Forget for a moment, if you can, all partisan noise and nonsense, whether Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Mike Pence, Alexandra Cortez, or any of the others:
We’re seeing before us right now in a more stark, unequivocal, dramatic fashion than ever before how little our lords and masters know about anything — which raises the inevitable question of why they get to dictate everything about our lives.
We’re seeing up close and personal a jaw-dropping example of a well-known political-economic principle:
Controls breed more controls.
Pay close attention. You will see things you’ve never seen before and let us hope you’ll never see again: economic principles played out simultaneously, in real-time, across an entire planet.
Here, among other things, is what you’ll discover:
When a government (any government) imposes large-scale controls that results in widespread shortages across an economy, that same government then consequently faces a choice: either repeal the controls or impose comprehensive rationing across the economy.
Quoting the economist Dr. Raymond C. Niles, in an article he wrote just today — and I absolutely implore you to read the following brief excerpt and process it:
The latter [rationing] was the course taken during both world wars and during our gasoline shortages of the 1970s when the gasoline price controls led to rationing.
The extraordinary government clampdown on economic life that we are enduring right now— in order to preserve hospital beds and the capacity of doctors and nurses — is the result, not just of the coronavirus, but of the severe restrictions on economic activity that have made our economy brittle and poorly-suited to adapt and respond to a natural emergency.
It is not a surprise that arguably the least resilient part of our economy — our medical system — is also the one most seriously hampered by a stultifying array of controls, such as: “certificate of need” rules that forbid construction of new hospitals and purchases of new equipment; widespread and comprehensive de facto price controls administered by the government via authorized prices paid by Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and other agencies; a “bleed over” of those price controls to the private medical insurance system, which has been regulated to death and bears no actual resemblance to insurance any more; and the licensing of doctors who (until limited exemptions were granted recently) were even prevented from working and saving lives across state boundaries in states where they were not licensed. This is just a partial list of the controls faced by our medical industry.
The full list is much longer.
And, of course, we have the anti-price gouging laws, which I have written about (“Anti-Gouging Laws Can Kill”), which have created artificial and avoidable shortages of the whole array of “PPE” (personal protective equipment) such as N-95 and other masks, gowns, sanitizer, gloves… you name it.
And then we have the CDC and FDA, whose only job it seems during this crisis is to delay and obstruct the production of tests and PPE, where each delay of even a day results in deaths. Yes, it is a just epithet to call the FDA the Federal Death Agency.
This is the context in which we face the coronavirus and it sets the stage for the subsequent choices we must make. Our government is not making the right choice of repealing these death-causing restrictions. It is only doing it in small, halting ad hoc steps and on a completely inadequate basis. The only proper choice for the government is to repeal all of these controls, or as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible.
If the government did that, the explosion in entrepreneurial activity — in production of tests, vaccines, cures, hospital beds, innovative new treatments, and an abundance of PPE and other life-saving equipment — would be monumental and it would save thousands of lives.
We are getting some of it, as doctors, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and everyday people, with shackles on and maybe in some cases partially removed by government, struggle and produce. But we could be doing so much more.
So, if we treat these governmental controls as a given, then what do we do?
I say that we cannot treat these controls as a given. The cure will be worse than the disease. We will wake up in the future, alive but shackled as government will have permanently arrogated to itself frightening new powers. That happens after every crisis. Some examples: The income tax was to be a temporary tax just to pay for World War I with a top marginal rate of 6%. Now look how it has become the permanent monster confiscator of our wealth.
The Federal Reserve Bank was created to deal with an “inflexible currency” and to avoid banking panics and downturns like the Panic of 1907. Instead, it became an octopus-like behemoth that caused, in no small measure, the Great Depression, and was the direct cause of our near-hyperinflation of the 1970s and, today, enables our government to spend as much money as it chooses and incur massive deficits without having to raise taxes.
The alphabet-soup of regulatory agencies, created in the 1960s and 1970s, continue to grow their tentacles into the economy.
What will government do when this pandemic is over and it has flexed its massive new control powers over us?
(Link)
A lot of people, myself included, think it possible (possible, I repeat) that coronavirus has been in the United States since at least late winter of 2019 — several people I personally know coming down with “a bug” in December (2019) and also January (2020) the symptoms of which were fever, shortness of breath, sudden body aches, dry cough, loss of smell and taste: essentially identical to what’s being reported for Covid-19.
This of course suggests that Covid-19 is already spread all throughout the population — many if not most people long-ago exposed, most without significant symptoms — which means that, if accurate, this entire atrocity exhibition has been totally pointless.
I say again:
We’re seeing before us now in a more stark, unequivocal, dramatic fashion than ever before how little our lords and masters know about anything — which raises the inevitable question of why they get to dictate everything about our lives.
Government is an agency of force. By definition, that’s what it is. Government is not inherently good. Government is inherently dangerous.