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A Pandemic Is No Time to Disparage Freedom
Jeff Tucker’s “In a Disease Panic, the Free Market Is Your Friend” ought to be atop everyone’s reading list. As libertarians well know, people who are under the delusion that government is a creative element in society, rather than a predator, will never let a good crisis go to waste. (Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, put it just that way.) The historian and economist Robert Higgs has documented the history of exploitation of crises to expand power and consume liberty in America in his classic, Crisis and Leviathan. We can see this process on vivid display with the outbreak of the coronavirus, or COVID-19.
What propels the expansion-through-crisis process is the belief that only government can respond effectively to the crisis. Most people, busy with their lives, don’t know enough about economics and politics to see the flaw in the statist’s case. By and large, and through no real fault of their own, they operate at a primitive level intellectually. Plus they take for granted what they’ve enjoyed all their lives: the increasingly accessible abundance of necessities and luxuries, which even a couple of generations ago would have made people green with envy. That is all the result of the fact that, despite all the obstacles, government has not managed to abolish markets, the price system, and entrepreneurship.
Enter Jeff Tucker’s article:
The truth is that the market loves you right now, more in the midst of a disease panic than ever before. It would love you even more if companies were not being browbeat by government into curbing sales of essential items. Let the prices of sanitizer and masks rise and you draw more into production and distribution. Throttle the market and you reduce supply.
The market would have loved you more had the Centers for Disease Control not failed to authorize private companies to test for the virus. It was only after the aggressive protests of the governor of New York that the CDC gave in and let people do what they wanted to do….
In a disease panic, we are learning, people lose their minds and stop thinking clearly about things that matter. They also reach out to authority to save them. All of this is expected. And it’s very sad. Even sadder is how the unscrupulous power mongers among us use such times to enhance the power of the state over our lives and claim it is for our own good.
Libertarians need to speak up — now more than ever.
This Is Your Security Force
Well how do you like that?
The New York Times:
Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time.
In late January, the first confirmed American case of the coronavirus had landed in her area. Critical questions needed answers: Had the man infected anyone else? Was the deadly virus already lurking in other communities and spreading?
As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.
To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.
By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.
What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.
“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”
In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days.
Federal and state officials said the flu study could not be repurposed because it did not have explicit permission from research subjects; the labs were also not certified for clinical work. While acknowledging the ethical questions, Dr. Chu and others argued there should be more flexibility in an emergency during which so many lives could be lost. On Monday night, state regulators told them to stop testing altogether.
The failure to tap into the flu study, detailed here for the first time, was just one in a series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing during the early days of the outbreak, when containment would have been easier. Instead, local officials across the country were left to work blindly as the crisis grew undetected and exponentially.
The Good News
The WSJ says that China and South Korea seem to have already peaked in their Corona virus outbreaks. It seems it never did break out in Shanghai. But apparently only due to totalitarian travel restrictions and Orwellian surveillance.
Update: Oh shit. The bad news: “The disease caused by the novel coronavirus has turned up among residents or workers in at least 11 elder-care facilities in the Seattle area, and at least three have reported fatalities among residents, local health authorities said Tuesday.”
More Lies About Russia From the CIA-New York Times
Russia is the reason that American neo-Nazis are neo-Nazis!
Also: Russia is the reason for black radical groups too!
Actual specific accusations and evidence forthcoming, we are told.
“they gave few details” “are examining ” “they did not detail how”
I know what your thinking: “What a bunch of stupid garbage.” But wait! This part really clinches it at the end:
Russia Today, the television station controlled by the Kremlin, has fanned division on both sides. Last week, RT ran a story about a video of New York police arresting a black man that sparked outrage. The organization has also posted tweets aimed at stirring white animosity, publishing an article in January accusing The New York Times of hating white people and criticizing Hank Azaria for quitting as the voice of Apu on “The Simpsons” because of its stereotyping of South Asians.
Uncle Joe Biden Is Really Losing It
He threatens to slap this voter for saying he’s against the second amendment. Don’t worry, he only wants to take away your 100 round AR-14 magazines, so it’s cool.
The Kiss of Death
Year Zero 101: A Direct Republic with Donnie Gebert
Donnie Gebert of the Direct Republic podcast and author of The Null Hypothesis of Politics joined Tommy for episode 101. Donnie’s idea of a Direct Republic, decentralization down to the individual, was thought up within a mind trained and educated by the DOD to topple governments through peaceful revolution. When Donnie realized the enemy was domestic and not abroad he put his education to work at home.
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