“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.
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.
It is one week until the U.S. mid-term elections and some members of the Regime seem worried that, for once, elections might actually have consequences. The smart money still says that if there is a “red wave” on November 8, Republicans will enter Congress next January and do precisely nothing about what has happened to the American people over the past 32 months. Criticism of the Ukraine War is as likely to be of the “Biden is not tough enough on Putin” variety as it is cutting off the Ukraine Gravy Train to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Still, there are some signs insiders are worried something different may be afoot, as demonstrated by the plea for “amnesty” in The Atlantic by Covid Regime propagandist Emily Oster. According to this alternative reality take, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
No, “we” need do no such thing. The lies, tyranny, and aggression all ran one way during the pandemic – towards those who, it turns out, were never “in the dark.” Whether those mandating lockdowns, masks, and later vaccines were honestly mistaken – “mistaken” seems wholly inadequate here – or acting in bad faith and with malice aforethought should be the subject of a formal investigation.
We have been subjected to six straight years of investigations into hoaxes and hobgoblins, from the nonexistent “Russa collusion” to the inconsequential Ukrainian “quid quo pro” to the farcical “insurrection.” It is past time for an investigation into the real crimes against humanity perpetrated against the American people under the pretense of fighting Covid-19.
Such an investigation would include sworn testimony as to the origins of the virus itself, whether or not data supporting lockdowns and vaccine mandates were knowingly corrupted and/or whether data contraindicating same were knowingly suppressed.
The existence of alternative treatments for Covid would have legally prohibited the issuance of any Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Covid vaccines, developed in record time under the government program known as “Operation Warp Speed.” Were alternative treatments prohibited and their proponents deplatformed to ensure these EUAs could be issued? Did people die who otherwise could have been successfully treated had these alternative treatments been made available?
These questions need to be answered. Both Anthony Fauci and his co-conspirators along with deplatformed experts like Robert Malone, M.D. and Peter MCullough, M.D. must be put under oath and questioned, preferably on live television so the American public can judge for themselves who is telling the truth and who is not.
Throughout 2021, Rep. Thomas Massie publicly asked the CDC to change information on its website indicating the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was effective for those previously infected with Covid-19 because the FDA’s review of Pfizer’s clinical trial data clearly showed it wasn’t (pg. 30). To this writer’s knowledge CDC website was never corrected. The Pfizer vaccine was among those later mandated by President Biden for large swaths of the U.S. workforce.
Massie, those he spoke with at the CDC, and the person(s) responsible for refusing to correct the false claims must be put under oath and questioned. If fraud was committed, charges should follow.
These are just a few of the egregious lies, distortions, and obfuscations perpetrated against the public in support of the Covid Regime. Studies in support of the government mandates were intentionally flawed. Even the integrity of the data has been called into question. Both freedom and the future of science itself depend upon these issues being settled once and for all via an adversarial process with penalties for lying.
The government response to Covid-19 was the most egregious assault on liberty in modern history. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever. The U.S. economy is approximately 5 million jobs short of the number that would have been created to employ its growing population had the lockdowns never occurred.
An as yet unknown number of people died as a direct result of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. That number must be established and those responsible for the deaths held accountable if the investigation shows they acted in bad faith.
We are constantly regaled with the vapid, “we must ensure this never happens again” after a mass shooting or other tragedy, always in support of new government power that will punish the innocent and do nothing to achieve the stated goal.
For once, that hackneyed appeal is appropriate. What must never happen again is the dystopian nightmare visited upon Americans by their federal, state, and local governments over the past two years. The only way to ensure that is to hold those responsible for it accountable. It is time for due process, not amnesty.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in late 1776, when the newly independent American states were at war with the mightiest empire in the world and not doing terribly well. Seven more years of hardship lay ahead, during which even John Adams’ family would struggle to keep body and soul together during the lean years of the Revolutionary War. Abigail Adams sold pins, handkerchiefs, and other trade goods sent home by her husband to feed the family while he was away making history.
246 years later, things aren’t nearly so bleak for Americans…yet. But they do suffer from the worst inflation in decades, growing shortages of food and other items, and an impending economic “hurricane,” if JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is correct.
The difference is this hardship is completely self-inflicted and unnecessary. Americans don’t suffer deprivation now to preserve newly declared independence and found a republic that will go on to inspire the world. They suffer from policies their own government imposed upon them, starting with Covid lockdowns, that have done no good whatsoever while causing immense harm.
With Washington, D.C., it’s always all pain and no gain.
In April, 2020, I asked, rhetorically, “When the Coronavirus Shutdown is over, will anyone blame their governments for the economic devastation they caused?”
In one sense, the Covid-19 era revitalized American federalism. While every U.S. state except South Dakota at first followed the advice of the federal government’s various national public health agencies and their spokesman, Anthony Fauci, M.D., eventually more and more diversity began to emerge in the way individual states responded to the virus.
In September of 2020, after televising a roundtable of non-government scientists from Harvard and Stanford, Governor Ron DeSantis reopened Florida completely and banned local jurisdictions from fining people for noncompliance with mask mandates.
Observing the political gains DeSantis enjoyed from lifting restrictions and the absence of disaster predicted by all opposed to DeSantis politically, Iowa’s governor lifted all restrictions in February 2021, followed closely by Gov. Abbot of Texas the following month.
While states with Republican governors trumpet their states as “free states” due to generally less severe and shorter-lived lockdowns, and proponents of decentralization from across the political spectrum point to this as a triumph of local government, federalism completely failed in the most important respect. Every United States citizen, regardless of the decisions of their state and local elected leaders, is being forced to pay for lockdowns equally.
Although Covid relief was federally funded, it wasn’t paid for with higher taxes. It would have been impossible to collect more taxes from a society producing considerably less wealth. Instead, the money was created by the Federal Reserve and handed out through programs created by the CARES Act and subsequent legislation.
We are feeling the effects of that money creation combined with decreased production now. Although his Republican critics would like to blame President Biden for rising prices today (and he has certainly contributed to them, especially energy prices), the majority of the spending authorized and new money created occurred while Trump was still in office.
M1 showed the supply of dollars at $4 trillion in February 2020. It was $16 trillion by May 2020 and $18 trillion when Trump left office in January 2021. It was just over $20 trillion as of January 2022.
President Biden, on the other hand, has largely failed to get most of the spending he wanted beyond an early Covid relief bill similar in size to the CARES Act. However, due to the mechanics of the way money gets spent by the federal government after it is appropriated by Congress, even much of the money appropriated in 2020 wasn’t spent until 2021.
That and the general lag between new money creation and the resulting rise in consumer prices is why price inflation only began in earnest in 2021. But this is not to lay the blame at Trump’s or Biden’s doorstep. Rather, it was the very bipartisan departure from reality, including by most the American public, that a large percentage of the economy could be turned off while people went on consuming as they did before.
Many otherwise “fiscally conservative” people threw up their hands and justified Covid bailouts on the grounds that those ordered to close their businesses or stay home from their jobs weren’t “at fault,” and therefore were entitled to bailouts.
It doesn’t matter who was at fault for lockdowns. Goods that are not produced cannot be consumed. One cannot consume more than one produces unless someone else provides the difference. Scarcity does not make exceptions for assignment of blame, political theories, or feelings. Even if lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths, which they didn’t, one still had to face the reality that producing enough to survive takes priority over avoiding the virus.
The truly “federalist” approach to Covid-19 would have been to allow each state to decide and pay for the policies it chose to implement in response to the virus. Politicians spoke in absolutes, saying lockdowns were “necessary.” Well, producing enough to survive was more necessary. This would have been true even if the virus had turned out to be as deadly as it was originally touted.
Had governors been forced to face reality and decide how to respond to lockdowns without external bailout money, there may not have been any lockdowns at all. If there were, they would have been fewer, of less severity, and of shorter duration.
This would not have made a bit of difference overall in the number of Covid deaths, as the retrospective comparisons of “open” vs. “locked down” states so clearly show.
Like TARP in 2008 and every other bailout, profits have been privatized and costs socialized. People who elected governors who took a more realistic approach to Covid and who themselves balanced the personal risk of contracting the disease more realistically with the responsibility of supporting themselves are paying the same cost in runaway inflation as those whose governors closed their economies completely and kept them closed for much longer periods of time.
Today, Americans are being asked to again support a departure from reality. The U.S. government, the most prolific invader of foreign nations in the past seventy years, has proclaimed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beyond the pale and imposed drastic sanctions in response. President Biden has acknowledged this will have a cost to American citizens, although he has vastly understated the cost.
The president and others have tried to shift the blame for present economic pain onto Putin. This is dishonest for two reasons. One, it is not Putin’s invasion but the sanctions in response to the that will cause economic hardship, just as it wasn’t “Covid” but the government response to the virus that caused the economic fallout we’re experiencing now.
Most importantly, the economic consequences of Biden’s Russia sanctions have not even begun to be felt by American consumers. They are just now suffering the effects of Covid lockdowns. The Russia sanctions could have far more onerous economic consequences, especially if they result in a new world economic order where a significant portion of the global population no longer uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency. That is a reality Americans are not ready to face.
Regardless of whether Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, America may not be able to afford the combined cost of Biden’s sanctions and the Covid lockdowns. Ignoring that reality may have fatal consequences for both America’s economy its political order.
I ran across a very powerful clip from George Orwell’s last interview. He’s visibly struggling to catch his breath (he died of tuberculosis later the same year) and looks into the camera to say, “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous, nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
The passage Orwell reads, which includes the famous “boot stamping on a human face forever” line, occurs while the government is torturing Smith for the purpose of making him say what his own eyes tells him is untrue.
Even worse, when O’Brien holds up four fingers, it isn’t sufficient that Smith tell him he sees five. He must believe it.
What a terrifying parallel to the Covid Regime today.
“The vaccines are safe and effective.” “Lockdowns and mask mandates slow the spread of Covid.”
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
If you haven’t read Orwell’s classic, I implore you to do so. There are actually four books I’d recommend that I was required to read in high school but have a feeling aren’t being assigned anymore:
Read them yourself and if you have teenage children, have them read them as well (some violence and adult material in some of these). Don’t let school thwart your children’s education.
Don’t forget my new e-book,It’s the Fed, Stupid, is also available in paperback here. It’ll cost you less than a sawbuck and is a great way to introduce friends to our ideas.
“Attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science,” said Anthony Fauci to widespread ridicule or approval, depending upon which side you are on. If you doubt his judgment personally, he’d have you believe, you must not believe in “the science.” Fauci went on to claim that all of the “things he’s talked about” were “fundamentally based on science.”
Let’s put the weasel words aside and recognize that what he wants you to believe – that all his official policy recommendations (“all the things I’ve talked about”) were firmly proven effective through application of the scientific method – is demonstrably false. The most rigorous, most scientific studies show precisely the opposite.
Fauci was a proponent of what has become to be known as “lockdowns,” the widespread closure of businesses and/or stay-at-home orders for the general population. Dozens of studies show this had no demonstrable effect on the spread of Covid-19. As one after another came out, Fauci went on talking about lockdowns as if this evidence did not exist.
Now, there are studies being conducted every day on this or that aspect of Covid-19 and I’m sure Fauci and his supporters can produce links to some that support lockdowns. While there are no absolutes, here is a general observation: the most scientific studies – the randomized controlled trial studies with large sample sizes measuring results in the real world – tend to point towards inefficacy of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). NPIs include (anti)social distancing, masks, and lockdowns.
Less scientific studies – those with small sample sizes or based on laboratory experiments rather than experience in the real world – tend to point towards efficacy. Remember the experiment on mannequins wearing masks? You get the picture.
Let’s not forget that early in 2020 Fauci said a study based on a single case of asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 “lays the question to rest.” And guess what? It turned out the patient documented in the case had never been asked if she had symptoms. When it turned out she was symptomatic at the time of transmission, the study was unpublished. Subsequent studies failed to prove asymptomatic spread was significant. A December 2020 study looking at secondary attack rates within the same household – published right on the NIH (Fauci’s agency) website – says it’s miniscule if it exists at all.
Yet, Fauci goes on talking as if this study doesn’t exist. He has no choice. Without asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for lockdowns or mandating masks for asymptomatic people.
On a rare occasion where the largely useless national media confronted Fauci with a question about how Texas could be doing so well four weeks after abandoning all Covid restrictions, he had no answer. “Maybe they’re doing more outside,” he mused. Then, he went on recommending the same policies as if the question had never been posed.
Fauci wasn’t alone. When White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Slavitt was asked why locked down and masked California and restriction-free Florida were having similar results in terms of Covid spread, he began his answer with perhaps the only honest words that have escaped a public health official’s mouth: “There is so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that is just a little bit beyond our explanation.” But then, in literally the same breath, he said we do know masking and social distancing work.
Now, you don’t have to be a trained journalist for the obvious follow-up question to occur to you: “No, Mr. Slavitt, the question I just posed to you suggests we don’t know masking and social distancing work because we are seeing equivalent results in states that are and are not following those policies.”
Of course, that follow-up was not put to Slavitt. And you really have to ask yourself why.
The failure of scientists to be scientific is not a new phenomenon. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) dealt directly with the tendency of scientists to reject evidence that contradicts the prevailing theory or “paradigm.”
“Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important,” wrote Kuhn, “can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.”
Kuhn’s overall thesis challenged the prevailing understanding at the time that science proceeds in a linear fashion, with new discoveries incrementally adding to the accumulated knowledge that preceded them. Instead, argued Kuhn, science throughout history has featured a series of revolutions, where paradigms like the geocentric theory of the solar system or Newtonian physics collapsed under the weight of “anomalies” (evidence which contradicted the theory) and made way for new paradigms like the heliocentric theory of the solar system and Einsteinian physics.
There is much nuance in Kuhn’s argument which his critics have tended to ignore, but one takeaway that we’re seeing proved in real time is that these scientific revolutions are only revolutionary because of the tendency for scientists to cling to a theory regardless of evidence that refutes it. Kuhn argues that scientists will not abandon a disproven theory until a new theory is presented that they are convinced explains the evidence better than the old.
What makes the New Normal so strange is that a scientific revolution occurred with no anomalies. It was firmly established by a century of scientific research that nonpharmaceutical interventions weren’t effective in combatting the spread of respiratory viruses. Indeed, Fauci himself initially repeated the established scientific consensus that lockdowns and mask mandates were not effective policy responses. He even discouraged people from voluntarily wearing masks.
Then, he and the rest of the government scientists did a complete about face. There was no new evidence that motivated this. They simply abandoned the prevailing scientific consensus based on a desire to do something – even though the scientific evidence before, during, and after the outbreak of Covid-19 said what they wanted to do wouldn’t work. As a result, there is now a New Normal paradigm based on…nothing.
It should be noted that there were plenty of non-government scientists protesting vehemently right from the beginning. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were already loudly protesting lockdowns as early as April 2020. Others contested asymptomatic spread, the mortality rate initially reported (they were right), and the efficacy of masks.
Here is the problem. This New Normal paradigm can’t collapse in the face of anomalies, no matter how numerous they are, because the anomalies are now simply ignored. Anyone who calls attention to them, no matter how credentialed or qualified, is systematically discredited.
In such an environment, scientifically disproven assertions like “Covid-19 spreads asymptomatically” and “lockdowns and mask mandates work” continue to form the basis of policy. The same goes for vaccine mandates.
It’s not that evidence against New Normal science can no longer be found. Much of it is available right on the websites of the government agencies denying it. It is simply a matter of saying “no” when governments and media demand you refuse to believe you’re lying eyes and obey.
Obedience has a price. We will be feeling the economic effects of lockdowns for many years. An entire generation of children will suffer psychological damage from being forced to wear masks during their most formative years. The damage to society as a whole from lockdowns, mask mandates, and (anti)social distancing policies may be immeasurable.
Neither can you simply go along to get along until things “get back to normal.” If and when the Covid Crisis finally ends, there is a Climate Crisis already teed up to begin as surely as night follows day. It will feature the same breathless media propaganda and ignoring of contrary evidence as did the Covid Crisis. The cost this time will be a significantly and permanently lower standard of living for you and your children.
First it was “staying home saves lives.” Then, it was masks. Now it’s the Covid vaccines. Over and over, we’re told we need to obey public health bureaucrats without question for the good of other people. Conversely, to disobey their “guidance” and exercise our inalienable right to liberty is “selfish.”
Charles Barkley, who is often refreshingly independent-minded, is the latest to parrot this mantra.
Memories are short these days. In early 2020, the use of tents for hospital overflow was breathlessly reported as if it were unprecedented, when tents had been put up for precisely the same reason just two years before, during a heavy flu season.
In April 2020, no one remembered this. Instead, it was, “OMG, tents!”
It’s much the same story with lockdowns, masks, and the vaccines. Every one of these was first presented to the public as protecting oneself. Then, when significant people resisted, the narrative changed to “you’re doing it for others.” Forget two years, most of the public didn’t remember the previous narrative two days later.
It’s like a nightmare.
At the center of the “freedom is selfish” allegation is a misunderstanding, deliberate or not, of liberty and legitimate power. The right to liberty, like the rights to life, acquiring possessions, and pursuing happiness, rests upon an understanding of what legitimate powers one person can exercise over another. And those powers are very few.
The right to life isn’t the right not to die under any circumstances. When someone drowns to death or gets struck by lightning, we don’t say his right to life was violated. No, the right to life is specifically the right to not be killed by another person other than in self-defense.
The right to life is rooted in the proposition that no one person has any legitimate power to deliberately deprive another of life. The right to liberty similarly rests upon the proposition no one has any legitimate power to deprive another of liberty.
If no individual has these powers, then they cannot delegate them to a government. I didn’t just make that up; it is a bedrock concept in the essay Thomas Jefferson said represented “the general principles of liberty and the rights of man, in nature and in society” generally approved by the citizens of both his state of Virginia and the United States generally.
“Inalienable” means cannot be taken away, not even by majority vote. That’s the reason for all the so-called “checks and balances” in our system. It’s the reason we have Bills of Rights in our federal and state constitutions. All these protections are there to ensure democratically elected officials don’t violate these inalienable rights, regardless of what majorities think or want.
Politicians, bureaucrats, and the useful midwits who blindly follow them will be quick to point out that “with rights come responsibilities.” That’s true. But the corresponding responsibility to a right is not to immediately surrender the right. That would be absurd. No, the corresponding responsibility to the right to liberty, for example, is to respect the right to liberty of others.
In other words, you can choose to take a vaccine or not to take it, and live with the consequences, as long as you do not infringe upon the rights of others to make the same decision for themselves. This is the very essence of “a free country.”
“But there are limits to liberty,” say the statists. That’s also true, but those limits are very narrow. “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him,” said Jefferson in an 1816 letter. Similarly, he said the government should “restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free” in his first inaugural.
The government and its minions weren’t completely unaware of this concept. That’s what made Covid-19 oh-so convenient. With just a small false equivalency, it seemed to check all the boxes necessary to restrain liberty on a massive scale.
First, we were told the disease was much deadlier than it turned out to be. Even then, the sensible approach would have been for people with symptoms to stay home. That’s why it had to spread asymptomatically, an article of faith among the Covid Cult that the evidence shows is virtually unfounded.
A December 2020 study found that even for people living in the same household, the “secondary attack rate” (rate at which an infected member of the household transmits to another member) was .7% for asymptomatic cases, as opposed to 18% for symptomatic cases.
.7%. In case you’re having trouble reading, that’s less than 1%. And this is for people living in the same household. How much smaller would the risk be for mere passersby on the street or even fellow diners in the same indoor restaurant?
Yet, without significant asymptomatic spread, there was no need for lockdowns or mask mandates. That’s why minions of the regime go on talking about asymptomatic spread as if it were a fact when the most rigorous studies say it’s miniscule, if it occurs at all.
The “studies” offered to refute this usually assume that because a large percentage of people in a defined group tested positive and are asymptomatic, that asymptomatic people must be spreading it, which clearly does not follow for a highly virulent pathogen.
But let’s say that asymptomatic spread is significant, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Does that give anyone the power to forcibly confine others to their homes or force them to wear masks? No.
The limit on the right to liberty is the prohibition on aggression or injury, both of which mean deliberate harm. That you may pose a risk to others does not equate to aggression. Society is impossible without accepting the risks posed by others. There are too many. They are all preventable to some extent with sufficient oppression, but then you no longer have a society at all, much less a free one.
Everyone has the right to stay home themselves to avoid the risk of viruses. But to claim a right to confine everyone else to their homes until that risk disappears is the truly selfish position, not to mention insane.
The same reasoning applies to the vaccines. There is a good amount of gaslighting regarding their effectiveness in preventing transmission of the disease, even after the CDC Director herself said they don’t. But whether they prevent infection and transmission or merely lessen the severity of the symptoms, there is no case for vaccine mandates.
If they prevent infection and transmission, then those who choose to be vaccinated are safe from those who don’t. If they merely lessen the symptoms, but don’t prevent transmission, as the CDC Director said, then declining the vaccine harms no one but oneself.
If they don’t do either, as increasing anecdotal and some clinical evidence suggests, then there isn’t much reason for anyone to take them at all, much less mandate them.
No one honest with himself can possibly believe governments and the media are being honest about Covid-19. But even holding their statements in the most charitable light possible does not justify any of the measures we’ve endured over the past 19 months. And none of it would be possible without support from at least a significant minority of the people.
All those not only tacitly accepting but championing the governments’ closing businesses, locking people in their homes, mandating masks, or forcibly requiring anyone to take a drug, no matter how effective, all for the purpose of marginally reducing risk to themselves from a virus with a 99.5% survival rate, is monstrously selfish. Shame on them.
The memes say it all. But if you want more “official” confirmation, a recent poll found that only 35% of Americans believe the 20-year war in Afghanistan was worth fighting. It’s hard to believe the number is even that high.
It’s not just that the very same Islamic fundamentalist group Washington went to war with twenty years ago is now running the country. The war also failed to reduce terrorism. Major terrorist attacks in the U.S. were at their highest post-2001 when the war on terror was at its height and dropped to virtually zero during the cease fire with the Taliban negotiated by former President Trump.
Just like Washington’s wars on drugs, the war on terrorism gave us a lot more of what it was at war with. This shouldn’t be a surprise. The government fails at every major initiative it undertakes. This is the organization that managed to interrupt a 200-year trend of falling poverty rates just a few decades after declaring war on poverty in the 1960s.
But Afghanistan was especially jolting. Not many people look at the incriminating data on the war on poverty, but everyone saw the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul. In the ensuing days, reality began to sink in. The U.S. had wasted 20 years, trillions of dollars, thousands of U.S. military lives, and hundreds of thousands of lives overall, for nothing.
All. For. Nothing.
Yet, as shocking as that reality is to most Americans, they still somehow believe this same government, the one that ran that 20-year debacle, suddenly becomes highly competent when fighting an airborne respiratory virus.
Washington’s War on Covid has been no more successful than its war against the Taliban. The proof isn’t hard to find. This article collated 35 studies showing the enormously destructive Covid “lockdowns” had no effect on slowing the spread or reducing hospitalizations or deaths from Covid-19.
The best studies – the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – suggest that masks aren’t particularly effective, either. But the federal and state governments continue to mandate them.
Then, there are the vaccines. The goalposts for evaluating them have moved significantly over the course of this year. We were originally told the vaccines would provide long-lasting immunity from the SARS-COV-2 virus. Now, we’re told the vaccines will merely lessen the severity of symptoms. The CDC director confirmed this months ago and the latest data seem to indicate that vaccination rates are not affecting the spread of Covid-19.
There is some evidence the vaccines are preventing hospitalization and death from Covid-19, but the latest study from the UK indicates fully vaccinated people made up 64% of all Covid deaths since February 2021. When you count partially vaccinated people, that number rises to 70%.
Even if vaccines are preventing hospitalizations or deaths those who choose to remain unvaccinated do not pose an increased risk to others if the vaccines aren’t preventing spread of the virus. But governments are still mandating the vaccines, just as they continued to mandate indoor smoking bans after the evidence was in that doing so didn’t improve health outcomes.
Unfortunately, there is long precedent for Americans continuing to have faith in disastrous government interventions even well after they are obvious failures. Americans still believed the New Deal was helping even after the stock market crashed a second time and unemployment started to rise again in 1937. They still believed it after FDR’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, told the House Ways and Means Committee in 1939,
“We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”
They still believe it to this day no matter how many times it is debunked.
There was enormous hope in 1974 that faith in government was finally broken after President Nixon resigned in disgrace, especially among members of the new Libertarian Party. But Americans went on believing.
Keynesian economics was pronounced dead for a few years after stagflation in the 1970s – considered impossible in the Keynesian framework – but it quickly resurrected to dominate fiscal and monetary policy without a peep from the public.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, “the era of big government is over.” But today it is bigger and more destructive than ever. Yet, no one in his right mind would say the war on drugs has been a success. Nor can it be argued the Department of Education has done anything but massive harm.
We have a whole generation of college graduates living in their parents’ basements, working low-paying and part time jobs, and trying to pay off massive student loans after being incentivized by easy money and government guaranteed loans to pursue college degrees with no ROI. Meanwhile, there is a crisis-level shortage of skilled tradespeople who could be on a path to upper middle-class incomes had they not been conned into college.
The harm done to young people in general pales in comparison to what the government has done to the African American community. What two hundred years of slavery and another one hundred years of institutional discrimination couldn’t do, the government accomplished in just fifty years “trying to help.”
Devastation is the only word appropriate to describe the African American community in 2021. And anyone familiar with the work of Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams knows this is not something intrinsic to their race or culture. The government did that to them and it doesn’t intend to stop.
The Afghanistan War debacle was shocking to most Americans, but it was really just one more in a long line of government failures, not all of which made such compelling TV. Nevertheless, a significant percentage of the American public not only complies with but zealously defends Covid-19 policies that will look no better than Afghanistan in the rearview mirror.
What will it take to break this religious faith in government?
