Also from Mr. Redwood is this short reflection on the state of freedom today in Britain. A slice:
I never thought I would be living in a country where you needed a reason to leave your house, where you were banned from making trips just for pleasure and where every social contact you wished to make had to be done electronically or under a special dispensation allowed by the regulations.
The consequences of Covid restrictions for the world’s poorest are dreadful.
Here are three recent Facebook posts by Phil Magness. One:
If you’re more outraged over facetious tweeting about masks than you are over the last year of lockdown policies, knowing full well the failure of those policies and their deeply regressive socioeconomic effects, allow me to suggest that your priorities are askew and your judgement on both subjects is deeply suspect.
Two (this one aimed at some people who claim to be libertarian):
30 years from now…
“Hey grandpa/grandma, did you oppose the lockdowns that unleashed a global wave of poverty and ripped apart our social fabric for the decade that followed them?”
“No, but I did write a bunch of twitter threads about how libertarians needed to be seen as not opposing The Science ™ behind lockdowns, lest we squander our 0.02% share of influence in the American political system.”
Through his many unscientific and self-contradictory statements about the efficacy of vaccines as displayed in his recent casting of doubt on our ability to return to normal even after being vaccinated, Anthony Fauci has personally done more to fuel the ignoble cause of vaccine skepticism in the last few months than every single anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist from the bowels of the twittersphere combined.
Let’s conclude today’s list of links with some optimism from Joakim Book. A slice:
It is plain as day that the centrally-planned mandates and the withdrawal of individual liberty – that in the last year often were portrayed as responsible and necessary – are having a bottom-up backlash. People, even the very ones issuing the mandates, ignore the rules left and right because those rules don’t work with how people live their lives. Those who aren’t political or intellectual elites (or make decent amounts of money) overwhelmingly report that the events of 2020 have made their lives worse. The anarchist growing in everyone’s minds is bound to come out; the infantilization of grown-up human beings will create a liberty-fueled backlash. Leave. Us. Be.
My idea of a century of liberty rests on much more than that – on megatrends that governments and statist ideologies are in no position to counter. The internet and its mass access to information. Cryptography and its mass ability to hide from view. And yes, the bitcoin and the mass ability to hold instantly-teleportable value (somewhat) outside the purview of Uncle Sam or banks censoring payments that they, or their regulations, don’t like.
