“Dow closes at record high after blow-out jobs report” proclaimed NBC News on Saturday. It is not surprising the story would ignore all historical perspective, even history within the past few months. Incumbent presidents routinely take credit for job creation during their administrations and the gullible American public largely believes them. Perceived as prospectively continuing the policies of the Biden administration, good news from the jobs report helps Kamala Harris’s election chances.
It isn’t just ignoring that only two months ago, the Bureau of Labor statistics revised downward their previously reported number April 2023 – March 2024 by over 800,000 jobs (around 27 percent)*. It’s the surreal practice of even talking about supposed job creation over the past four years as if most of it weren’t just recovering jobs lost during the 2020 Covid lockdowns.
During March and April of 2020, the BLS reported net job losses of almost 22 million. Of course, these were not the type of job losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis. These were people ordered to stay home by the government as part of a suite of responses to Covid that did nothing but harm.
As people were allowed to go back to work, there were several months for which the BLS reported millions of “jobs created.” But everyone understood these were mostly just people previously ordered to stay home returning to work. At least while Trump was still president.
But once Joe Biden was inaugurated, the national media started ignoring that reality and treating higher than usual jobs reports as vindication of “Bidenomics.” The truth is it took years just to recover the number of jobs lost during March-April 2020. The 22 million jobs reported lost during that period were not added back until September 2022.
That’s 31 straight months of zero jobs created on net while millions of undocumented mouths to feed entered the country. That is an economic blow the likes of which modern Americans have never experienced in their lifetimes. And the problems it created were by no means solved after September 2022 when the economy finally began adding new jobs on net. One cannot just start counting jobs created after September 2022 as “net jobs.” One also has to recognize the opportunity costs of the lockdowns.
No one has done more to secure free speech in the United States in the past several years than Elon Musk. By buying X, the social media platform formerly known as “Twitter,” Musk has provided a platform where content that would be banned or suppressed in virtually every other online space, including Twitter before Musk owned it, can be shared freely among subscribers. That alone is a great service to this country.
But both he and Tucker Carlson do Americans a disservice when they argue “free speech is essential to democracy.” It is not. Free speech is essential to individual liberty, not democracy.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects free speech from the democratically elected Congress. Implicit in its protection is the idea that democracy is a danger to liberty in general and free speech in particular. Indeed, the entire Bill of Rights, along with all the so-called “checks and balances” (bicameral legislature, presidential veto, etc.) are there to protect us from democracy.
Musk’s own tweet of Tim Walz’s comments about free speech should make this clear to Musk. Democracy is what made Walz the Governor of Minnesota and the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee. It obviously wouldn’t protect us from Walz’s implied suppression of free speech should he achieve federal office. The anti-democratic First Amendment would.
This has nothing to do with the technical distinction between “a democracy” and “a republic,” either. Imagine a system where the people democratically elected representatives and those representatives could do anything they wished as long as they executed the will of the majority. That would be a republic, and it would be every bit as dangerous to liberty as a pure democracy.
That seems to be the system both Elon and Tucker have in mind when they refer to “democracy” and the importance to it of free speech. But it is not the system created in either the U.S. Constitution or any of the state constitutions. In all of those, the will of the majority is limited and not by their republican form but by their limits to the power of the government, regardless of the wishes of the majority.
Former President Donald Trump has survived yet another assassination attempt less than two weeks after a judge postponed his sentencing on thirty-four felony convictions related to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For the moment, all obstacles to Trump standing for the November presidential election seemed to be cleared away.
Trump’s supporters are reeling from what they perceive as the unprecedented assault on America’s republican norms. That’s understandable given the relative stability of electoral politics in the decades before Trump came on the scene. However, those of us who grew up in the 1970s remember the assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan just a few years after the successful assassinations of both President John Kennedy and his brother.
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People of my generation considered being shot at a normal part of the job for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.
Nor are deep state machinations to remove a sitting president anything unprecedented. President Nixon was removed from office by a Naval intelligence officer posing as a reporter working with the number two man at the FBI. As with Trump, the media dutifully swayed the public against the popular president for reprisals that would be considered minor today, post-Snowden.
But many Americans believe something is fundamentally different about today’s Democratic Party establishment. Even some prominent Democrats see the party as breaking from its core values by repressing speech and undermining the democratic primaries to install Kamala Harris as its nominee.
Ironically, the truth is stranger than this fiction. The progressive movement has always been authoritarian, anti-democratic, and reactionary.
Since “save our democracy” is the call to arms (literally, for some of its deranged supporters) of today’s progressives, let us begin with progressivism being anti-democratic. Since the beginning of the movement, when it was led by Republicans, progressives have attempted to transfer power away from elected assemblies and to unelected bureaucrats or judges.
This began with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Although passed by Congress, it empowered an unelected board of commissioners to both set rates and conduct quasi-judicial proceedings to settle disputes. It set the precedent for Congress to unconstitutionally transfer both its own exclusive power to legislate and the judicial power to the executive.
The New Deal massively expanded on that precedent in creating myriad executive branch regulatory agencies that effectively usurped most legislative power from the elected Congress. This trend has metastasized ever since. Thus, when President Biden wanted to mandate Covid vaccines, he didn’t even bother to approach Congress. He went straight to a regulatory agency of unelected bureaucrats and directed it to write a new rule. No democracy needed.
Throughout the 20th century, progressives were fervent supporters of Supreme Court decisions that similarly usurped legislative power from the elected Congress. Where the Constitution clearly required an amendment for the federal government to exercise a new power, the unelected Supreme Court dutifully found that power hiding between the lines. This was just another way to avoid putting progressive ideas to a popular vote.
None of this is to say democracy is any guarantee of individual liberty. But it is preferable to the autocratic rule of an unelected oligarchy.
As far as being authoritarian, all political movements suffer from that defect, but the progressive movement particularly so. Apart from the obvious enormities of jailing journalists and political opponents during WWI and imprisoning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, progressivism is more fundamentally authoritarian in its modus operandi for achieving all its societal goals. Without exception, progressives seek to forcibly override the personal choices of individuals and replace them with regulations imposed by the state.
Where Thomas Jefferson famously defined liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” Woodrow Wilson took a perverse turn on the “unobstructed” idea. In The New Freedom, he answers the question, “What is liberty?” as follows:
“You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, “How free she runs,” when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons,” in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”
Where Jefferson saw government as the obstructor of liberty, Wilson saw it as the “adjuster” of human activity. This “adjustment,” of course, is regardless of the individual’s will or rights. Only by allowing the government to adjust your activities can you truly be free.
Monstrous.
That progressivism is reactionary would probably surprise Americans the most. But it is nonetheless true. Calling the movement “progressive” follows the proud American tradition of giving your party or movement a name opposite to its nature. The Federalists weren’t in favor of federalism; they were nationalists. The Anti-Federalists were in favor of federalism. The Whig Party were quite the opposite of the British party after which they were named. And progressivism isn’t about progress; it’s about returning to an earlier, illiberal past.
Equity markets continued to sell off on Monday prompting continued calls for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in September. Combined with the dismal jobs report on Friday, the selloff has also soured the outlook for a “soft landing.” Economist Mohamed El-Erian echoed the opinions of many others that the Fed held interest rates too high for too long, thus failing to prevent a recession and sharp stock market correction.
Putting aside the free market objections to the Fed being involved in manipulating interest rates – or existing at all – this analysis is useless at best for several reasons.
First, Fed rate cuts always come “too late” in the business cycle to prevent market crashes and recessions. Looking back at Fed open market operations history, one can see that even when the Fed had been cutting rates for over a year, as it had been prior to the 2008 crash, it did not prevent the bubble it had previously blown up from popping.
There are several reasons why the Fed will always be “too late.” The first is fundamental. While the Fed is holding interest rates artificially low, malinvestment is occurring. Capital is being directed towards projects that aren’t really profitable at market interest rates. These can include unwarranted expansion of otherwise profitable business ventures or capitalization of projects that shouldn’t be launched at all (see “Pets.com” from the 2000 dotcom crash).
At some point, the reality of unprofitable investments fueled by unsustainable debt asserts itself and those malinvestments must be undone. The market overcomes the efforts of the Fed and liquidates unprofitable ventures, unsustainable debt, and, unfortunately, millions of jobs that never should have been created in the first place. All of the above must be redirected towards better use, which takes time. That period of reallocation is called a recession.
It should be noted that even the Fed’s efforts to avoid recessions with monetary policy are wrongheaded. What it attempts to do with interest rate policy and monetary inflation is keep inefficient, unprofitable businesses alive. These are sometimes called “zombie companies” because they aren’t really viable going concerns. They are only able to keep operating because the Fed creates conditions under which they can borrow money at artificially low rates.
Regardless, economic laws are like forces of nature. They always win in the end, often immediately after supposed experts announce their demise. Recall Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s 2008 reassurance that “subprime is contained” or President Bill Clinton’s triumphant 2000 declaration that “we’ve ended the business cycle.”
This time around, Fed rate cuts may have even less chance of achieving the mythical “soft landing.” That’s because part of what used to be part and parcel of rate cuts has already been done, namely monetary inflation or as it is now euphemistically called, “quantitative easing.”
Prior to 2008, the Fed achieved rate cuts by purchasing government debt securities in open market operations. This simultaneously added new dollars to the economy and drove down interest rates. The latter was simply supply and demand. A greater supply of money meant its price – interest rates – declined. Conversely, when the Fed wanted to raise interest rates, it sold securities to its member banks, decreasing the supply of money.
Since the 2008 crisis, the Fed doesn’t manage interest rates that way anymore. Because its member banks built up huge deposits at the Fed, for which the Fed paid them interest, it could now manipulate interest rates by simply changing the rate it paid its member banks. This effectively separated interest rate policy from the creation of new dollars or the destruction of existing ones.
The Fed’s response to the 2008 crisis was twofold. It forced interest rates down to near-zero by lowering the rate it paid on deposits and added trillions of new dollars to the economy by purchasing government and mortgage-backed securities. It promised at the time to unwind the vast expansion of its balance sheet – from less than $1 trillion to over $4 trillion – when the “once in a lifetime crisis” was over.
But after unwinding only a small fraction of that increase 2018-19 coupled with modest interest rate increases, the Fed increased its balance sheet to just under $9 trillion and took interest rates back to the zero bound in 2020.
This is where it gets complicated. Conventional wisdom says the Fed began “tightening” in 2022 with the first in a series of interest rate increases in March and reduction of its balance sheet later in the year. Indeed, the Fed did eventually raise the federal funds rate to over 5% (where it remains today) and reduce its balance sheet from a peak of $8.9 trillion to about $7.2 trillion as of this writing.
However, the balance sheet reduction is not the tightening it appears to be. That is because even though the Fed has reduced its balance sheet and the M2 money supply has decreased slightly from its 2022 high, a “stealth easing” has been occurring that no one is really talking about.
Ten days ago, President Biden was adamant he would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and defeat “threat to democracy” Donald Trump. Trump was still promising to “drain the Swamp” in Washington, D.C., expurgating DEI and critical race theory from federal agencies, deporting illegal aliens who entered the country in record numbers during Biden’s administration, and end the Swamp’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
As of this morning, Biden is out of the race and out of sight and mind. The Democratic Party’s national media is already in high gear promoting Kamala Harris. And Trump, following an assassination attempt by yet another “lone gunman,” has been brought to heel.
The only thing unprecedented about Biden’s decision not to seek reelection is its timing. Lyndon Johnson similarly announced he would not seek reelection in 1968 – only one of many similarities between this year and that one – but he did it far earlier in the year. That gave the Democratic Party much more time to select and rally around a replacement candidate, albeit in an unsuccessful effort to hold onto the White House.
The change in Trump over the past ten days is much more striking, if unreported. It is understandable that Trump was shaken by the assassination attempt. That explains the lack of fire in his voice while delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention just a few days later. But what is of much greater significance was the content of the speech, not the style.
Trump said himself that he completely threw away the speech he intended to give at the RNC and now would deliver one centered around national unity. Since the acceptance speech, he has disavowed Project 2025 as a product of the “extreme right,” attempting to position himself as a moderate.
He may not have used that word, opting for “common sense” instead, but what else could it mean? If there is an extreme right that he says he is not a part of, then what else could he be but a moderate? Rumors that his campaign is already second guessing the selection of J.D. Vance as running mate due to the liability of his “extremist” positions only further confirms that Trump has been effectively neutered by the assassination attempt in terms of any threat he may have posed to the establishment.
Don’t forget that Trump’s ideological difference from the establishment was always greatly exaggerated. He never questioned the existence of a global standing army, just that it shouldn’t be used so often and for such insubstantial benefit. He promised “not to touch” Social Security and Medicare, which together with the military comprise about two thirds of federal spending.
He claimed to have cut regulations significantly during his first term but did not fundamentally threaten the New Deal regulatory bureaucracy in any way. Even years into his presidency, prior to the Covid pandemic, nothing much had changed. And in 2020, nothing changed for the better.
A Trump now positioning himself as even more moderate than the Trump of his first term is not going to get the job done. Project 2025 may be “extreme,” but extremism is just what is needed right now. There is nothing moderate about the left’s program. They swing for the fences during every at bat and have rarely struck out during the past several decades. If the juggernaut is going to be stopped it won’t be by a president seeking to “unite the country” and meet far left extremism with “common sense.”
Every newsworthy event prompts a narrative from imperial media and the Trump assassination attempt was no different. Rather than do what journalists purport to do, which is subject public officials to the blinding light of scrutiny, they immediately went into narrative mode. And the narrative chosen for this event was clear: free speech is dangerous.
There are various strains of this message. Some particularly TDS-affected propagandists have tried to blame Trump himself for the attack, saying it was his “extreme” political rhetoric that “raised the temperature” and somehow resulted in a 20-year-old malcontent deciding to shoot him.
Republicans dismiss this theory, of course, saying it has been the left’s nonstop demonization of Trump for the past eight years that drove the shooter to murder and drove thousands of more “mostly peaceful protestors” to loot, pillage, and occasionally assault or kill innocent people.
While the Republican version is more superficially plausible, it still rests upon the same assumption: that people using nothing more than words are somehow responsible for the immoral actions of others. This false premise cannot be allowed to stand.
Every individual is responsible for his own actions. Once you abdicate that position and place the responsibility for one person’s actions on another’s words, you no longer have a free society. You have agreed in principle that people in general cannot be allowed to be free; that there are some words or phrases they must not be allowed to hear. Thus, there are some words and phrases others may not be permitted to speak.
For all their talk about “democracy,” this has always been the fundamental premise of the progressives. They believe most people are incapable of self-government. They were much more explicit about it during the early Progressive Era when they were openly eugenicist. Today, those same instincts are simply clouded in euphemism and doublespeak.
They are all for “free speech” if it doesn’t threaten their rule. They are all for “democracy” as long as the right leaders are elected (here as well as abroad). Consider how absurd it is to suggest “democracy” must be saved from the candidate who gets the most votes. They say it and many still nod their head in agreement.
They don’t really believe the commoners are capable of managing a single aspect of their own lives. All must be “regulated” by the elite. And there is nothing more vital to regulate than what the commoners are allowed to hear, say, and think. This is why the media come on so strong and why people are deplatformed on the internet. Compelling the right thoughts is literally the entire basis of the establishment’s rule.
Enough people thinking the wrong thoughts could end it overnight.
Winds of uncertainty swirl inside the imperial beltway as prominent Democrats continue to call on President Biden to abandon his campaign for the presidency due to his now acknowledged cognitive issues. The Atlantic last week went so far as to call for Biden to resign as president, saying it would “give American democracy its best chance of surviving.”
The Democratic Party and the media (but I repeat myself) would have you believe Biden’s cognitive issues present America with two grave problems. One, that he is presently unable to fulfill his present duties as president; two, that he will be unable to defeat former President Donald Trump in November and “save democracy” from the candidate who could potentially get the most votes.
Trump supposedly presents a third problem, that being the “danger to democracy” he represents. This despite the fact that we’ve already lived through four years of Trump being president and “democracy,’ at least the way the empire defines it, is alive and well.
None of this is true. The first clue to its falsity is the media saying it. Since Trump first entered politics and at least since 2020, the national media has served as a perfect contraindicator for the truth and the narratives related to the 2024 election are no exception. Biden’s incompetence poses no danger to everyday Americans in the present. It will likely matter little for his chances to defeat Donald Trump in the November election, just as it mattered little in 2020.
And no, Donald Trump represents no danger to “democracy,” whatever the power elite actually means by that, nor to the republican form of government created by and guaranteed to every state in the union by the U.S. Constitution.
Make no mistake, Biden and Trump are a problem, but not for Americans. They are a problem for the empire. Ultimately, they represent the same problem for the empire, although it would have you believe otherwise.
To understand this, one must put aside civic fairy tales and acknowledge how the American political system really works. The fairy tale says the American system is “a democracy,” and the president is elected by a majority vote of the people and directs the federal apparatus according to the “will of the people.”
The Congress is also elected by a majority vote of the people in the states and districts therein and writes the laws the president executes and must abide in fulfilling his duties.
That is certainly what the Constitution says, but it is not how the American political system works. Nor has it worked that way for close to a century.
In reality, that system of government was replaced during what Garet Garrett called “The Revolution Was,” referring to the New Deal. The revolution consisted of Congress creating myriad federal agencies to “regulate” the economy and then delegating its legislative power to the unelected bureaucrats comprising those agencies.
At first, the bureaucrats took their direction from the president, drawing praise from both Hitler and Mussolini due to the system’s similarity to the fascism that had inspired it. But over time, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The bureaucrats began telling the president what they were going to do instead of the other way around.
Yes, the elected president may still make the final decision on this or that policy. But he makes that decision between two choices presented by the bureaucrats, their Choice A and their Choice B. This is why so little seems to change even when the incumbent party is swept out power in an electoral landslide. Thus, even after the Republican Revolution of 1996 or the election of supposed ubermonster Donald Trump in 2016, nothing really changed. The imperial machine kept grinding on as if there had been no election at all.
After WWII, foreign policy was reconstructed in similar fashion. A national security state was created wherein permanently employed bureaucrats in the State Department, Pentagon, and “intelligence community” assumed the power to direct foreign policy in the same way the administrative state runs domestic policy. Again, the president may make the final decision but it’s usually after being presented with a binary choice between two options amenable to the bureaucracy.
“Mr. President, do you want to bomb Syria or merely impose economic sanctions?”
All of this begs an obvious question: if the permanent bureaucracy is really running things, how do either Biden or Trump pose a problem?
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” – Henry David Thoreau
In LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES ET AL. v. RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, ET AL. (“Raimondo”) the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the “Chevron deference,” a doctrine dating to the 1980s that said in judging whether a regulatory agency had exceeded the authority delegated to it by Congress, courts must defer to the agency’s interpretation of any ambiguous language in the law.
This is being decried by liberals as a crippling blow to the federal government’s ability to regulate and lauded by conservatives as a welcome return to stricter obedience to the Constitution.
In reality, it is just more hacking at the branches by SCOTUS rather than striking at the root.
The root of the problem is Congress delegating any authority to make rules at all to the executive branch. The Constitution is clear that the legislative power is delegated exclusively to Congress, meaning any rules either prohibiting or requiring human action must be written by legislators elected for that purpose, passed by both houses of Congress, and signed by the president. Calling the rules federal agencies write “regulations” instead of laws doesn’t change anything. It’s still legislating and any person honest with himself knows this.
Congress has no constitutional authority to delegate this power to another branch of government. There is a legal doctrine older than Chevron expressing this called the “nondelegation doctrine.” SCOTUS referred to it in its decision on President Biden’s proposed Covid vaccine mandates. But rather than striking down Congress’ ability to delegate its legislative power to the executive, rampant since the New Deal, the Court merely ruled Congress can’t delegate this power too much.
Hacking at the branches.
This has been the case with all the supposedly monumental decisions by the supposedly “hard right” Court that includes three appointments made by former President Donald Trump. Presented with opportunities to confront three spurious legal doctrines from the 20th century that allowed power to be unconstitutionally transferred to the federal government in general and its executive branch in particular, the Court has largely affirmed these doctrines, merely massaging them differently to get results conservatives like.
The problem is that if even this Court, considered extreme by today’s standards, will not fundamentally enforce the nondelegation doctrine or strike down the Incorporation Doctrine, there will never be a chance to do so again.
This is a consent of the governed issue. It is not so much a matter of whether one or another of the particular laws or powers exercised are good or bad in a vacuum. It is a matter of who is exercising the power and how they acquired it. Our founding document preceding even the Constitution says government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. And no one ever consented to the federal government striking down state laws or the executive branch legislating. On the contrary, the delegates at the constitutional convention emphatically denied the former power to Congress although proposed by Madison throughout the summer. The latter power wasn’t even considered as their separation was a foundation pillar of the constitution itself.
As Covid authoritarians attempt to weasel out of accountability for the destruction they visited upon American society, new data continue to suggest Covid “conspiracy theorists” were right all along. A comprehensive study published in Science this month by Standford Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid and Harvard Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics Chirag Patel was no exception. The study made use of “daily data on 16 government responses in 181 countries in 2020–2021, and 4 outcomes—cases, infections, COVID-19 deaths, and all-cause excess deaths—to construct 99,736 analytic models” and concluded, “we find no patterns in the overall set of models that suggests a clear relationship between COVID-19 government responses and outcomes.”
In case the sanitized, academic language reduces the impact of that statement, allow me to translate it into plain English: the maniac bureaucrats who run most civilized countries shut down society for over a year, destroyed small businesses, kept loved ones from visiting dying parents and grandparents, permanently damaged an entire school-aged generation, loosed the worst inflation upon the public in fifty years, and transferred trillions of dollars in wealth to the richest one percent of society and it was all for nothing.
All. For. Nothing.
The study is only concerned with whether the measures affected Covid outcomes. It does not consider the societal effects of the measures. But no one needs a clinical study for that. Neither do the perpetrators of this crime against humanity substantively deny the negative fallout from the Covid Regime. That’s why disgraced former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo was out doing media hits claiming lockdowns and other mandates were “really all voluntary,” while his idiot brother Fredo calls for a government commission to investigate the responses.
Cuomo has since been called before a Congressional committee to answer questions about his handling of nursing home Covid patients. Cuomo infamously ordered New York nursing homes to admit patients who tested positive for Covid, allegedly causing the deaths of over 15,000 nursing home residents. In a vacuum, this is a good thing. If 15,000 people died who otherwise might not have, there should be accountability.
But too much focus on this ostensible error is a distraction from the main issue: neither politicians nor the government’s bureaucrat “experts” should have had the power to do any of what they did during 2020-21 – which again accomplished nothing.
Many of these petty tyrants are now hiding behind the excuse, “We didn’t know a lot in 2020 and 2021; now, we know more.” There are two problems with that.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) stripped “Mr. Anthony Fauci” of his professional title, as least for the duration of her questioning on the floor of the House, citing the explosive revelation in The New York Post that, “NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide.” The figure cited in the headline refers to royalties paid by pharmaceutical companies to the government agency and its scientists for patents they held on drugs or drug technologies utilized by the companies in developing the Covid vaccines and/or other drugs during the Covid pandemic years.
There is a clear distinction in the article, missing from the headlines, that these royalties were paid, “the agency and its scientists.” In other words, $710 million was not paid out to individual scientists in varying amounts based upon their patent claims. Rather, some portion of the money was paid to the government agency as a whole and some went to individual scientists.
Fauci has previously answered questions from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on this matter, refusing to disclose the full details of the royalty payments, but indicating his personal gain from such payments was nominal. While we don’t know that’s true, one suspects that if the details of the $710 million were fully disclosed, the lion’s share of the money was likely paid to the government and some small portion paid to individual scientists who developed the patents, with no one scientists becoming fabulously wealthy because of them.
But even with this most charitable assumption, there is still a massive problem here. The vaccines these companies developed were mandated by the government. There are plenty of arguments against such mandates without the royalty aspect, but knowing an agency like NIH had a financial incentive to recommend these vaccines for such a mandate is particularly egregious, even if most of the money wasn’t paid to private individuals employed by it.
