Category: Covid-19

“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

— Friedrich Hayek

During seasons of great pestilence men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was coming. Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity.

— Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles MacKay

Something you should know at the outset, if you don’t know it already:

“The latest figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Deaths are lower now than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015, slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is imparted by population growth” (source).

Bill Gates, whose political-economic philosophy is an unintegrated farrago of hackneyed shibboleths, recently said this: “Normalcy will only return when we’ve vaccinated the entire global population. The economic hit [will be huge] but we don’t have a choice.”

He is flatly, unequivocally wrong.

As is the elitist tool Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who was the main architect of the Obamacare debacle (yes, the same man caught on video advocating actual death-panels for the elderly [watch that video, please]), who recently called for a mandatory 18-month lockdown, and who also recently said this:

“How are people supposed to find work if this goes on in some form for a year and a half? Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is we have no choice.”

Reader, we have a choice.

I repeat: we have a choice.

We have a choice, and that choice is the correct choice, and it is the one that should be chosen precisely because it’s the right one.

I want you to please notice first and foremost the sloppy logical-fallacy — called a false dilemma fallacy — pathetically smuggled in by both of these clownish charlatans who would dare to presume to make decisions for the rest of us: either we shut down the economy for many months to come and live as slaves to an elite bureau of central planners, or we do nothing.

You either support the lockdowns, in other words, or you want everyone to die.

You know what you do with that sort of obvious tactic — that sloppy pathetic attempt at argumentation?

This: you swat that strawman into oblivion and then you crush it into the dirt with the heel of your boot, and you tell these elitist tools that neither they nor anyone else, even the most elite bureau of planners imaginable, has rightful jurisdiction over your person or property.

I do sincerely believe that one of the primary reasons people buy into such ridiculous nonsense is that people simply cannot imagine that ostensibly educated human beings, like scientists, doctors, lawyers, computer scientists and so on, could be so stupidly naïve and ignorant concerning such basic things. It is therefore often concluded that these people must be right.

I want to assure you that educated people of all varieties — even the most highly educated — not only can be so stupidly naïve and ignorant: they are frequently so. It happens, in many cases, more often than not, I believe — especially concerning political-economic philosophy because postmodern leftist-progressive Neo-Marxist theory, in one form or another (and they’re all preposterously antiquated and have been proven wrong time and again), dominates academia around the globe, and has for many decades. Millions and millions of nominally educated people are thus inculcated up to the gills with this poisonous doctrine — this mathematically impossible economic theory of forced egalitarianism and altruism at the point of gun — and the overwhelming majority of these millions can’t even see that they’ve been inculcated with it, let alone break out of it.

This is also a testament to the fundamental importance of thinking about and establishing the philosophical principles which undergird all subsequent knowledge — a testament as well to the widespread practice of tendentious reasoning and confirmation bias.

Please be assured of the following, if nothing else: a great many secular beliefs held even by successful and seemingly intelligent people are every bit as dangerous and dogmatic as the fanatical non-secular beliefs that get so much more attention, and if you doubt me at all, then don’t click this link.

What so many of these nominally educated people fail to grasp is the boundless possibilities which arise naturally from voluntary action, non-coercive adjustments, and human intelligence when left free of force — both by individuals acting with free agency and by businesses run by such individuals.

I’m well-aware that the books and essays against my position are endless and some even have the appearance of sophistication, the superficial veneer of something cogent. Some are award-winning and even sound closely reasoned. But essays on this subject get nowhere except back where they all began:

Do individuals possess the right to their own person and property, or not?

The fact is that there is no conflict between humanitarian and economic concerns.

It’s another false dilemma the world has presented you. I promise you it’s wrong.

A poorer country or society is always much less healthy and more vulnerable to illness, disease, pollution, and every other deleterious thing.

“When human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat” — said former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption. He called this “herding behavior” and said that herding behavior is precisely why “hysteria is infectious.”

You will not see a greater illustration of this fact than you’re seeing play out right now across the entire world.

Try this:

If you were handed two cards with lines on each, one clearly shorter than the other, could you tell the difference? If you think this is a ridiculous question, think again.

In one of psychology’s most famous experiments, Solomon Asch showed that if you’re in a group and most of the group members claim the shorter line is longer, you might just go along. In his book You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney reports, “In Asch’s experiments, 75 percent of the subjects caved in on at least one question [about the length of the lines]. They looked at the lines, knew the answer everyone else was agreeing to was wrong, and went with it anyway.”

Perhaps even worse, those who changed their correct answers to conform with others “seemed oblivious to their own conformity. When the experimenter told them they had made an error, they came up with excuses as to why they made mistakes instead of blaming the others.”

If you’re sure you would go against the grain, consider this: “The percentage of people who conformed grew proportionally with the number of people who joined in consensus against them.”

Imagine you are in a meeting, and a significant decision is to be made. You think your manager’s plan is ditzy. You are ready to speak out when you see everyone else in the meeting is agreeing with your manager. Would you behave like a mouse and go along? If you’ve ever gone along with a poor decision, don’t beat up on yourself; it’s tough to go against the herd.

Perhaps you think Asch’s experiments merely show there is no reason to dispute the crowd when the situation is trivial. Sadly, research shows when something significant is on the line, fewer people will buck the herd.

In his book The Science of Fear, Dan Gardner reports on experiments by psychologists Robert Baron, Joseph Vandello, and Bethany Brunsman which found that conformity goes up “so long as the judgments are difficult or ambiguous, and the influencing agents are united and confident.”

Gardner wondered, would new evidence “make us doubt our opinions?” The answer, Gardner found, is “Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that supports that view while ignoring, rejecting, or harshly scrutinizing information that casts doubt on it.” [My red emphasis.]

The latest evidence suggests COVID-19 is not as high a risk as initially thought. If you think such evidence will convince your neighbors or Facebook friends that it’s time to end the lockdowns, you will be endlessly frustrated. Our neighbors care what other people think. If you live in an area where support for the lockdowns is widespread, your neighbor will likely go along. Remember, the more nuanced an issue is, and the more critical the problem, the more the desire to conform goes up.

We are living through both a pandemic and a contagious madness of global proportions.

Politicians who led us down this destructive lockdown path won’t be changing their view until their “solution” is politically untenable.

(Link)

In 1850, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat aided the world in understanding “the seen and unseen costs” of authoritarian policies. What Bastiat was referring to is the fact that it’s simple to see how (for instance) the state giving millions of people a $5000.00 check will buy them groceries and pay rent. But it’s not so simple or obvious — and yet even more critical — to see the costs and harms of where such money must come from: the escalation of borrowing and taxation, the trillions in pointless spending that accumulate, the unprecedented amounts of new money created by the Federal Reserve, the ensuing inflation, which is a form of theft on people’s life-savings, and the countless other destructive ramifications and repercussions, which mushroom endlessly because in trying to fix the initial problems that the unseen costs create, more controls are levied and then more unseen costs accrue.

Yet the masses (i.e. the voters), unwilling to even consider the possibility of unseen costs, cheer for it because in their eyes government can magically create money from whole cloth.

Ladies, gentleman, and everyone else — please hear me: it is naïve to think that people won’t adapt to a threat, real or perceived. It’s equally naive to think that businesses won’t either — including shutting their doors, if they deem it most prudent, or if the customers determine it by their voluntarily deciding not to go out for drinks or food, entertainment or recreation, because they have concerns about the health and safety of themselves and their family — just as people already were doing without needing a government mandate; just as businesses deemed “essential” already have and just as businesses deemed “non-essential” already were before state-forced lockdown made it illegal.

The more you treat human beings like helpless babies, the more human beings will expect to be treated this way — and therefore the greater the growing dependency on that monstrous leviathan known as the state, which is by definition an agency of force and as such cannot spend a single penny unless it first either taxes, borrows, or prints: until in a very short time, there is no end to the things that people, even once self-reliant people, come to expect the state (rather than voluntary transactions and peaceful exchanges among humans) to provide for everyone — all in exchange for your and my inalienable right to life and property, and that of course includes the limitless ingenuity and progress and health and wealth and civilization brought about by conditions of freedom and the protection of our inalienable rights.

There is a very specific reason that all societies governed predominantly by authoritarian states exist in widespread poverty and complete suppression of the individual’s rights, as there is a precise reason that all societies governed by a predominately laissez-faire state have, exactly to that extent, flourished and freed the individual.

Freedom once gone is gone forever.

This is why you MUSTMUSTMUST stand up against this unprecedented power-grab, and the propaganda campaign that largely fueled it. Even if you’re perfectly okay with the state now having this kind of power over this particular thing, realize there is no longer any check on it: it was decreed by executive order, and that power is automatically unchecked, and horribly dangerous. Think of that unchecked power turning, for no reason or just cause, against something (or someone) you hold dear — because I promise you that it is only a matter of time before this unleashed power-source spreads into other areas. Power and bureaucracy once established are impossible to retrogress away from, and there is already a growing chorus of voices calling for no return to normal — which was hardly laissez-faire anyway, though much closer than this current cataclysm.

There is the threat of a virus, and this virus and the destruction caused by it are real and should never be taken lightly, but rather with measured and serious precautions — precautions which a free society with a free people rationally informed (by, for instance, the testing kits that the CDC bureau made illegal in favor of their own broken junk) are best equipped to handle — just as we should take seriously any influenza or other potential epidemic.

The dangers should not, however, be overblown, and neither should we be lied to, nor yanked around like puppets by bureaucratic puppet-masters who are philosophically bankrupt, so that the “cure” creates greater destruction (by far) than the disease. There has unquestionably been fear-mongering and outright prevarications, and it is an outrage and, in my opinion, a total scandal which, in the name of science and scientific integrity, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law that Neil Ferguson, the corrupt scientist largely responsible for the onset of this hysteria proper, still refuses to show anyone his thirteen-year-old computer code which he used to make his outlandish predictions about Covid-19. There has been a definite propaganda-machine behind much of the catastrophizing — a machine promoting misinformation, exaggeration, hysteria, and panic, and there has unquestionably been a huge governmental power-play as a result of that machine and the fear it thereby spawned and which the majority of people are permitting in total acquiescence to the whipped-up fear. Not even the New York Times, once the most admired and venerable newspaper in the United States, if not the world, now denies this — in large measure because they, too, bought into it.

There’s no end to the emergencies and crises that power-lusting politicians and bureaucrats, with their unslakable cupidity, are capable of generating — all of which to the detriment of individual rights: whether the crisis is environmental, terroristic, proletarian, pandemic, privilege, labor, geo-political, racial, religious, or any others, both known as well as the yet-to-be-conceived, or any cross-combination. The forces that work tirelessly against individual rights are legion and multiplex, and they are constant because, like virus, they can’t survive exposure to light, and they thus mutate from year-to-year, decade-to-decade, generation-to-generation: God-or-Devil-appointed kings and queens one generation, Monarchy the next; Marxism one generation, Socialism on the NAZI pattern next; Neo-Marxism one generation, environmentalism the decade following — right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union; deep ecology one decade, inequality the next; privilege one year and then the year following, democratic socialism is all the rage. And so it goes. One generation plagiarizes another. The only thing different about them are the concretes: the principles remain precisely the same.

Quoting from a good article, with slightly confusing grammar and punctuation, by a writer named John Tamny:

It cannot be stressed enough that the political response to a virus, one that has broadly limited freedom with our “own good” in mind, has amounted to an obnoxious non sequitur. Death potentially looms due to an unknown, so restrain the very human capital that has felled all manner of past maladies with economic growth, creativity, and advances born of growth capital matched with the creative?

The lack of freedom that so many say is the coronavirus solution is in truth what blinds us to a solution. There’s so much we don’t know, and one reason we don’t is because there are too many rules, and too many not allowed by decree to produce information about the implications of people freely moving about and interacting.

That it took only the suggestion of the possibility of sickness, with an approximately estimated one percent lethality (and it is almost certainly lower), to render a nation once characterized by individuality, autonomy, freedom, innovation, creativity, industriousness, hard work, industry, and more into housebound conformists — it completely confirms what some non-conforming commentators have suggested: this is the most mind-spinning consolidation in the shortest span of time of millions and millions willingly acquiescing individual liberty to full power that you will ever see played out in real time. And I agree.

“It’s possible to believe that Covid-19 is potentially as lethal (or more) than even the highest estimates, contagion rates high or higher than estimates, and social distancing wise, while also believing that current government polices are misguided and tyrannical. They’re not mutually exclusive views.”

— Peter Earl, economist

Please consider what I already said above: the power which the state has seized by executive decree is a newfound power that’s unchecked, and even if you agree wholeheartedly with the motive and desired results of this particular power-play, remember the following and think about it carefully: it is an unjustly acquired state power over individuals and their property, yours included, and all your loved ones’ as well, and because it’s unchecked, it is a power that can now move in any direction, into any arena of human life.

Individuals possess rights because of which there are things that no person and no group or institution may rightfully do — not without being in violation of those rights — which is to say, without being in the wrong. It is no accident that “wrong” is the opposite of “right” in this context as well.

The proof of rights is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Now please ask yourself: whose permission? And who gives permission to the one whose permission you’re acting under and to the one above this one and then to the one above her and so on? And why?

If, for instance, the government says that one business can be open — let’s say a coffeeshop or a liquor store — but not another (a restaurant, for example, or a bar), these businesses and the individuals who own and operate them are all acting and operating not by right but purely by governmental permission.

Rights by definition can only belong to individuals — not groups — since it is only individuals who compose any group or so-called collective. Rights legally guarantee your freedom and independence as an individual human being.

Independence is autonomy. It is the freedom to govern yourself and to rely upon your own independent judgment.

Independence is the freedom to express your own individuality.

When humans are left free, they invent, they innovate, they create, they exchange — they freely associate, which in turns creates more innovation, more invention, more idea generation, more creation. In this precise way, freedom — the freedom to live and to produce and to keep the fruits of what you produce — creates prosperity and goodwill among human beings.

An adversary ethic and epistemology — i.e. a government governing not by consent but by consensus; knowledge gained not by processing all the relevant data and its context, nor by the hierarchy of facts, but by consensus — they negate the prosperity and goodwill among humans that freedom brings.

But what in the final analysis is freedom?

Freedom, in its most fundamental form, has only one meaning: it is the omission of force.

Freedom is the absence of coercion.

It simply means that you are left alone.

It means that every individual — regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, creed, gender, brawn, beauty or any other non-essential characteristic — every individual possesses the absolute right to her own life, and only her own life.

The thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Freedom, like rights, is one of these things that virtually everyone believes in — that is, until everyone finds out what it actually means. And then almost no one believes in it.

The difficult thing for many people to accept or grasp about freedom is that it doesn’t actually guarantee much of anything. It doesn’t guarantee success or happiness, or shelter, or a certain income, or food, or healthcare, or a “level playing field,” or a level training field, or anything else that must ultimately derive from the production or labor of others. Freedom means only that you are free to pursue these things and that if you achieve them, they are yours unalienably, which in turns means: they cannot be taken, transferred, revoked, or made alien.

It is, for example, a simple-to-say and almost obscenely common platitude that you have the right to a job, or the right to healthcare, or the right to free housing. It is much more difficult to say what this implies: namely, that you have the right to the knowledge and labor and life of another human being. Because you do not. Nobody does.

The IHME is meanwhile suddenly realizing that Farr’s Law won’t be subverted — not even by Covid-19 or the panic it created — and that the virus is fading fast. And yet they nevertheless need to find a way to declare victory. But please don’t be fooled, not for a moment: the idea that social distancing by itself can kill off a virus is one-hundred percent pseudoscience. The IHME has realized that Covid-19 is somewhat seasonal and not nearly a big enough deal to justify the immense destruction that’s been wrought.

Government doesn’t “need a plan” to “end the shutdown.” Government needs to end the shutdown. Immediately.

To support forced shutdowns for an unspecified and indefinite time-span means to rely upon the same government that spent weeks sending contradictory messages, blocking testing, and being entirely unprepared to provide actual leadership. To end the forced lockdowns is to allow people to live their lives freely. Approximately 17 million people going to work will once more feel productive and useful. They will begin earning their own money again. Most importantly of all: the deadly and horrifyingly seductive and lulling lethargy, the indolence that comes from any and all forms of socialism — the process of entrenchment taking hold with such astonishing swiftness, like a gentle hand gripping your throat and squeezing until, before you’re even aware of it, you drift away into a brain-damaged stupor, irreparable (and you can already see this happening here, this new lifestyle so lulling and appealing to so many) — it will be mercifully abolished.

“Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.” — Friedrich Hayek

When the shutdown happened, it was a panicked, random, sweeping irrational decision made by scared politicians responding to howling media freaks. Regular people were horrified. All these three weeks later, you can see people coming around and thinking oh-oh-oh we can’t possibly open up until the virus goes away, which is a preposterous outlook because viruses of one sort or another have always been with us and somehow civilization managed to cobble together the idea of human rights in spite of this. In any case, right now I’m shocked at the dearth of public voices calling for an immediate opening. And think about it: if you are not for an immediate shift from government controls back to freedom of association right now, you are de facto for shutdown. Consider that. Now think about the writers, pundits, intellectuals and other big shot voices out there who could make a difference for freedom RIGHT NOW but are declining to do so for fear of the social-media mobs or whatever. Moral courage is among the world’s rarest and most precious qualities.— Jefferey Tucker

“If you’re angered by citations for being in park with your nuclear family, or in your car or running on the beach — or, for that matter, if you’re angered by the “non-essential” goods roped off in stores — understand that these things have nothing to do with fighting the virus and everything to do with power-hungry politicians and law enforcement” — Ilya Shapiro, economist and lawyer.

“Distrust all in whom the desire to punish is powerful.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Also, here’s another data study shows “virtually zero correlation between speed of shut down and expected death rates.”

This video is for anyone who thinks I exaggerate the dangers of authoritarianism and laws laid down by authoritarian decree:

Compare these two headlines:

The evidence is overwhelming: poverty creates disease and death. It sickens and kills over the short and long term, and brings higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Things crucial to our day-to-day lives (medical and otherwise) come from healthy inventive economies – or they don’t come at all, as many people are only now discovering. Ask yourself: who makes, uses, and replenishes these things? 

I’ll give you a hint: it is not government bureaus — not faceless, inanimate “factors of production” (per economists’ jargon) but real, live, self-interested, ingenious, productive people: entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, lab technicians, doctors, nurses, medical specialists, EMT crews, hospitals, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies.

Claims about the “net benefits” of mandatory lockdowns and shutdowns are farcical and horrifying — because they’re woefully unequipped and dangerous, especially when used to justify destructive policymaking. In the words of economist Richard Salsman:

“An economy is an intricate, delicate system, a stupendous, comprehensive latticework of interconnected contracts, of plans and sub-plans, markets and sub-markets, calibrations and expectations, retail chains and supply chains, prices and profits – a mosaic of real lives and livelihoods.”

As of 4:00pm yesterday (April 8th, 2020), a total of 14,696 U.S. residents have died from Covid-19, and death is never something to be treated lightly or disrespectfully — and I know people who do both. 

Here are some other figures for context:

• roughly 12,469 people in the U.S. died from the swine flu from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010. Unlike Covid-19, which mainly kills older people with preexisting health problems, 87% of people killed by the swine flu were under the age of 65.
• an average of 37,000 people in the U.S. have died from influenza each year over the past nine years.
• around 170,000 people per year in the U.S. die from accidents.

Deaths from Covid-19 are right now 7.1% of the annual fatalities from the flu and accidents. 

The main reason the flu takes tens of thousands of lives every year is that the these particular viruses — as opposed to Covid-19 coronavirus — mutate in ways that prevent people from becoming immune to them. Quoting the Journal of Infectious Diseases: 

“All viruses mutate, but influenza remains highly unusual among infectious diseases [because it mutates very rapidly]…. New vaccines are [therefore] needed every year to protect against it.”

Much is still unknown about the mutations of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but there are the indications that it doesn’t quickly mutate. This means it’s less likely to be an ongoing problem. From a March 2020 paper in a molecular biology journal called Embo, Michael Farzan, co-chair of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, wrote that once a vaccine for Covid-19 is developed, it “would not need regular updates, unlike seasonal influenza vaccines because the part of the virus that the vaccine targets is protected against mutation by a feature of its genetic material, or RNA.” The same point applies to naturally acquired immunity.

The Atlantic, Vox, and even Forbes promptly turned the truth of this matter on its head by confusing the general nature of coronaviruses with that of Covid-19. There are different types of coronaviruses, of which Covid-19 is caused by just one.

“Coronaviruses are a family of RNA viruses that includes some common cold viruses. These viruses tend to mutate rapidly, but Covid-19 does not share that trait. [It] does not mutate rapidly for an RNA virus because, unusually for this category, it has a proof-reading function in its genetics” (ibid).

When the history of coronavirus is written, the heroic work of Helen Y. Chu, a flu researcher at the University of Washington, will be worthy of recognition.

This infuriating account comes from LeapsMag.com:

In late January, Chu was testing nasal swabs for the Seattle Flu Study to monitor influenza spread when she learned of the first case of COVID-19 in Washington state. She deemed it a pressing public health matter to document if and how the illness was spreading locally, so that early containment efforts could succeed. So she sought regulatory approval to adapt the Flu Study to test for the coronavirus, but the federal government denied the request because the original project was funded to study only influenza. 

Aware of the urgency, Chu’s team bravely defied the order and conducted the testing anyway. Soon they identified a local case in a teenager without any travel history, followed by others. Still, the government tried to shutter their efforts until the outbreak grew dangerous enough to command attention. 

Needless testing delays, prompted by excessive regulatory interference, eliminated any chances of curbing the pandemic at its initial stages. Even after Chu went out on a limb to sound alarms, a heavy-handed bureaucracy crushed the nation’s ability to roll out early and widespread testing across the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention infamously blundered its own test, while also impeding state and private labs from coming on board, fueling a massive shortage. 

The long holdup created “a backlog of testing that needed to be done,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist who is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. 

 In a public health crisis, “the ideal situation” would allow the government’s test to be “supplanted by private laboratories” without such “a lag in that transition,” Adalja says. Only after the eventual release of CDC’s test could private industry “begin in earnest” to develop its own versions under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization. 

In a statement, CDC acknowledged that “this process has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked, but there is currently no backlog for testing at CDC.”  

Now, universities and corporations are in a race against time, playing catch up as the virus continues its relentless spread, also afflicting many health care workers on the front lines. 

Hospitals are attempting to add the novel coronavirus to the testing panel of their existent diagnostic machines, which would reduce the results processing time from 48 hours to as little as four hours. Meanwhile, at least four companies announced plans to deliver at-home collection tests to help meet the demand – before a startling injunction by the FDA halted their plans. 

[Read the rest of the article here.]

And why hasn’t Taiwan shut down its economy?

Geographically, it’s very close to the Chinese mainland, and yet relatively few people in Taiwan have been infected. The same is true of Singapore and Hong Kong.

How did Taiwan and the others — South Korea included — achieve this? It wasn’t through coercion and force but just the opposite: by allowing the free flow of knowledge and the voluntary action that this knowledge fosters — more informed people able because of this to more wisely choose.

As Javier Caramés Sanchez and William Hongsong Wang recently wrote:

“At the moment in Taiwan, the infection has been completely contained despite being one of the countries with the highest risk of suffering a pandemic, given that the Republic of China (ROC) is very close to the Chinese mainland (the People’s Republic of China (PRC)). Until January there were flights between Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and the epicenter of Wuhan, China. However, as of March 21 there were only 153 infected at the same time that Europe, far away from the Chinese mainland, has more than ten thousand affected by the coronavirus. However, in Taiwan and other parts of Asia, including Singapore and Hong Kong, no massive mandatory quarantine or containment has been applied so far.

“The first cause of Taiwan’s success is the transparency of information, which stopped the rapid growth of infection. The containment in Taiwan has been carried out with relatively high transparency. As early as December 31 of last year the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Taiwan began to take serious the potential danger of the Wuhan pneumonia, informing citizens every day about the developing trends of the infection and its status. The information provided by the Taiwanese authority also includes whether the infected in Taiwan contracted the illness from overseas input, which helps people take measures to protect themselves in a timely manner. In the constant press conferences, the Taiwanese government provides different options and recommendation that people can choose to adopt voluntarily but are not imposed coercively. The abundant information provided continuously has allowed individuals to make their own informed and balanced decisions under conditions of uncertainty. In contrast, the governments of the European Union countries reacted slowly and as late as February did not provide sufficient information about the potential pandemic, making the situation difficult to handle.

Voluntary Decision-Making and Cooperation among Individuals and Private Sectors 

The type of quarantines established by the Taiwanese government are mostly self-quarantines. The Taiwanese government acknowledges that it is crucial to rely on people’s voluntary actions to resist the pandemic. As we have noted above, most cases of contagion in Taiwan come from outside and are almost always detected at the border.Taiwanese people’s voluntary self-protection is effectively suppressing the spread of the coronavirus in their country…

“As the Austrian school of economics demonstrates in the calculation theory of socialism, no central planning body has the capacity to organize society based on coercive mandates. The main reason is that the central planner is unable to obtain all the necessary information to organize society in this way, as information has subjective, creative, dispersed, and tacit qualities. This principle is fully applicable to the containment of a pandemic. Individual responsibility along with transparency of information are crucial to stopping a pandemic. Taiwan makes a very good case for how individualism and voluntary cooperation work effectively in resisting the coronavirus pandemic.”

[Read the full article here.]

The alternative to the lockdown strategy in the fight against Covid-19:

The current coronavirus strategy of most governments is a recipe for a worldwide economic disaster. In many countries, the strategy of confinement and forcing shops to close is a sure-fire path to large-scale business failures. The cascade of economic and financial repercussions to come is likely to lead to another Great Depression.

The Costs of Prolongation 

Italy, for example, already had a 135 percent debt-to-GDP ratio before the crisis. It is hard to imagine how it will be able to borrow more without a commitment from other European countries to jointly be responsible for more Italian debt—something the northern European countries are still strongly opposed to. The ECB is already printing money like crazy, and another Greece-like situation will make it ramp up the printing presses even more. We have been down this path many times before, where the cure is clearly much worse than the disease. The German hyperinflation of 1921-1923 created a resentful, impoverished middle class which ultimately led to Hitler’s rise to power.

The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that originated in China is highly contagious. More than 80 percent of the patients show only mild flu-like symptoms but for the remaining 20 percent, mostly the elderly or people with preexisting conditions, the virus can be life-threatening. To save lives short term, the entire population in Europe is currently being held under house arrest and many businesses have been put into a pre-liquidation state by no longer being able to realize a profit due to inactivity.

The current strategy is not to stop the virus in its tracks but to spread out the contagion so that the peak is a level that will be more manageable for the health care system. Governments took the biased advice of health care professionals without a real weighing of all the pros and cons. This prolongation in time, however, will come at a steep economic and human cost.

Unemployment Correlates with Death

In the longer term, more lives will be lost if we continue this strategy. How many victims of financial ruin will end their own lives? In the modern era, for every one percent increase in the unemployment rate, there has typically been an increase of about one percent in the number of suicides. A study conducted by Brenner in 1979¹, found that for every 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate, mortality increased by 1.2 percent, cardiovascular disease by 1.7 percent, cirrhosis of the liver by 1.3 percent, suicides by 1.7%, arrests by 4 percent, and reported assaults by 0.8 percent (see here). How many lost lives out of 300 million in the USA does a 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent unemployment rate represent? 

The use of the free market gives another strategy to control the spread of the coronavirus. For example, we now have strong evidence from trials in France and China that in 75 percent of the cases a combination of two extremely well-known antimalarial drugs (hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin) can bring the viral load down to nearly zero after just six days (complications usually arrive after the 6th day). These drugs could make the latent effects of the Wuhan virus as mild for 20 percent as the other 80 percent, and they were recently cleared for use.

There are many other possible drug combinations that might offer similar results, but FDA and EMA regulations requiring long term testing make it much more difficult for these drugs to be available in time to treat the virus. Yet the world economy is at stake and we cannot sit and argue on the quality of the water while our house is burning down.

An obviously better solution than sinking the world economy into a great depression is a greater use of “laissez-faire.” The current lockdown strategy is a bleak choice of (allegedly) fewer short term deaths against a much larger long-term death toll. We must return to a business-as-normal situation as soon as possible. We need to free drugs from overbearing drug regulations and make them widely available (with appropriate dosages and warnings) everywhere at a market price without the need for a prescription. We need markets to be free so they can provide a wide choice of medications.

The argument is not for a non-strategy; it is for allowing voluntary choices to define the strategy. For example, the elderly might consider taking chloroquine preventively [as many doctors in New York City are]; it has a long history of being taken to prevent malaria in Africa. It is naïve to think that people can’t inform themselves and take appropriate actions for their own health benefits.

It is also naïve to think that businesses and people won’t adapt to the perceived threat. Restaurants can seat patrons several meters apart. Waiters and cooks can wear masks and gloves. There is an infinite number of innovative ways people will adjust. Just because we cannot imagine a voluntary market solution does not mean one does not exist. South Korea is an example to emulate. Instead of an authoritarian locking down of its people, it took a much more libertarian approach to the problem and is already showing promising results.

(Link)