If the market will settle on gold or any other commodity as money the amount of this commodity is going to be in line with people’s requirements.
Given that a commodity that is selected as money is part of the stock of wealth the increase in the supply of such commodity is not going to set in motion the menace of boom-bust cycle. This should be contrasted with the increase in the money supply out of “thin air”.
Historically, many different goods have been used as money. On this, Ludwig von Mises observed that, over time,
[T]here would be an inevitable tendency for the less marketable of the series of goods used as media of exchange to be one by one rejected until at last only a single commodity remained, which was universally employed as a medium of exchange; in a word, money.1
Similarly, Murray Rothbard wrote in “What Has Government Done to Our Money,”
Just as in nature, there is a great variety of skills and resources, so there is a variety in the marketability of goods. Some goods are more widely demanded than others, some are more divisible into smaller units without loss of value, some more durable over long periods of time, some more transportable over large distances. All of these advantages make for greater marketability. It is clear that in every society, the most marketable goods will be gradually selected as the media for exchange. As they are more and more selected as media, the demand for them increases because of this use, and so they become even more marketable. The result is a reinforcing spiral: more marketability causes wider use as a medium, which causes more marketability, etc. Eventually, one or two commodities are used as general media-in almost all exchanges-and these are called money.
Through the ongoing process of selection, people settled on gold as their preferred medium of exchange. Some commentators, cast doubt that gold can fulfill the role of money in the modern world. It is held that, relative to the growing demand for money because of growing economies, the supply of gold is not growing fast enough. On this according to Insider from June 15, 2011,
Frank Shostak‘s consulting firm, Applied Austrian School Economics, provides in-depth assessments of financial markets and global economies. Contact: email.
An important objection is that, if government can force people to take a potentially dangerous vaccine to protect against a hypothetical harm to others, the same reasoning would support the imposing of many additional liberty violations. These could include, for example, “red flag” laws and other forms of gun control, restrictions on access to “extremist” ideas, or a system of mass surveillance to prevent possible future acts of violence. The argument that government can use force to prevent hypothetical harms renders restraint on government power meaningless.
Cook County, Illinois, Judge James Shapiro reached a new low in covid tyranny by forbidding Rebecca Firlit from seeing her 11-year-old son until she receives a covid vaccine. Judge Shapiro is not alone in abusing judicial power to force individuals to get vaccinated. Judges across the country have ordered defendants to get covid vaccines, sometimes as a condition of avoiding prison. This outbreak of judicial tyranny is a symptom of the authoritarianism pandemic that is the real threat to America.
Corporations are imposing requirements, including that employees show proof of vaccination, pay more for health insurance if they have not had a covid vaccine, and undergo regular (in some cases weekly) covid tests. An increasing number of state and local governments are requiring their employees and even people working in some private jobs to take covid vaccines, as well as imposing vaccine passport requirements on people generally.
President Biden has urged employers to implement vaccine mandates, and government is working with its big tech allies to develop “model” vaccine passports.
Government approved model vaccine requirements combined with government officials encouraging their adoption send the message to businesses that imposing vaccine requirements on their employees, and maybe their customers as well, is a good way to stay in the politicians and bureaucrats’ good graces.
An effective way for the US government to “encourage” adoption of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports is denying federal funds to businesses, states, local governments, and other institutions that refuse to require employees, customers, or other people to prove they are vaccinated. This will result in vaccine requirements while enabling government to claim it is not forcing vaccines on anyone.
President Biden is already planning for the US government denying Medicare and Medicaid funding to nursing homes that do not require their employees to prove they are vaccinated. This could result in staff shortages at nursing homes. A short-staffed nursing home poses a much greater risk to residents than a nursing home with a staff comprised of healthy, unvaccinated individuals. Texas is experiencing a nursing shortage thanks in part to hospitals firing unvaccinated nurses.
Health care workers have good reason to resist vaccine mandates. Many individuals have died or suffered other adverse effects — including miscarriages — after receiving a vaccine.
Some people try to justify vaccine mandates and vaccine passports by saying that, by risking infecting others, unvaccinated individuals endanger other people. However, the federal Centers for Disease Control recently admitted that covid vaccines do not prevent the spread of infections. In addition, the claim that we are having a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” relies on data collected from early in the year — before many Americans had taken covid vaccines.
An important objection is that, if government can force people to take a potentially dangerous vaccine to protect against a hypothetical harm to others, the same reasoning would support the imposing of many additional liberty violations. These could include, for example, “red flag” laws and other forms of gun control, restrictions on access to “extremist” ideas, or a system of mass surveillance to prevent possible future acts of violence. The argument that government can use force to prevent hypothetical harms renders restraint on government power meaningless.
It is imperative that we support the growing resistance to vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. We must also expand the resistance to covid authoritarianism to resistance to all forms of government infringements on liberty.
After Portugal, now Sweden has become the second European nation to ban travellers from the most vaccinated nation Israel. Sweden also banned the entry of citizens from the United States, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro, and North Macedonia.
What is the best way ahead? Less social justice. More plain old ordinary justice. Then reduced statism. “That government is best which governs least” is a truism for a good reason: it is tried and true.
All major problems can be fairly laid at the door of the government, particularly on the woke philosophy that energizes all too much of its behavior.
They take half the GDP away from us. Most of these funds are spent in wasteful ways: paying people not to work; welfare, which breaks up the family; subsidies to all and sundry. Worse, an awful lot of it is spent on inculcating regulations, licenses, dictates, which further reduces the ability of the private sector to create affluence. Maybe, without their “helping us,” our prosperity could be quadruple what it is now. In sharp contrast, during the feudal days, the lord required the serfs to work on his lands only two days per week, for a grand total tax rate of about 28%. This compares rather favorably to our above 50% tax take. True, there were other onerous requirements imposed upon the serfs, but still, this gives us pause as to how far down the garden path we’ve gone.
What would we do with these great riches were we to have them at our disposal?
One thing for sure would be to invest in weather control. The Ida storm has wrought havoc in southern Louisiana and has led to death and destruction in a large swath of states to the north and east of the Pelican State. In hundred years, maybe even fifty, cloud seeding technology could make this sort of weather outrage a thing of the past. What can bring this happy date a bit closer? For one thing, if we were much richer, a least a portion of that capital, human and physical, would be used for this purpose. For another, stopping affirmative action and going back to merit as the criterion for choosing our scientists, mathematicians, engineers, etc. would be a step in the right direction. Instead, wokester Harvard and its ilk are busily attempting to justify the quotas they impose upon very bright students who have the wrong skin color. The National Institute for Health is demanding that the laboratories of the nation “look like America” in terms of pigmentation if they want to be funded. Happily, the Mississippi Levies have not failed this time around, as they did during Hurricane Katrina. Then, they were under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of these flood protections to the present day. Had this portion of the economy been privatized, that would not have long endured. As philosopher-economist Thomas Sowell reminds us: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Another avenue for investment would be the battle against COVID. The Biden administration is imposing all sorts of regimentation on the citizenry while not doing very much at all to stem the invasion of this disease from carriers flooding through our southern border. It is complicit, too, in undermining merit in terms of laboratory membership — the very people upon whom we rely to innovate our way out of this mess. Instead, the powers that be are focusing their energies on canceling naysayers, lifting their medical licenses. They supposedly rely on “science” to justify their ham-handed orders, but this is the opposite of open-ended inquiry.
One of the problems in this regard is the doctor shortage. We hear tales of heroic physicians working around the clock into exhaustion. This is admirable. But why do we have so few people in the medical field? This problem, too, may be laid at the door of the government. They support and are complicit with the American Medical Association’s vicious practice of restricting entry to this sector of the economy.
Then there is the debacle of Afghanistan. The U.S. poured billions in treasure, and thousands of precious lives, into an attempt to turn that country into an Asian version of New Hampshire. They learned nothing from the failure of the French, and then our American forebears, to accomplish something similar in Vietnam, nor from the Russian decades-long failure in Afghanistan to impose institutions that are foreign to the Afghans. The U.S. military, instead of focusing on preparedness, turned its attention on a whole host of mission-irrelevant politically correct social justice concerns. Perhaps that is all to the good if it lessens U.S. adventurism abroad. Unfortunately, this is not bloody likely. This institution is like a small weak boy who is mouthy and derisive: not a good combination.
What is the best way ahead? Less social justice. More plain old ordinary justice. Then reduced statism. “That government is best which governs least” is a truism for a good reason: it is tried and true.
The lessons of such a panic are applicable to the modern-day amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as numerous times we have seen the state change its narrative. This has caused “shortages” in goods like toliet paper or hand sanitizer and in many grave cases the deaths of many in elderly retirement homes in their mismanagement of medical resources. This response has been worse than the initial pandemic exactly because of how the state responds, intensifies, and uses panics to its advantage.
While I was not alive to see the Y2K panic, looking back to it has always shined a light on how panics start and how often they are “making a mountain out of a molehill.” In the case of Y2K, the blame falls squarely in the lap of the government. Or more accurately, the governments of the world.
For those unaware of the Y2K phenomion, computers before the 2000s had laughably small memory sizes. This forced computer programmers to scrape the “bottom of the barrel” for megabytes by shortening code. This led to years of computers being identified by only the last two digits of the year, leading to worry among programmers of what happens when the year becomes 00 (2000), hence the name “Y2K bug.”
As expected though, the government never let a good crisis go to waste. In the United States, Congress passed the “Y2K Act” which created government-backed insurance for any “Y2K related problem,” getting rid of any financial liabilities it may incur. As well, $9 billion in total (around $14 billion today) was spent by the federal government.
Despite this heavy spending, it was not the government that fixed the bug and prevented “disaster.” They weren’t even the ones who identified the problem, as the first major identification was by a woman working for an insurance company in 1984. Entrepreneurs and programmers in the private sector seized on the issue and began to find remedies, with private sector spending in the U.S. on the issue being around $100 billion ($160 billion today).
You could say that the Y2K bug was actually a great moment for showing how effective entrepreneurs are in responding to a crisis compared to the government, but we don’t remember it as such because of how the government defined the narrative. President Bill Clinton and Congress continued with speech after speech and bill after bill to “address” the Y2K bug stressing “great danger” that could come from it. The media of course jumped in on that to help create a sense of panic in the United States and the world.
What is remembered from Y2K is the panic people had in response to it. People spent thousands on Y2K Survival Kits, literature, and gear that ended up being all for naught. Many had an intense and legitimate fear of “world-ending” scenarios, riots, nuclear war, etc that were all unfounded. But these scenarios were given fuel by media and government creating a panic that they did little to quell.
The lessons of such a panic are applicable to the modern-day amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as numerous times we have seen the state change its narrative. This has caused “shortages” in goods like toliet paper or hand sanitizer and in many grave cases the deaths of many in elderly retirement homes in their mismanagement of medical resources. This response has been worse than the initial pandemic exactly because of how the state responds, intensifies, and uses panics to its advantage. The situation becomes clear as you see how the effects of the pandemic hit countries with lower intensity on the freedom index.
What we can be sure from both waves of panic is that while there may be real concerns to be mitigated, the state is not only ineffective at mitigation, but often makes the panics worse by making “mountains out of mole hills.”
The NHS has published a blog on its official website called “Dear white people in the UK” which lectures Brits about their “white privilege” and says they should “be uncomfortable” about their “whiteness.”
Yes, really.
The article is written by Aishnine Benjamin, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion lead at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (not a real job).
It orders white people to read numerous far-left screeds about intersectionality and why white people should feel guilty about the color of their skin while telling them to shut up and “listen…to what black and minority ethnic people are saying.”
“Don’t say ‘I’m not political’ to excuse yourself from this conversation,” the text barks.
“Right now, ignorance isn’t an excuse. You can’t unsee what you have seen.”
That’s interesting given that all one can see in this article is outright racist hatred of white people thinly veiled in the garbled, quixotic rhetoric of social justice.
“Be uncomfortable,” the blog instructs white people, before asserting how “structurally racist systems” can only be properly understood by consuming numerous race-baiting books, videos and podcasts about how bad white people are.
The article then stresses that all of these messages should also be pushed on children before telling people to support Operation Black Vote, a leftist NGO.
“Diversity isn’t a fun to have it’s a must have,” the article aggressively ends.
Britain’s National Health Service — the taxpayer-funded, eternity-waiting-list for cancer patients but if you want your cock chopped off you’re right at the front health service — is now promoting racial Marxism to the nation. pic.twitter.com/ay6IpEkmVl — Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) September 5, 2021
While it’s easy to dismiss the blog as a meaningless exercise in performative white guilt, the situation becomes more ominous when you understand that the NHS can now literally deny health care to people it considers to be “racist” or “homophobic.”
Despite being notoriously terrible, the NHS is so venerated that it has all but replaced the church as the United Kingdom’s official state religion.
During the first lockdown, Brits were pressured to take part in a cringe-inducing weekly clapping sessions to show their appreciation for a health service that was apparently “overwhelmed,” but not overwhelmed enough to prevent nurses up and down the country performing Tik Tok dance routines for social media clout.
Some people who refused to take part were even publicly shamed by their community on Facebook.
As we previously highlighted, a prominent think tank published a report concluding that adulation for the NHS is not rational.
When Dr. Anthony Fauci confidently screamed at Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in July – calling him a liar for accusing him of funding so-called “Gain-of-Function” (GoF) research in Wuhan, China to make coronaviruses more transmissible to humans, the argument ultimately fadeddue to Fauci’s unsupported claim that the research didn’t technically fit the definition of GoF.
Now, thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Interceptagainst the National Institutes of Health (which were unredacted enough to toss Fauci under the bus), we now know that Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Peter Daszak, was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.
Peter Daszak (left), Anthony Fauci
While evidence of this research has been pointed to in published studies, the FOIA release provides a key piece to the puzzle which sheds new light on what was going on.
“This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19 (via The Intercept).
Wuhan Institute of Virology Shi ‘Bat Lady’ Zhengli toasts with Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak (emerging viruses group photo)
And as Rutgers University Board of Governors Chemistry Professor Richard H. Ebright notes, “The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.“
In short, Fauci lied to Congress when he denied funding Gain-of-Function (GoF) research.
Ebright summarized The Intercept‘s reporting in a Monday night Twitter thread:
“The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.” — Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) September 7, 2021
Continued (emphasis ours):
“The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.”
The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present.
(This had been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant. But this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of the 2017 grant.)
The materials confirm the grants supported the construction–in Wuhan–of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.
The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (“humanized mice”).
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses–one not been previously disclosed publicly–was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed…
…and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction–in Wuhan–of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus.
The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.
* * *
When asked in the replies where to find specific evidence on GoF research, user @SnupSnus replied:
the same page is also numbered page 11- whoever made all those numberings set us up for lot’s of confusion, “3.3.c humanised mouse experiments” — Simon Lackner (@SnupSnus) September 7, 2021
there is an easy clue; the acknowledgments section of the paper attached in Fauci’s panicked e-mails obtained via FOIA. this is the work “expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone”. pic.twitter.com/WbLIGDouRE — counterpopp (@counterpopp) September 7, 2021
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?” -The Intercept
In response to inquiries from The Intercept, EcoHealth communications manager Robert Kessler replied: “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to say.”
Stay tuned, things should get really interesting for Fauci and Daszak in the near future.
So we paid the CCP to develop the virus that they unleashed on the world…Not surprising…The media will probably dig into this now just to avoid the Afghanistan disaster but that’s not going away anytime soon either .. https://t.co/Ud9YKvmrTt — Marco Mazzocco, CFA (@MarcoMNYC) September 7, 2021
To review the history of EcoHealth, Fauci and Gain-of-Function research which we noted in March:
In 2014, Peter Daszak, president of New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, received a grant from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and others to research how bat coronaviruses can ‘evolve and jump into the human population.’
The grant’s initial funding of $666,442 began in June 2014 with an end date of May 2019, and had paid annually to the tune of $3.7 million under the “Understanding The Risk Of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” project. Notably, the Obama administration cut funding for “gain-of-function” research in October, 2014, four months after Daszak’s contract began, while the Wuhan Institute of Virology “had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions” for years under the leadership of Dr. Shi ‘Batwoman’ Zhengli, according to the Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin.
One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has called “heinous.”
…
The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period — from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020. -The Intercept
After Rogin exposed diplomatic cables last April expressing grave concerns over safety at WIV, he says: “many of the scientists who spoke out to defend the lab were Shi’s research partners and funders, like the head of the global public health nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak; their research was tied to hers, and if the Wuhan lab were implicated in the pandemic, they would have to answer a lot of tough questions.”
In short, Daszak – who has insisted the ‘lab escape’ theory is impossible, and that random natural origin via intermediary animal species is the only answer – has a massive conflict of interest.
@PeterDaszak on Gain of Function-experiments, Dec. 2019:
“You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily”
“… inserting the spike protein into a backbone of another virus”
“[…] insert these other related diseases and get a better vaccine.”
Furthermore, the biggest clue to SARS2’s zoonotic origins are those closest virus relatives in bat caves in Yunnan, China that have been frequently sampled by various labs over the past decade.
Why not search there first? — Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) March 10, 2021
Does this count as a form of self-investigation?
If you’re charged with investigating data/records that you were a part of, and you tell the rest of the team they don’t need to audit the records because you already know there’s nothing relevant in there and can close the case? pic.twitter.com/9JDPjEMOtr — Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) March 10, 2021
As Covid authoritarianism continues, breakthroughs of truth, courage and peaceful resistance abound. A FOIA request has revealed that Fauci lied about funding gain-of-function research. Massive resistance around the world against “vaccine passports” continues on. But there is also plenty of absurdity as the UK vaccines minister said that children could override their parents on getting the vaccines. Don’t miss today’s Liberty Report!
by Tyler Durden
