Russ Roberts EconTalks with Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Art Carden decries one of the many Orwellian aspects of the tyranny unleashed in the name of fighting Covid. Here’s his conclusion:
Do the aristocrats want hoi polloi to heed their dire warnings? They should lead by example. Politicians, rule thyselves. If you can’t or won’t, at least acknowledge your guiding principle, which seems to be that some animals are more equal than others.
And the ordeals got worse and worse and worse, while the virus did its own thing, entirely unperturbed by whatever measures the experts invented to conquer it. The longer the farce went on, the more the people started to ignore them: almost as many Americans travelled for Thanksgiving as usual, despite our overlords publicly chanting against it. Societies developed this game where officials made grandstanding speeches before they themselves cheated the very rules they imposed; the rest of us cheated the rules too, whenever we got a chance: ignore masks when nobody sees; go outside even when we’re not allowed to; have friends over when nobody noticed; visit the park or the countryside even when prohibited; hold mass protests if your woke issue is important enough.
In the face of overwhelming evidence against their pandemic policies, the establishment stuck to their story, misinterpreting reality as the cases and deaths came down in the late spring and summer ‒ an outcome that seemed to prove that the public campaigns against the virus worked. Never mind that the curves reversed themselves before policies started “working” and that they didn’t do so more rapidly in jurisdictions that tighten the noose the most.
Deep down 2020 has taught us that officials don’t have a clue, that they don’t control what they pretend to control, and that their measures aren’t targeted to or calibrated for stopping the spread of a virus.
Jeffrey Singer reveals the lethal connection between a pandemic and drug prohibition.
Salena Zito wonders why we Americans have so sheepishly obeyed the wolves who pose as our protectors. A slice:
Years from now, when we walk past the graves of the restaurants, shops, and gyms that didn’t make it, will we ask ourselves how we let this happen? Or will we have accepted that we laid down our liberties one day to flatten a curve and never fought to get them back?
Appropriately quoting Patrick Henry, Eli Steinberg – writing in Newsweek – eloquently protests the Covid lockdowns as well as the obsessive focus, by the media and politicians, on Covid risks as if these differ categorically from any of the countless other risks that attend being alive.. (HT Reuvain Borchardt) A slice:
But the Founders ultimately recognized that it is not enough to just stay alive. For life to have meaning, it needs to be worth living. And what that means—by definition—is that we must take some risks and make some sacrifices. Think about it—if your life as lived is not worth any chance of dying for, is it worth living for?
Are we just running out the clock? What sort of existence is that? No wonder the projections for deaths of despair due to COVID keep rising, well beyond 150,000.
While this risk-averse approach has come to typify the way we first approached COVID, it is the spirit of America that will ultimately pull us out of it.
