of which they have unilaterally decreed to be nonessential.
In his terrifying novel “1984” — which posits a future of total control of all persons by the government and total control of the government by one political party — George Orwell argued that he who controls the meaning of words controls the laws as well.
That Orwellian truism has been manifested like never before here in America, where executive branch officeholders have used state and local police to restrain people from engaging in private and public behavior which they concede was lawful two months ago because today it is not deemed “essential.”
Frankly, I am surprised at the ferocity of police enforcement and the lameness of police compliance. The police have taken the same oaths to uphold the same Bill of Rights — it’s not the Bill of Safety; it’s the Bill of Rights — as have all other officeholders. The police also know that it is unlawful for them to obey an unlawful order, particularly when they use force.
The lockdown orders are all unlawful because none of them — none — has been enacted by a legislature, and all of them — all — interfere with fundamental liberties, each of which is guaranteed — guaranteed — by the Constitution.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I recognize the scientific value of personal efforts to control contagion. But under the Constitution, these social-distancing, wear-your-mask, shut-your-business, stay-at-home edicts constitute mere recommendations that should induce rational voluntary compliance, because the government in America is without lawful power to compel compliance.
The governors complain about resistance. They need to know that Americans will resist efforts to interfere in behavior that remains as moral, natural, lawful and constitutional as it was 60 days ago.
Last week, President Donald Trump, sounding fed up with gubernatorial lockdown orders, declared that religious worship is essential — meaning, in his opinion, all houses of worship should be opened — and he offered that he was prepared to “override” any governors who disagreed with him.
When he realized that he lacked any authority to override even unlawful gubernatorial decrees, he dispatched the Department of Justice to begin filing challenges to governors in federal courts and to argue that constitutional freedoms are being impaired by the states.
I applaud this, but it is too little, too late. Where was the DOJ when Catholic priests were threatened with arrest for saying Mass or distributing palms and when Jewish rabbis were put in COVID-19-infested jails for holding funerals? At all these religious events, folks freely chose to exercise their freedom to worship; and to take their chances.
These DOJ interventions provoked the question: Who should decide what goods, services or venues are essential — the states or the federal government? The question is Orwellian, as the answer is: neither of them. The government in America — state or federal — has no power and no right to determine what goods, services and venues are essential.
Those determinations have been for individuals to make since 1776, and those individual choices have been constitutionally protected from the feds since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and from the states since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.
What is essential to the laborer or student or housewife may not be essential to the former Goldman Sachs partner who was elected governor of New Jersey, and who decreed last week, “It shall be the duty of every person or entity in this State… to cooperate fully” with his orders, or essential to the ideologue who is mayor of the Big Apple and who, for all his professed liberality, threatened to close permanently — permanently — businesses and houses of worship that flaunt his guidelines.
A duty is undertaken voluntarily or by nature, not by executive command, Governor Murphy. And the government cannot take property away from its owners except for a legitimate public use and only for just compensation, Mayor de Blasio.
Governors and mayors can make all the dictatorial pronouncements and threats that they wish. But they cannot use public assets to enforce them. And when they seek to use force, those from whom they seek it should decline the offer.
In America, we decide for ourselves what produces happiness. We have never delegated to the government — ever — the power to make personal choices for us.
And some of us are willing to take chances and even do “nonessential” things. The essence of the freedoms for which we have fought since 1776 is the liberty to be ourselves.
Scott Atlas is the newest member of the White House senior staff. Appointed barely a month ago, he’s undergoing a public hazing. His brief as a special adviser to President Trump, he tells me in an interview by Zoom, is to “advise the president on integrating the science and developing a policy for how we deal with the coronavirus pandemic.” Still living out of “multiple suitcases” in a Washington hotel, he was paid a mighty Beltway compliment this week when two national newspapers ran hit pieces on him.
Flecked with references to unnamed White House insiders, the Washington Post and New York Times articles questioned his fitness and credentials for a Covid-19 adviser’s role. The Post pointed out that Dr. Atlas—a former professor of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center—“does not have a background in infectious diseases or epidemiology.” The Times sniffed that he is “neither an epidemiologist nor an infectious disease expert, the two jobs usually associated with pandemic response.”
On the day we speak, Dr. Atlas, 65, discovers that his Wikipedia page has been edited to reflect this alleged vocational failing. “Although Atlas is not an expert in public health or infectious diseases,” the crowdsourced encyclopedia now says, “he was selected by President Donald Trump to serve as an advisor on the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Do you know anyone who is an editor at Wikipedia?” he asks. “They keep distorting what I have said. Honest people need to fight back against intentional distortion.” A proud and feisty man, Dr. Atlas is the first person in his family to go to college. His father was a barber and traveling salesman in Chicago, his mother a secretary. He doesn’t take kindly to being trashed in the national media. “It’s pretty obvious that objective journalism is dead in the country,” he bristles. “These are intentional attempts to delegitimize me. I think everybody knows that as soon as you get a White House badge there are forces out to try to destroy you. But I’m very comfortable with my CV.”
Dr. Atlas describes himself as the author of “more than 100 peer-reviewed papers.” as well as of “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine,” which he calls “one of the, if not the, leading books in MRI.” Since 2012 he’s focused almost exclusively on health-care policy as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
Dr. Atlas regards his critics’ focus on his apparent lack of expertise as “comical” and says they have “no idea what they’re talking about.” He notes that he is one of many members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on which “there are other people with backgrounds in epidemiology and public health and virology.” His own strengths include “a long history at the highest levels in academic medicine at the best institutions” as well as a “unique combination” of expertise in medical science and data. “I’m not here to be a virologist,” he says. “I’m not here to be a public-health official. I’m here to advise on health-care policy in a very complicated health-care crisis, the biggest crisis in a century.”
Dr. Atlas is particularly incensed about the newspapers’ claims that he is pushing for a policy of herd immunity, a phrase both newspapers deploy in scare quotes. “They’ve published an overt lie,” he says. “I have never said that to the president. I have never said it to the vice president. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s not a distortion, it’s just, frankly, a lie to say that I’ve done that.”
Herd immunity is “a phenomenon,” he says. “If you don’t understand that, that’s OK, but you’re not fit to be speaking about it.” He offers a quick and indignant tutorial on the subject: “It’s a known immunological phenomenon whereby enough people in a population have immunity to an infection, and so, by virtue of that, you break the chain of contagiousness toward the vulnerable.” Herd immunity—or “population immunity,” as he also calls it—is “the basis for giving widespread immunization. If you don’t believe in herd immunity, you don’t believe in why immunizations are given.”
All this, Dr. Atlas says, is “widely known and accepted by anyone who understands anything about infectious disease or immunology.” But he insists there is no advocacy on his part. “What they’re trying to say,” he says of the hostile reporters, “is that I’m advocating throwing the barn doors open—just let everyone get infected, and whoever dies, dies. This is a preposterous lie.”
Dr. Atlas says that “population immunity probably exists” in New York City. “I said this back in March or April to my wife,” he recalls. “I said the irony is that New York is going to be the first place to be safe because so many people have had the infection that it took a massive toll.” Herd immunity is “highly likely” to be why New York has relatively few new cases, “even though thousands of people have been out protesting intermittently, no distancing or anything.”
None of this, he says, “should either be controversial, or a surprise to any critical-thinking medical scientist.” He notes that this is “very different from advocating herd immunity. I’m observing that it happens, and that’s just not controversial.”
So what is the Trump administration’s policy? “The policy is what the president has said,” he answers. “We know who to protect, so first and foremost let’s protect the vulnerable people.” And while this is “very challenging,” he says the U.S. is “doing much better than Europe.” By his own calculations, the U.S. has had 38% fewer “excess mortality deaths”—fatalities over and above those that would have occurred in a non-pandemic year—for people over 65 than Europe. (The data include most of the European Union plus Norway, Switzerland, and the U.K.)
Other key aspects of the administration’s Covid policy include “making sure we don’t have hospital overcrowding”—the whole point of flattening the curve—and safely reopening schools, businesses and social activity. This last question is the one on which Dr. Atlas caught Mr. Trump’s eye. As a commentator on Fox News Channel, he’s long made an impassioned case for loosening restrictions on schools and businesses. “The harms of prolonging the lockdown are enormous.” (Dr. Atlas has written for these pages on health care periodically, including on Covid this year.)
Dr. Atlas strongly favors reopening classrooms: “Children are very low-risk. They have virtually zero risk of dying, and a very, very low risk of any serious illness from this disease. We know that. But we also know that there are enormous harms to not opening up schools to children. And yet this isn’t somehow part of the discussion.” He runs through a jarring list of such harm caused by distance learning, including, by one estimate, a 30% drop in reading ability and a 50% decline in math skills. Children need socializing, too: “They don’t go to school just to learn what’s in a book.” They learn “maturation, conflict resolution, physical fitness.” Schools are where a lot of kids get fed properly. “We can’t,” he says, “be the only country in the Western world that is willing to sacrifice our children out of our own fear.”
Higher education should reopen too, he says. Keeping campuses shut is “destroying people’s lives, destroying people’s futures, and destroying the communities around the universities.” And that’s not the worst of it. He says data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 40.9% of American adults have reported struggling with mental health or substance abuse during the pandemic. A startling 25.5% of 18- to 24-year-olds have contemplated suicide during the lockdown—precisely the cohort “that’s being denied access to college campuses.”
Add restrictions on medical facilities and the effects of patients’ fearing to seek care, and the health toll is apparent across the demographic range. Nearly 80% of patients in active treatment for cancer have reported delays in care. Diagnostic cancer screenings have fallen to a third of pre-Covid levels nationally. Half of all kids didn’t get immunizations, “setting up the potential of a massive future health disaster,” he says. “Did you know that almost 40% of acute stroke patients just didn’t call the ambulance? We have to look at the impact of the pandemic, and the impact of societal lockdowns. It would be reckless to do otherwise.”
As for Covid-19 itself, Dr. Atlas is upbeat. “We’re doing a lot better with this,” he says. “The length of stays in hospitals are a third of what they were in the peak” in the spring. “I think most of the damage, honestly, has been done.” He’s optimistic about a vaccine—“there’s a lot of incredible speed in its development”—and anticipates “roughly a hundred million doses are going to be available toward the end of the year.” We are, he thinks, “on the road to getting rid of this threat.” He rejects confident predictions of a “second wave”: “That’s just conjecture. Not every virus has a second wave.” And he says: “The talk of anybody saying we’d better do another societal lockdown is completely anti-data.”
He acknowledges that “people still need to do everything they can to protect their elderly family members, their elderly friends, people they work with. But we’re in a different level of shape here. People understand how to protect people now.”
Fear, he adds, is “a very potent weapon,” and the lockdown proves it. “Whoever thought that the government had the power to just confine you to your home, shut down schools, and shut down every business? And then, whoever thought that people would say OK to that?”
Mr. Varadarajan is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
I warned recently that the events of 2020 were killing political moderation in America by bankrupting millions of small business owners, the hardy yeomen entrepreneurs who have so long formed the solid center of American politics.
A new study from Baylor’s b-school — tellingly one begun well before the current pandemic — suggests that the policy response to COVID-19 may kill America’s long tradition of entrepreneurship too. That is not as far-fetched as it sounds. It has happened before, in many countries.
What authors Daniel Bennett and Boris Nikolaev show in “Historical Disease Prevalence, Cultural Value, and Global Innovation” (Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2020) is that peoples who suffered from higher levels of disease pathogens, especially the nine nasties (dengue, filariae, leishmania, leprosy, malaria, schistosomes, trypanosomes, tuberculosis, typhus — and, yes, they are all real, and real bad), became more collectivist and xenophobic and less likely to interact with members of other groups.
Less interaction meant less trade, which meant a smaller Smithian extent of the market, which meant a less well-developed division of labor, which meant lower per capita output, which meant more susceptibility to pathogens. Living in a germy place did not necessarily spring a steel trap of impoverished economic inertia, but it certainly did not help to create a vibrant entrepreneurial environment.
Jared Diamond also highlighted the power of pathogens in his epic Guns, Germs, Steel and various development economists have been pointing to the negative effects of malaria for decades. They clearly have a point: if a disease changes the genome, as malaria does by creating selective pressures in favor of debilitating sickle-cell anemia, or wipes out a culture, society, and economy, as occurred in the New World after the arrival of European diseases, it clearly delivers a negative economic shock. What the Baylor boys show is that those shocks can reverberate for centuries.
Granted, their study looks at seriously deadly pathogens. But the mere fear of disease can be just as powerful by increasing neophobia, or fear of novelty, and nepotism, or bias in favor of family and friends. Instead of individual freedom, people in high fear environments favor conformity and authority, traits not conducive to innovation or entrepreneurship. Or, I would add, to modern democracy.
As a global pandemic, COVID-19 by definition raised everyone’s PSTV (Parasite Stress Theory of Values) by a little bit. But the overreaction to the pandemic by much of the media and most governments is a far bigger threat to entrepreneurship than the virus itself. For months, people have been bombarded with bad news, seemingly always on the heels of every little hopeful sign. Much of the world’s population is literally cowering at home afraid to go to church, school, or work, the very places that provide humans the most distractions, if not outright joy.
Innovation, except for COVID-related stuff, is now at a low ebb and may never rebound if the crisis lasts long enough to change cultural values. Or, in a generation we may see less innovation because the crisis has turned our young people into collectivists, more concerned about “staying safe” than “taking risks.”
The irony is that innovation could have saved us all from the bulk of the economic costs and deaths from, and with, COVID-19. With rational discussion instead of top-down direction from the CDC, NIH, WHO, etc., we could have ascertained even before the virus hit our shores that a voluntary live vaccine would provide sufficient herd immunity. Live vaccines are easy to make as they are just a small dose of the real thing. It would have been far safer than the DIY alternatives, like partying hardy, that many young people eventually opted for anyway.
Unfortunately, though, the strength of property rights has been eroding for generations in the face of government mandates and have sunk even lower of late, especially in large cities that privilege the right of assembly over property protections. That dip also does not bode well for the future of innovation in America because the Baylor authors also show that “property rights institutions are a strong positive predictor of national innovation” levels, a finding well known to those who study the strong connection between economic freedom scores and innovation.
It is possible that we will get through this, as politicians assert ad nauseum, as if it wasn’t a cliched non sequitur. Yes, America has seen worse times than this and what not. But most of the current batch of Americans hasn’t seen worse than this and no group of Americans since the New Deal has had to look into the faces of politicians who implemented colossally bad policies and then doubled down on them, extolling their obvious failures as successes.
This is not the America of Valley Forge or D-Day, it is the America of Pickett’s Charge, where people die needlessly without any hope of “victory” because their reputed superiors told them it was the only way. It is the America where farmers destroyed food while other Americans went hungry. It is the America that purports to help the downtrodden and poor while grinding their faces, this time behind essential job classifications and mandatory masks.
America’s saving grace may be that most of the rest of the world, even Anglosphere countries like Australia and New Zealand, screwed up even worse. But the biggest threat was never a mass exodus of entrepreneurs, it was the loss of entrepreneurship itself.
Robert E. Wright is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s Financial Exclusion (2019).
This is a story about when big innovations happen.Not how, but when. And to some extent, why.Hopefully you find it counterintuitive at first before it quickly seems obvious. That’s how most important ideas work.And hopefully you’ll see why 2020, for all the hell its brought, could be the new beginnings of something promising.Cars and airplanes are two of the biggest innovations of modern times.
But there’s an interesting thing about their early years.
Few looked at early cars and said, “Oh, there’s a thing I can commute to work in.”
Few saw a plane and said, “Ah-ha, I can use that to get to my next vacation.”
What they did say early on was, “Can we mount a machine gun on that? Can we drop bombs out of it?”
Every new invention looks like a toy at first. Adolphus Greely was one of the first people outside the car industry to realize the “horseless carriage” could be useful.
Greely, a brigadier general, purchased three cars in 1899 – almost a decade before Ford’s Model T – for the U.S. Army to experiment with. In one of its first mentions of automobiles, The Los Angeles Times wrote about General Greely’s purchase:
It can be used for the transportation of light artillery such as machine guns. It can be utilized for the carrying of equipment, ammunition and supplies; for taking the wounded to the rear, and, in general, for most of the purposes to which the power of mules and horses is now applied.
Nine years later, the LA Times did an interview with young brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, who talked about the prospects of their new flying machine:
The Wrights had reason to believe this was true. Their only real customer in their early years – the only group to show interest in airplanes – was the U.S. Army, which purchased the first “flyer” in 1908.
The Army’s early interest in cars and planes wasn’t a fluke of lucky foresight. Go down the list of big innovations, and militaries show up repeatedly.
Radar.
Atomic energy.
The internet.
Microprocessors.
Jets.
Rockets.
Antibiotics.
Interstate highways.
Helicopters.
GPS.
Digital photography.
Microwave ovens.
Synthetic rubber.
They all either came directly from, or were heavily influenced by, the military.
Why?
Are militaries home to the greatest technical visionaries? The most talented engineers?
Perhaps.
But more importantly they’re home to Really Big Problems That Need to Be Solved Right Now.
Innovation is driven by incentives. And incentives come in many forms.
On one hand there’s, “If I don’t figure this out I might get fired.” That will get your brain in gear.
Then there’s, “If I figure this out I might help people and make a lot of money.” That will produce creative sparks.
Then there’s what militaries have dealt with: “If we don’t figure this out right now we’re all going to die and the world will be taken over by Adolf Hitler.” That will fuel the most incredible problem-solving and innovation in the shortest period of time that the world has ever seen.
The 1955 book The Big Change describes the burst of scientific progress that took place during World War II:
What the government, through its Office of Scientific Research and Development and other agencies, was constantly saying during the war was, in effect: “Is this discovery or that one of any possible war value? If so, then develop it and put it to use, and damn the expense!”
The result has been likened to a team of experts combing through a deskful of scientific papers, pulling out those which gave promise of usefulness, and then commandeering all the talent and appropriating all the money that might be needed to translate formulae into goods.
Militaries are engines of innovation because they occasionally deal with problems so important – so urgent, so vital – that money and manpower are removed as obstacles, and those involved collaborate in ways that are hard to emulate during calm times.
You cannot compare the incentives of Mountain View coders trying to get you to click on ads to Manhattan Project physicists trying to end a war that threatened the country’s existence. You can’t even compare their capabilities. The same people with the same intelligence have wildly different potential under different circumstances.
Militaries are an extreme example of panic-induced innovation.
A broader point that applies to everyone is that the biggest innovations rarely occur when everyone’s happy and safe, or when the future looks bright. They happen when people are a little panicked, worried, and when the consequences of not acting quickly are too painful to bear.
That’s when the magic happens.
The 1930s were a disaster.
Almost a quarter of Americans were out of work in 1932. The stock market fell 89%.
Those two economic stories dominate the decade’s attention, and they should.
But there’s another story about the 1930s that rarely gets mentioned: It was, by far, the productive and technologically progressive decade in history.
The number of problems people solved, and the ways they discovered how to build stuff more efficiently, is a forgotten story of the ‘30s that helps explain a lot of why the rest of the 20th century was so prosperous.
Here are the numbers: Measuring total factor productivity – that’s economic output relative to the number of hours people worked and the amount of money invested in the economy – hit levels not seen before or since:
Economist Alex Field writes:
In 1941, the U.S. economy produced almost 40 percent more output than it had in 1929, with virtually no increase in labor hours or private-sector capital input. Almost all of the increase in output per hour is attributable to technological and organizational advance [of the 1930s].
A couple of things happened during this period that are worth paying attention to, because they explain why this happened when it did.
The New Deal’s goal was to keep people employed at any cost. But it did a few things that, perhaps unforeseen, become long-term economic fuels.
Take cars. The 1920s were the era of the automobile. The number of cars on the road in America jumped from one million in 1912 to 29 million by 1929.
But roads were a different story. Cars were sold in the 1920s faster than roads were built. A new car’s novelty was amazing, but its usefulness was limited.
That changed in the 1930s when road construction, driven by the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, took off.
Spending on road construction went from 2% of GDP in 1920 to over 6% in 1933 (vs. less than 1% today). The Department of Highway Transportation tells a story of how quickly projects began:
Construction began on August 5, 1933, in Utah on the first highway project under the act. By August 1934, 16,330 miles of new roadway projects were completed.
Historian Robert Grodon writes:
The 1930s witnessed the construction of multilane engineering marvels, including the George Washington, Golden Gate, and Bay Bridges, as well as the beginning of multilane limited-access turnpikes, including the Merritt Parkway in southern Connecticut and the first section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. These anticipated, and in some cases became part of, the postwar Interstate Highway System. As of 1940, a map of the principal routes of the U.S. highway system looks virtually identical to a map of today’s Interstate Highway System, except that most of the roads were two-lane with intersections rather than featuring limited access.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike, as one example, cut travel times between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg by 70%. The Golden Gate Bridge opened up Marin County, which has previously been accessible from San Francisco by ferry boat.
Multiply those kinds of leaps across the nation and 1930s was the decade that transportation truly blossomed in the United States. It was the last link that made the century-old railroad network truly efficient, creating last-mile service that connected the world. A huge economic boon.
Electrification also surged in the 1930s, particularly to rural Americans left out of the urban electrification of the 1920s. The New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration brought power to farms in what may have been the decade’s only positive development in regions that were economically devastated. The number of rural American homes with electricity rose from less than 10% in 1935 to nearly 50% by 1945.
It is hard to fathom, but it was not long ago – during some of our lifetimes and most of our grandparents’ – that a substantial portion of America was literally dark. Franklin Roosevelt said during a speech on the REA:
Electricity is no longer a luxury. It is a definite necessity. It lights our homes, our places of work and our streets. It turns the wheels of most of our transportation and our factories. In our homes it serves not only for light, but it can become the willing servant of the family in countless ways. It can relieve the drudgery of the housewife and lift the great burden off the shoulders of the hardworking farmer.
I say “can become” because we are most certainly backward in the use of electricity in our American homes and on our farms. In Canada the average home uses twice as much electric power per family as we do in the United States.
Electricity becoming a “willing servant,” – introducing washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators – freed up hours of household labor in a way that let female workforce participation rise. It’s a trend that lasted more than half a century and is a key driver of both 20th century growth and gender equality.
A second productivity surge of the 1930s came from everyday people forced by necessity to find more bang for their buck.
The first supermarket opened in 1930. The traditional way of purchasing food was to walk from your butcher, who served you from behind a counter, to the bakery, who served you from behind a counter, to a produce stand, who took your order. Combining everything under one roof and making customers pick it from the shelves themselves was a way to make the economics of selling food work during a time when a quarter of the nation was unemployed.
Laundrymats were also invented in the 1930s after sales of individual washing machines fell – they marketed themselves as washing machine rentals.
Factories of all kinds looked at bludgeoned sales and said, “What must we do to survive?” The answer was often to build the kind of assembly line Henry Ford introduced to the world in the previous decade.
Output per hour in factories had grown 21% during the 1920s. “During the Depression decade of 1930-1940 – when many plants were shut down or working part time” historian Frederick Lewis Allen writes, “there was intense pressure for efficiency and economy – it had increased by an amazing 41 per cent.”
He wrote again in 1943:
Anybody can understand the basic principle of a fork truck. But the layman can only stand in awe before some of the complex electronic machines which came into use after 1935 – machines for measuring materials with microscopic exactitude, or for watching the performance of a machine and automatically correcting flaws in its performance. The language used by engineers in talking about them is quite unintelligible to him, as are the processes involved. But at least he can appreciate the miraculous results they achieve.
Something as simple as quality control sampling massively reduced manufacturing waste and became common in the 1930s. Lewis Allen again:
The workman can thereupon regulate the adjustment of his machine, not by guesswork, but with exact knowledge of just how it is functioning. This [process] – which in many a factory has saved large amounts of money by reducing the number of defective products – has the effect of raising the status of the workman by making him in a special sense his own boss, the informed critic and judge of his performance.
This story was repeated across industries. Productivity growth in the 1930s was not constrained to a few fields, like it was in the 1920s when manufacturing accounted for nearly all the gains. The ‘30s saw huge technical progress in utilities, farming, wholesale trade, retail, transportation, mining, and communication.
“The trauma of the Great Depression did not slow down the American invention machine,” Alex Field writes. “If anything, the pace of innovation picked up.”
Economist David Henderson writes:
“Topping” techniques in electricity generation — using exhaust steam from high-pressure boilers to heat lower-pressure boilers — raised capacity by 40 to 90 percent with virtually no increase in the cost of fuel or labor.
New treatments increased the life of railroad ties “from eight to twenty years.”
With new paints, the time for paint to dry on cars fell from three weeks (!) to a few hours.
[Total research and development] employment in 1940 was 27,777, up from 10,918 in 1933.
Driving knowledge work in the ‘30s was the fact that more young people stayed in school because they had nothing else to do. High school graduation surged during the depression to levels not seen again until the 1960s, according to Field. One student recalled:
High schools had a larger attendance than ever before, especially in the upper grades, because there were few jobs to tempt anyone away. Likewise college graduates who could afford to go on to graduate school were continuing their studies – after a hopeless hunt for jobs – rather than be idle.
All of this – the better factories, the new ideas, the educated workers – became vital in 1941 when America entered the war and became the Allied manufacturing engine.
The big question is whether the big technical leap of the 1930s could have happened without the devastation of the depression. And I think the answer is “no” – at least not to the extent that it occurred.
You could never push through something like the New Deal without an economy so wrecked that people were desperate to try anything to fix it.
It’s doubtful that business owners and entrepreneurs would have so urgently found new efficiencies without the record threat of business failure.
Managers looking at their employees and saying, “Go try something new. Blow Up the playbook, I don’t care,” is not something that gets said when the economy is booming and the outlook is bright.
Big, fast, changes only happen when they’re forced by necessity.
World War II began on horseback in 1939 and ended with nuclear fission in 1945. NASA was created in 1958 two weeks after the Soviets launched Sputnik and landed on the moon just 11 years later. Stuff like that rarely happens that fast without fear as a motivator.
It reminds me of this:
HOBBES: Do you have an idea for your story yet?
CALVIN: You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
HOBBES: What mood would that be?
CALVIN: Last-minute panic.
There’s an obvious limit to stress-induced innovation.
There’s a delicate balance between the economy being thrown upside down, everyone inside it driven into action by necessary panic, while the foundations of the economy itself remain intact, capable of supporting the new ideas and innovations.
My guess is that balance has only happened a few times in modern history.
One was the period from 1930 to 1945. Parts of the Cold War might qualify, though it was concentrated in a few defense sectors.
Then there’s 2020.
The hardest thing about stress-induced innovation is reconciling that positive long-term trends can be born when people are suffering the most. It makes the topic difficult to even discuss without looking insensitive.
But think of what’s happening in biotech right now. Many have pessimistically noted that the fastest a vaccine has ever been created is four years. But we’ve also never had a new virus genome sequenced and published online within days of discovering it, like we did with Covid-19. We’ve never built seven vaccine manufacturing plants when we know six of them won’t be needed, because we want to make sure one of them can be operational as soon as possible for whatever kind of vaccine we happen to discover. We’ve never had so many biotech companies drop everything to find a solution to one virus. It’s as close to a Manhattan Project as we’ve seen since the 1940s.
And what could come from that besides a Covid vaccine?
New medical discoveries? New manufacturing and distribution methods? Newfound respect for science and medicine?
So many important discoveries happen by accident when frantic experimentation uncovers an unrelated quirk of science. In his book How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson writes:
Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict … An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
This is happening in medicine right now. It’s happening with doctors in hospitals and scientists in labs. It’s impossible to know what it will lead to. But there’s currently so much experimentation, with stakes so high, that you know we’re going to look back in 10 or 20 years at the important discoveries that wouldn’t have been possible without Covid-19. That’s always how it’s worked.
Or think about cities.
I don’t think San Francisco or New York are dead – that’s absurd. But it doesn’t take many companies letting their employees work remotely to take the pressure off one of the biggest social problems of the last generation: affordable housing.
Having so much of the economy’s economic potential clustered in a few cities – a few neighborhoods, really – created $2 million starter homes in cities with good jobs and cheap homes in cities with little economic growth. Even a slight shift to permanent remote work could make cities more livable and rural areas more prosperous.
Or colleges. Student loans are another major social issue of the last generation. Without Covid the college industry would have likely corrected in the coming decades. With Covid it’s correcting in the coming weeks.
When schools say, “Pay full tuition and we’ll teach you over Zoom,” and students and parents say, “Wait, there’s no way that’s worth it,” you realize – quickly, in stark terms – that you’re not paying for an education. You’re paying for a credential and a social experience, which doesn’t need to cost $68,000 a year.
There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.
It’s not crazy to say that could be the most important developments of the next generation, because student loans have been one of the biggest burdens of the past generation.
On the tech front, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said “two years of digital transformation took place in two months,” this spring.
What does that lead to?
Almost every business in the world is now asking how they can work more efficiently, save a few bucks here and here, and do more of their business online.
What does that lead to?
Tens of millions of people who lost their jobs, and hundreds of millions of people who kept theirs but worried, will be permanently scarred into thinking about risk, opportunity, and safety nets differently than they were six months ago.
What does that lead to?
I don’t think anyone knows the answers.
All we know is that the most important changes of the last 100 years have taken place during upheavals. And we’re currently in the biggest upheaval of the last 100 years.
We know that creativity and discovery surge when people are forced to find, rather than just want, new solutions.
We know that an irony of technology is that economies often make their greatest leaps forward when the outlook is bleakest.
It might be one of the only silver linings of 2020.
In October, 1933 an Ohio lawyer named Benjamin Roth wrote a diary entry about the economic carnage devastating his town. A quarter of the town was unemployed. Farms were bankrupt. Surviving businesses used new efficiencies to get by with fewer workers, exacerbating unemployment.
Roth tried to remain optimistic.
“I am confident that new inventions and scientific discoveries will remedy this situation,” he wrote.
At nearly the same time he was writing an electrical engineer named Edwin Armstrong introduced a new radio technology to David Sarnoff, an RCA executive struggling to hold together an industry smashed by the Depression.
Sarnoff later recalled the conversation, as told in the book Man of High Fidelity:
“Why are you pushing this so hard?” asked Sarnoff.
“There is a depression on,” said Armstrong. “The radio industry needs something to put life in it. I think this is it.”
The technology – FM radio – transformed 20th century communication.
Is this article ‘fake news?’ No, because the statement in the title that reads “we have a lot of evidence that it’s a fake story all over the world” is an actual quote from a representative of the group discussed in the article. The statement was said. Whether or not what the quote says is true, on the other hand, is up for you to decide or according to multiple governments, is up for the World Health Organization (WHO) to decide. Is the title misleading or inaccurate? No, again, it’s a direct quote and represents the opinion of multiple health professionals. Are these health professionals implying that COVID-19 is a fake virus? No, they are simply implying that it’s not as dangerous as it’s being made out to be., and I summarize some of that information below that has them coming to that conclusion.
These doctors and scientists are being heavily censored across all social media platforms, and those who write about them are experiencing the same. Many of the claims these doctors make have been ‘debunked’ by mainstream media, federal health regulatory agencies and ‘fact-checkers’ that are patrolling the internet. Any information that does not come from the (WHO) is not considered reliable, truthful or accurate, and that would include the information presented in this article and information shared by these experts in the field. People are being encouraged to visit the WHO’s website for real and accurate information about COVID-19 instead of listening to doctors and scientists who oppose the narrative of these health authorities.
What Happened: More than 500 German doctors & scientists have signed on as representatives of an organization called “Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss.” Außerparlamentarischer Corona Untersuchungsausschuss stands for the “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee and was established to investigate all things that pertain to the new coronavirus such as the severity of the virus, and whether or not the actions taken by governments around the world, and in this case, the German government, are justified and not causing more harm than good.
As the Corona-Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee, we will investigate why these restrictive measures were imposed upon us in our country as part of COVID-19, why people are suffering now and whether there is proportionality of the measures to this disease caused by the SARS-COV-2 virus. We have serious doubts that these measures are proportionate. This needs to be examined, and since the parliaments – neither the opposition parties nor the ruling parties – have not convened a committee and it is not even planned, it is high time that we took this into our own hands. We will invite and hear experts here in the Corona speaker group. These are experts from all areas of life: Medicine, social affairs, law, economics and many more. (source)
You can access the full English transcripts on the organization’s website if interested.
This group has been giving multiple conferences in Germany, in one of the most recent, Dr. Heiko Schöning, one of the organization’s leaders, stated that “We have a lot of evidence that it (the new coronavirus) is a fake story all over the world.” To put it in context, he wasn’t referring to the virus being fake, but simply that it’s no more dangerous than the seasonal flu (or just as dangerous) and that there is no justification for the measures being taken to combat it.
I also think it’s important to mention that a report published in the British Medical Journal has suggested that quarantine measures in the United Kingdom as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the peak of the virus.
Why This Is Important: It can be confusing for many people to see so many doctors and many of the world’s most renowned scientists and infectious disease experts oppose so much information that is coming from the WHO and global governments.
Many scientists and doctors in North America are also expressing the same sentiments. For example, The Physicians For Informed Consent (PIC) recently published a report titled “Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) Compares COVID-19 to Previous Seasonal and Pandemic Flu Periods.” According to them, the infection/fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.26%. You can read more about that and access their resources and reasoning here.
John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University has said that the infection fatality rate “is close to 0 percent” for people under the age of 45 years old. You can read more about that here. He and several other academics from the Stanford School of Medicine suggest that COVID-19 has a similar infection fatality rate as seasonal influenza, and published their reasoning in a study last month. You can find that study and read more about that story here.
Michael Levitt, a Biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University criticized the WHO as well as Facebook for censoring different information and informed perspectives regarding the Coronavirus and has claimed that, with regards to lockdown measures, that “the level of stupidity going on here is amazing.” You can read more about this here.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a specialist in microbiology and one of the most cited research scientists in German history is also part of Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee mentioned above and has also expressed the same thing, multiple times early on in the pandemic all the way up to today.
Implementation of the current draconian measures that are so extremely restrict fundamental rights can only be justified if there is reason to fear that a truly, exceptionally dangerous virus is threatening us. Do any scientifically sound data exist to support this contention for COVID-19? I assert that the answer is simply, no. – Bhakdi. You can read more about him here.
Below are some interesting statistics from Canada. (source)
The Takeaway
We have to ask ourselves, why are so many experts in the field being completely censored. Why is there so much information being shared that completely contradicts the narrative of our federal health regulatory agencies and organizations like the WHO? Why are these experts being heavily censored, and why are alternative media platforms being censored, punished and demonetized for sharing such information? Is there a battle for our perception happening right now? Is our consciousness being manipulated? Why is there so much conflicting information if everything is crystal clear? Why are alternative treatments that have shown tremendous amounts of success being completely ignored and ridiculed? What’s going on here, and how much power do governments have when they are able to silence the voice of so many people? Should we not be examining information openly, transparently, and together?
