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Lockdowns: Immoral, Illegal, and Ineffective – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 16, 2020

The immorality of the lockdowns is evident from many perspectives (such as the non-aggression principle of libertarians). Here I will focus on the Ten Points of the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics developed in the wake of Nazi crimes during WWII. This list is in terms of a medical experiment, but as implied above we are all guinea pigs now.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/ira-katz/lockdowns-immoral-illegal-and-ineffective/

By Ira Katz

To lockdown a nation to prevent the spread of an infectious disease is a medical intervention never tried in the history of the world before 2020 and then almost immediately employed throughout most of the world. This observation alone is worth in depth consideration. Here I will make the case that, considered as a medical intervention, lockdowns are immoral, illegal and ineffective.

Immoral

The immorality of the lockdowns is evident from many perspectives (such as the non-aggression principle of libertarians). Here I will focus on the Ten Points of the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics developed in the wake of Nazi crimes during WWII. This list is in terms of a medical experiment, but as implied above we are all guinea pigs now.

  1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
  2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
  3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
  4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
  5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
  6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
  7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
  8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
  9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
  10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

Clearly, the most obvious and important violation of lockdowns is of point 1 and the related point 9. Lockdowns are applied without consent and nobody is allowed to opt out. Point 2 is also violated. More fruitful approaches are available as explained in the Great Barrington Declaration. Point 3 is not directly applicable, but does highlight the fact that our rulers are flying blind with no animal or human pilot results to guide them (more on this below). The repugnant nature in which the lockdowns have been applied often are aimed to create physical and mental suffering and injury (for example, fear is always induced) violating point 4. Point 6 is also important to emphasize. What is the real importance of this problem. To me the fabrications and frauds of the Covid story were evident in the WHO declaration of the pandemic in March. The comparison of the infection fatality rate between Chinese hospitalized patients for Covid and the general population for flu was pure fraud. It is clear from this UK radio interview that the epidemiologists who have concocted this intervention have not done anything to quantify the negative effects violating point 7.

Illegal

I am not a lawyer so I will rely on Lord Sumption’s (the former supreme court justice) dissection of government illegality in the UK as a model of how governments have been acting. Furthermore,  it does not take a lawyer or health professional to note the violations of the Bill of Rights in the US.

Herein I will emphasize the more focused legal norms of the medical community. The fundamental basis of regulatory affairs is to assure, based on evidence from in vitro, ex vivo, in vivo preclinical and clinical testing that all medical interventions (pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures) are both effective and safe. The gold standard of evidence is the controlled, randomized clinical trial (CRCT). Furthermore, this testing should be assessed for all groups affected; men and women, different age groups, different race and ethnic groups. The lack of CRCTs for other Covid related interventions has been the common critique of the medical community against, for example, hydroxychloroquine. My key point is that no CRCT has been performed to assess the efficacy or safety of national lockdowns. The fact that such a trial is even difficult to imagine makes the case stronger not to apply this blunt instrument.

The fact that CRCTs are often severely compromised is not relevant to my argument here.

Ineffective

I noted above that there is no CRCT to prove the effectiveness of national lockdowns. Nonetheless, we do have data on the experience of the different countries (and US states) that have employed lockdowns, with the important case of Sweden as a control. Getting all of the data (which is always suspect today) into a form for easy comparison is an enormous task that government officials refuse to perform. Tom Woods has been collecting graphs from internet sources that should be required viewing by all citizens for their own wellbeing. I reproduce one of those graphs here that alone makes a devastating case for ending all national lockdowns.Not only did lockdowns not reduce the first wave in Europe, they have set us up for the second wave.

I am sure most readers will have already noted that a similar analysis can be applied to other Covid responses such as mask mandates and vaccinations.

The Best of Ira Katz Ira Katz [send him mail] lives in Paris and works as a research engineer for a French company. He is the co-author of Handling Mr. Hyde: Questions and Answers about Manic Depression and Introduction to Fluid Mechanics.

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Good News: Covid Is Driving More Parents to Homeschool | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 7, 2020

Perhaps what’s more important for Americans is to focus more of their time and energy on activities they can actually control, namely taking charge of children’s education and not handing them over to the state for roughly seven hours a day, or even ten hours a day, if Kamala Harris had her way.

https://mises.org/wire/good-news-covid-driving-more-parents-homeschool?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=322bd3c7e4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-322bd3c7e4-228343965

José Niño

There might not be a lot to cheer about in 2020. With rioting, looting, and draconian lockdowns, America seems to be on the precipice of social unraveling thanks to misguided policy decisions and the culture of divisiveness fomented by political elites and the media class.

But in any moment of crisis, there are always new avenues for innovation that make people better off. Yes, private individuals can take advantage of precarious situations and turn them around for good purposes. Just look at homeschooling.

In a previous article, I noted that Americans should use the current lockdown mania to explore distinct educational options as opposed to clamoring for schools to be reopened. Americans might actually be getting the memo.

According to certain estimates from Gallup, the percentage of children participating in homeschooling is expected to double based on figures from 2019 to 2020. Further, public schooling has witnessed a concomitant drop in enrollment, with enrollment rates going from 83 percent in 2019 down to 76 percent in 2020.

Parents have every reason to pull their children out of public schools. These institutions are not exactly safe learning environments, nor are they run on a fiscally sound basis. A study from the Manhattan Institute found US per pupil spending has surged in the last fifty years, going from $4,720 in 1966 to $13,847 (in 2018 dollars) in 2016.

Private education is usually viewed as a luxury for the rich. While posh private options such as the Exeter Academy exist, many religious schools provide budget alternatives for families disenchanted with the current school system. The average Catholic school only charges about $8,000 per student, while private schools of other religious denominations charge roughly $10,000. Just like any service available in the private sector, there are diverse choices for families of all economic standings. The same cannot be said about one-size-fits-all public schools, which continue to have money thrown at them regardless of performance.

The education preferences of Americans vary from family to family. Not all parents will turn to private schooling, so many pursue the homeschooling route. Nevertheless, the reasons parents decide to exit the public school system tend to be similar irrespective of which alternative education model they choose. Some parents are sick of the political indoctrination their children receive at public schools. Others have become concerned about the viability of virtual education in addition to the uncertainty of school schedules. For many parents, jumping into the homeschooling realm seems like a risk, but it’s perhaps well worth it after weighing other options.

While the chaotic nature of the current lockdowns and the social unrest across the nation will make many Americans shudder, trying times are when entrepreneurs begin to shine. We must remember that nothing in our world is static. No matter the obstacles that the government and other institutions place in front of us, history has repeatedly shown that enterprising individuals find ways to satisfy the desires of the masses and improve their living standards. Change is the natural order, and the state does an excellent job of propping up moribund institutions that are in need of a facelift.

In one of his more underrated works, Bureaucracy, economist Ludwig von Mises acknowledged the inexorability of change and observed why it’s important for societies to embrace it if they desire to make economic progress:

The actual world is a world of permanent change. Population figures, tastes, and wants, the supply of factors of production and technological methods are in a ceaseless flux. In such a state of affairs there is need for a continuous adjustment of production to the change in conditions.

Public schools have functioned as taxpayer-subsidized daycares where parents can take the easy way and drop their kids off for eight hours a day to receive a subpar education. Nowadays, you can add in a large dose of cultural radicalism thanks to the introduction of the 1619 Project historical revisionism to numerous schools’ curricula. The public schooling skeptics, who have insisted for years that public schools serve as indoctrination centers, don’t look so crazy once people become aware of how ensconced political correctness is in schools. Handing young people over to the state was always a risky proposition. Countless families are starting to see firsthand how far the radicalization rabbit hole has gone. A good portion likely doesn’t want to take the risk of having their children completely brainwashed and will pull them out of modern-day indoctrination centers. Better to do so late than never.

A pivot to nonstate education is not a radical concept by any stretch of the imagination. There are strong residual instincts for alternative education methods among Americans. It’s usually forgotten that compulsory public education has not always dominated American education. Private schooling, homeschooling, and localized forms of public education have been used by Americans throughout their history. It wasn’t until mass public education entered the picture during the Progressive Era—the very period that gave birth to the administrative state—that mass compulsory education began its viral spread nationwide.

The current pandemic environment has opened up new approaches to schooling such as co-ops, learning pods, and unschooling. Despite what critics say, homeschooling is not as uniform as advertised. Parents have lots of choices at their disposal during a time when public schooling is becoming exceedingly cumbersome (as if it weren’t so in the first place).

There is reason to believe the recent wave of first-time homeschoolers may not be a temporary development but rather a budding sign of an educational realignment that is unfolding before our very eyes. The path toward any semblance of economic sanity or limited government is not going to be linear, frankly. When we look at the way markets work, it involves humans recognizing problems and muddling through with solutions that satisfy people’s desires. Oftentimes it takes external shocks to the system to effect change.

Given how the modern-day administrative state has rendered most political elections nothing more than political theater, the very act of exiting the public school system is a much more decisive expression of political action. Forget casting ballots—which will usually ends up favoring candidates who do nothing of substance to roll back public administration—the fact that more Americans are looking for other education options could yield much larger profreedom results than conventional politics.

It’s still up in the air whether Americans will completely follow through with their public school exodus. But if there’s a high-yield form of political activity that can be undertaken now, it’s getting children out of the public education system altogether. Doing so is a much more effective way of bringing about political change than punching a ballot every four years in what’s constantly marketed “as the most important election of our lifetime.”

Perhaps what’s more important for Americans is to focus more of their time and energy on activities they can actually control, namely taking charge of children’s education and not handing them over to the state for roughly seven hours a day, or even ten hours a day, if Kamala Harris had her way. Much more could be achieved by giving public education the cold shoulder than by putting all the eggs in the electoral politics basket. Author:

Contact José Niño

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook or Twitter. Get his premium newsletter here.

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Faceless parents, fearsome world: Covid-19 restrictions enact sinister form of child abuse that may destroy entire generation — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

Yet, rather than call for a stop to what amounts to institutionalized child abuse, they have merely suggested countries prepare for the coming demand for mental health services, sure to be a bonanza for Big Pharma as children who take psychiatric drugs tend to end up on them for life.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/505089-lockdowns-masks-children-develop/

Helen Buyniski

Helen Buyniski

is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

Draconian Covid-19 control measures are depriving children of the social contact they need to develop mentally and physically into functional adults. Even so, we are told these restrictions protect the vulnerable.

Experts have acknowledged that young children returning to in-person classes after a semester or more of lockdowns and isolation will be playing academic catch-up. However, the literature on education’s “New Normal” is noticeably light on the psychological ramifications, especially for the group most severely impacted by these measures: very young children and infants whom the Covid-19 response may have barred from reaching critical developmental milestones. Are these kids to be sacrificed on the altar of the Great Reset?

After all, it isn’t uneducated mommy-bloggers gaslighting parents into believing they can raise a normal healthy child in the bubble-like isolation prescribed by most of the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. No less than Harvard University has encouraged parents to hold “virtual playdates” for their kids, as if Skype and Zoom are valid alternatives for the critical immunity-building practice of playing outside in the dirt and swapping germs with other kids.

The university also suggests teachers and parents “incentivize” mask-wearing in order to “reinforce the social norm” – despite limited  evidence for health benefits and the still-unresolved issue of whether children are even at risk from the novel coronavirus. While there is conflictingevidence on whether masks actually reduce viral transmission, they do prevent children (and adults, for that matter) from reading each others’ facial expressions, a disaster for very young kids still learning nonverbal social cues.

Even the Centers for Disease Control warns against putting face masks on children under two years of age, acknowledging that carbon dioxide builds up inside and preverbal children are unable to communicate if they can’t breathe. The WHO discourages masking up kids under five, referencing not just safety but the “overall interest of the child,” and warns of the “potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development” between the ages of six and 11.

The long-lasting psychological effects of covering children’s faces, then, can be far more insidious than the simple safety concerns. Barring kids from learning empathy and emotional interaction via facial expressions could have a lasting impact on their intellectual development, and a persistent atmosphere of fear is known to severely disrupt intellectual and emotional development, especially in young children. Trapped in isolation with their stressed-out, fearful parents, children marinate in that anxiety until it becomes their own “new normal.” That constant state of fear can hamper their ability to interpret emotions and interact with others.

Distinguishing faces from non-facial images is one of the first things infants learn, specifically being able to spot their mother and by the age of one, babies are taking action based on the facial expressions of adults around them. It remains important later in life, too – studies have shown that being able to read facial expressions (“social referencing”) is strongly correlated with academic performance. But children being born in the Covid-19 era may be whisked away for a Covid-19 test and only given back to Mom when she’s safely “masked up” – and sometimes not even then. 

The Brookings Institute even acknowledged that social referencing is a key developmental stage for babies – only to push the issue aside by telling worried parents they could conquer the problem masks present to their developing child with a few games of peekaboo. Children’s TV powerhouse Sesame Street has even tried to make social isolation palatable to its young audience with muppets (who wash their hands compulsively, talk on Zoom calls, and talk up the virtues of “video playtime,” which is “a lot of fun” and “makes us feel better.”

Disgusting indoctrination and propaganda directed at children from where else? Sesame Street!!https://t.co/zIuiI8RvQf— Jeff Wyatt (@jntwyatt) October 23, 2020

But child psychologists admit that kids who grow up unable to see the faces of those around them will have a very difficult time navigating social situations or even expressing their own emotions, and “virtual playtime” is no substitute for the real thing. Like emotion-muffling mask mandates, lockdowns are likely to have lasting negative effects on children’s mental and physical health, they warn. 

Adding insult to injury, statistics suggest there may be no logical reason to subject children to these traumatizing behavioral controls. Aside from a handful of widely (some might say excessively) publicized cases, children have been largely spared the complications associated with Covid-19 infection, as multiple studies have confirmed and the media establishment has grudgingly reported. Even a study that claimed kids under five years old might carry 100 times as much virus as adults had to concede that this did not translate to showing symptoms or transmitting the virus to others. Depriving them of the social interaction and fear-free atmosphere that are critical to their development into functional adults thus appears to serve no public health purpose.

Even the World Economic Forum, which has been one of the loudest champions of lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, and other responses heavy on fear and light on evidence, has acknowledged the pandemic constitutes the “world’s biggest psychological experiment,” warning that prolonged isolation will lead to an explosion in “trauma-related mental health disorder.” Yet, rather than call for a stop to what amounts to institutionalized child abuse, they have merely suggested countries prepare for the coming demand for mental health services, sure to be a bonanza for Big Pharma as children who take psychiatric drugs tend to end up on them for life.

The future for these kids looks very dark indeed. What will it take to wake their parents? Sesame Street goes to the psych ward?

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : No Vaccine for Tyranny

Posted by M. C. on November 3, 2020

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/november/02/no-vaccine-for-tyranny/

Written by Ron Paul

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO ‘s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!

Slaoui is just the latest “expert” to endorse forcing the American people to relinquish their few remaining scraps of privacy to stop coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have urged development of a digital certificate for those vaccinated for coronavirus. People without the certificate would find their liberty severely restricted.

Those who think that the new surveillance system will be limited to coronavirus should remember that Social Security numbers were only supposed to be used to administer the Social Security program. They should also consider that the PATRIOT Act’s expansion of warrantless wiretapping was supposed to be limited to stopping terrorists. However, these powers have been used for a wide variety of purposes. Whenever government is given power to abuse our rights for one reason it will inevitably use that power to abuse our rights for other reasons as well.

Fauci and Gates’ digital certificate could, and likely will, be expanded to include proof individuals have received a variety of other vaccines and medical treatments. The digital certificate could even extend to monitoring a person’s lifestyle choices on the grounds that unhealthy habits make one more susceptible to diseases.

The digital certificate could also be tied to the REAL ID program to deny individuals who have not been vaccinated the right to travel. It could also be combined with a future mandatory E-Verify system to deny unvaccinated individuals the right to hold a job. Those who consider this “paranoia” should consider Britain is already developing a covid passport.

Liberty lost in the “war on covid” will not be voluntarily returned when the coronavirus threat ends — assuming the government ever stop moving the goal posts and declares the coronavirus threat is over. Instead, the people must be prepared to take back their liberty from the politicians. Fortunately, we still have the ability to do so by the peaceful means of educating our fellow citizens and pressuring our elected officials to reverse course. We must all do what we can to use these peaceful tools before we are in a “dark winter” of authoritarianism.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.


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COVID-19 Lockdowns Are In Lockstep With The “Great Reset” – Activist Post

Posted by M. C. on October 24, 2020

Who benefits from global lockdowns that are destabilizing all facets of our society? The following four “great” undercurrents may provide a clue.

We have entered a “new normal” where Pyongyang, North Korea, affords more ambulatory freedom than Melbourne, Australia. While rioting and mass demonstrations by assorted radicals are given a free pass – even encouraged by leaders in the West – Facebook posts questioning lockdowns are deemed subversive.

https://www.activistpost.com/2020/10/covid-19-lockdowns-are-in-lockstep-with-the-great-reset.html

By Dr. Mathew Maavak

In October 2019, a pandemic simulation exercise called Event 201 – a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – concluded that a hypothetical new coronavirus may end up killing at least 65 million people worldwide within 18 months of an outbreak.

When COVID-19 coincidentally emerged from Wuhan two months later, scientists were rushing to generate similar alarmist forecasts using a variety of questionable scientific models. Researchers from the Imperial College London, for instance, approximated death tolls of 500,000 (UK) and two million (USA) by October this year. To those following the metastasis of the global vaccine mania, the Imperial model was predictably “tidied up” with the help of Microsoft.

While scientific models are admittedly fallible, one would nonetheless be hard-pressed to justify the endless string of contradictions, discrepancies and wilful amnesia in the global pandemic narrative. In fact, one should question whether COVID-19 even deserves the tag of a “pandemic”. According to the United States’ Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the updated age-group survival rates for COVID-19 happen to be: Ages 0-19 (99.997%); 20-49 (99.98%); 50-69 (99.5%); and 70+ (94.6%). The mortality rates are only slightly higher than the human toll from seasonal flu and are, in fact, lower than many ailments for the same age cohorts.

If the CDC statistics don’t lie, what kind of “science” have we been subjected to? Was it the science of mass-mediated hysteria? There are other troubling questions yet unanswered. Whatever happened to the theory of bats or pangolins being the source of COVID-19? Who was Patient Zero? Why was there a concerted media agitprop against the prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine that was backed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) no less? And why did Prof Neil Ferguson, who had led Imperial’s contagion modelling, repeatedly breach lockdown measures to meet his paramour – right after his recommendations were used to justify draconian lockdowns worldwide which continue till today?

Most damning yet, why are Western media and scientific establishments dismissive of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine? After all, Moscow’s credibility, both scientific and otherwise, is on the line here. In a real pandemic, nobody would care where an effective remedy comes from. The virus does not care about borders and geopolitics; so why should we politicize the origins of an antidote?

Perhaps what we are really dealing with here is a case of mass “coronapsychosis” as Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko aptly called it. Who benefits from global lockdowns that are destabilizing all facets of our society? The following four “great” undercurrents may provide a clue.

The Great Deflection

As the author had warned for more than a decade, the world is staring at a confluence of risk overloads, socioeconomic meltdowns (1) and a Second Great Depression. For the ruling classes, COVID-19 is fortuitously deflecting public attention away from the disastrous consequences of decades of economic mismanagement and wealth fractionation. The consolidation of Big Tech with Big Media (2) has created an Orwellian world where collective hysteria is shifting loci from bogeymen like Russia to those who disagree with the pandemic narrative.

We have entered a “new normal” where Pyongyang, North Korea, affords more ambulatory freedom than Melbourne, Australia. While rioting and mass demonstrations by assorted radicals are given a free pass – even encouraged by leaders in the West – Facebook posts questioning lockdowns are deemed subversive. This is a world where Australian Blueshirts beat up women, manhandle a pregnant woman in her own home, and perform wolf pack policing on an elderly lady in a park. Yet, the premier of the Australian state of Victoria remains unfazed by the unflattering moniker of Kim Jong Dan.

The corona-totalitarianism is unsurprisingly most pronounced in the Anglosphere and its dependencies. After all, these nations are staring at socioeconomic bankruptcies of unprecedented proportions vis-à-vis their counterparts. Even their own governments are being systematically undermined from within. The US Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11 to combat terrorism, is now providing $10 million in grants to organizations which supposedly combat “far-right extremism and white supremacy”. This will further radicalize leftist malcontents who are razing US cities and its economies in the name of social justice. There is, however, a curious rationale behind this inane policy as the following section illustrates.

The Great Wealth Transfer

While the circus continues, the bread is thinning out, except for the Top 0.001%. Instead of bankruptcy, as recent trends indicated, Silicon Valley and affiliated monopolies are notching up record profits along with record social media censorship. US billionaires raked in $434 billion in the first two months of the lockdown alone. The more the lockdowns, the more the wealth accrued to the techno-elite. As tens of millions of individuals and small businesses face bankruptcy by Christmas, the remote work revolution is gifting multibillion dollar jackpots to the likes of Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). Azure (Microsoft) and AWS (Amazon) cloud eco-systems, among others, have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.

In the face of such runaway wealth fractionation, panoptic contact tracing tools from Big Tech are increasingly employed to pacify restive populations. And of course, to prevent a second, third or Nth wave of COVID-19 for our collective good!

In the meantime, Big Banks, Big Pharma, Big Tech and other monopolies are getting lavish central bank bailouts or “stimulus packages” to gobble up struggling smaller enterprises. COVID-19 is a gift that never stops giving to a select few. But how will the techno-oligarchy maintain a degree of social credibility and control in an impoverished and tumultuous world?

The Great Philanthropy

Oligarchic philanthropy will be a dominant feature of this VUCA decade (3). According to a recent Guardian report, philanthropic foundations have multiplied exponentially in the past two decades, controlling a war chest worth more than $1.5 trillion. That is sufficient to bankroll a horde of experts, NGOs, industry lobbies, media and fact-checkers worldwide. Large sums can also be distributed rapidly to undermine governments. The laws governing scientific empiricism are no longer static and immutable; they must dance in tandem with the funding. Those who scream fake news are usually its foremost peddlers. This is yet another “new normal” which had actually predated COVID-19 by decades.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is a prime example of how oligarchic philanthropy works. Since 2000, it has donated more than $45 billion to “charitable causes” and a chunk of this is designed to control the global media narrative. The Guardian, rather tellingly, credits the BMGF for helping eradicate polio despite contrary reports of wanton procedural abuses, child death tolls and poverty exploitation which routinely mar the foundation’s vaccination programs. Bill Gates even interprets vaccine philanthropy in terms of a 20-to-1 return on investments, as he effused to CNBC last year.

As for the BMGF’s alleged polio success, officials now fear that a dangerous new strain could soon “jump continents”. After spending $16 billion over 30 years to eradicate polio, international health bodies – which work closely with BMGF – have “accidentally” reintroduced the disease to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

Poverty, hunger and desperation will spawn a tangible degree of public gratitude despite elite philanthropy’s entrenched bias towards elite institutions and causes. By the Guardian’s own admission, “British millionaires gave £1.04bn to the arts, and just £222m to alleviating poverty” in the 10-year period to 2017. Contrast this with the annual $10 billion earmarked by the philanthropic pool for “ideological persuasion” in the US alone. The rabble is worth their weight only for the potential havoc they can wreak.

There is enough money floating around to reduce our cities into bedlams of anarchy as seen in the United States today. (It will only get worse after the Nov 3 US presidential elections). The crumbs left over can be delegated to threadbare charities. One only needs to reflect on soup kitchens in the post-1929 Weimar Republic. The most popular ones were organized by the Nazi party and funded by wealthy patrons. The march towards a new order has a familiar historical meme. The new Brownshirts are those who terrorise citizens for not wearing masks, for not being locked down in their pens, and for simply supporting a political candidate of choice. Even children who do not follow the oligarchic narrative are not spared!

The Great Reset

A great pruning will inevitably occur in the mega-billionaire club as whatever remains of the global corona-economy is systematically cannibalized. The club will get smaller but wealthier and will attempt to sway our collective destiny. Control over education, healthcare, means of communications and basic social provisions is being increasingly ceded by governments to the global elite. Governments colluding in the “new normal” will sooner or later face the ire of distressed masses. Politicians and assorted “social justice warriors” will be scapegoated once they have outlived their usefulness.

In this cauldron, the century-old technocratic dream of replacing politicians, electoral processes and businesses with societies run by scientists and technical experts (4) may emerge – thanks to advances in panoptic technologies. It will be an age for the “rational science of production” and “scientific collectivism”. The latter is eerily redolent of the Soviet sharaska (prison labs) system.

The production and supply of goods will be coordinated by a central directorate (5), led not by elected representatives (whose roles, where they exist, will be nominal anyway) but by technocrat factotums. Perhaps this is what the World Economic Forum refers to as the Great Reset. In reality, though, this idea smacks of a global Gosplan minus the Doctor Sausages for the innumerable many.

(Some emerging economies like Malaysia and India casually refer to technocracy as an infusion of greater technical expertise into bureaucracy. This is a misinterpretation of technocracy’s longstanding means and goals).

One intractable problem remains: will the emerging global oligarchy tolerate the existence of various deep states worldwide? Initially, both groupings may cooperate to their mutual benefit but their respective raisons d’être are too contradictory to be reconciled. One thrives on an “open society” run by obedient hirelings who will administer a global Ministry of Truth, while the other depends on secrecy and a degree of national sovereignty to justify its existence. Surveillance technologies ushered in by the ongoing “coronapsychosis” may end up being the deciding factor in this struggle.

After all, if social media posts by the President of the United States and the White House can be blatantly censored today, think of the repercussions for billions of people worldwide tomorrow?

An abridged version of this article was published by RT on Oct 14

References

1. Maavak, M. (2012), Class Warfare, Anarchy and the Future Society: Is the Middle Class forging a Gramscian Counter-Hegemonic Bloc Worldwide? Journal of Futures Studies, December 2012, 17(2): 15-36.

2. Maavak, M. (2019). Bubble to Panopticon: Dark Undercurrents of the Big Data Torrent. Kybernetes, Vol. 49 No. 3, pp. 1046-1060. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-06-2019-0403

3. Maavak, M (2021). Maavak, M. (2021). Horizon 2020-2030: Will Emerging Risks Unravel our Global Systems? Accepted for publication. Salus Journal, Issue 1 2021.

4. Elsner, Jr., Henry (1967). The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation. Syracuse University.

5. Stabile, D.R. (1986). Veblen and the Political Economy of the Engineer: the radical thinker and engineering leaders came to technocratic ideas at the same time. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol, 45, No. 1, 1986, pp. 43-44.

Dr Mathew Maavak is a regular commentator on risk-related geostrategic issues.

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The Absurdity of Covid “Cases” | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 2, 2020

Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose. If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection? When someone drives to work without incident or accident, do we create statistics about their exposure to traffic?

Mild or asymptomatic covid cases are effectively meaningless. The world is full of bacteria and viruses, and sometimes they make us a bit sick for a few days. There are millions of them in the world all around us, on our skin, in our nose and respiratory tract, in our organs. We are meant to live with them, which is why we all have immune systems designed to help us coexist and adapt to ever-changing organisms

https://mises.org/wire/absurdity-covid-cases?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=4e96eb02eb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-4e96eb02eb-228343965

Jeff Deist

Today’s headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump “tested positive” for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers “got” covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy. 

As always, the story keeps changing: Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.? Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown back in February, urging everyone to visit? Remember Fauci dismissing masks as useless? Why should we believe anything the political/media complex tells us now?

So what do these headlines really mean? What exactly is a covid “case”? 

Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, most US media outlets have been exceedingly credulous and complicit in their reporting. Journalists almost uniformly promote what we can call the “prolockdown” narrative, which is to wildly exaggerate the risks from covid-19 to serve a political agenda. They may be motivated to hurt Trump politically, to promote a more socialist “new normal,” or simply to drive more clicks and views. Bad news sells. But the bias is clear and undeniable. 

This explains why media outlets use the terms “case” and “infection” so loosely, to the point of actively misinforming the public. All of the endless talk about testing, testing, testing served to obscure two important facts. First, the tests themselves are almost laughably unreliable in producing both false positives and negatives. And what is the point? Are we going to test people again and again, every time they go out to the grocery or bump into a neighbor? Second, detecting virus particles or droplets in a human’s respiratory tract tells us very little. It certainly does not tell us they are sick, or transmitting sickness to anyone. 

Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose. If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection? When someone drives to work without incident or accident, do we create statistics about their exposure to traffic?

—A virus is not a disease. Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself—SARS-CoV-2—show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call “coronavirus disease.” 

The only meaningful statistics show the incidence of serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths. The single most important statistic among these is the infection fatality rate (IFR). Data collected through July shows that the IFR for those under age forty-five is actually lower than that of the common flu. The covid-19 IFR rises for those over fifty, but it is hardly a death sentence. And the data does not segregate those with preexisting health issues caused by obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. If we could see data only for reasonably healthy people under fifty, the numbers would be even more reassuring. 

Mild or asymptomatic covid cases are effectively meaningless. The world is full of bacteria and viruses, and sometimes they make us a bit sick for a few days. There are millions of them in the world all around us, on our skin, in our nose and respiratory tract, in our organs. We are meant to live with them, which is why we all have immune systems designed to help us coexist and adapt to ever-changing organisms. We develop antibodies naturally, or we attempt to stimulate them through vaccines, but ultimately our own immune systems have to deal with covid-19. The virus will always be out there waiting, on the other side of any lockdown or mask—so we might as well get on with it. 

From day one the focus should have been on boosting immunity through exercise, fresh air, sunlight, proper dietary supplementation, and the promotion of general well-being. Instead our politicians, bureaucrats, and media insisted on business lockdowns, school closures, distancing, isolation, masks, and the mirage of a fast, effective vaccine. As with almost everything in life, state intervention made the situation worse. We can only hope many governors are removed from office, either by impeachment or at the next election. Several, including Andrew Cuomo in New York and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, should face criminal charges for their lawless edicts. There is no due process exception for “public health.”

Lockdowns were never justified, either in terms of the covid-19 risk or the staggering economic tradeoffs, which will be felt for decades. They certainly are not justified now, given seven months of additional data showing that the transmission and lethality of covid-19 are not particularly worse than previous SARS, swine flu, or Ebola pandemics. We still don’t know how many of the reported two hundred thousand US covid-19 deaths were actually caused by the SARS-CoV-2 respiratory disease, or simply reflect people who died of other causes after exposure to covid-19. We do know that the harms caused by the lockdowns far outweigh the harms posed by the covid-19 virus.

We have had nearly eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in media. How much more will we accept? Author:

Contact Jeff Deist

Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, and as an attorney for private equity clients. Contact: email; Twitter.

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Elon Does Something Libertarian – EPautos – Libertarian Car Talk

Posted by M. C. on October 1, 2020

Vaccines have a very sketchy record for being safe.

Especially those rushed to market, as the vaccine for the Swine Flu was back in the mid ‘70s. A not-small number of previously healthy people became seriously – and permanently – sick after getting needled.

Journalists – there were such creatures, once upon a time – actually reported this.

Today, they report about the cases! the cases! – because their air-time is bought and paid for by the Needlers, who need to maintain the fear in order to get the mandate.

https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2020/09/30/elon-does-something-libertarian/

By eric
 
Many libertarians want to like Elon Musk. He just gave them a reason to.

Not because he has decided to stop relying on government to help him sell electric cars.  But because he came out against government forcing people to submit to injections.

Musk isn’t old – or sick – and neither are his kids. Therefore, he reasons, there is no reason to inject himself or them with a vaccine against a sickness that doesn’t pose much if any serious risk to themselves – but which is itself much riskier than the virus it might protect them from getting.

Unless it is a novel vaccine, the pending WuFlu vaccine will at best be partially effective – reports have it that the threshold for FDA approval is 50 percent effective – which means 50 percent not effective – and guaranteed to come with a higher risk of serious side effects than the risk of healthy/not-elderly people getting seriously sick from the WuFlu.

Vaccines have a very sketchy record for being safe.

 

Especially those rushed to market, as the vaccine for the Swine Flu was back in the mid ‘70s. A not-small number of previously healthy people became seriously – and permanently – sick after getting needled.

Journalists – there were such creatures, once upon a time – actually reported this.

Today, they report about the cases! the cases! – because their air-time is bought and paid for by the Needlers, who need to maintain the fear in order to get the mandate.

Which Elon has decided he’ll say no to.

Good for him – and for us.

Needling the healthy and not-elderly is as unnecessary as forcing people who can swim to wear a life-preserver whenever they go near the water. Worse, actually – because the latter would be merely silly while the former (needling the healthy) is objectively dangerous. They are trying to force healthy people to assume a greater risk than the risk of the thing which the needling is supposedly meant to protect them from.

With indemnity!

You know you’re in trouble when the government can force you to submit to a medical procedure that you not only can’t refuse but which you can’t sue for redress in the event you’re permanently damaged by it. It is like being told you must buy a car with a potentially lethal defect and if it maims or kills you, you can’t sue the company that made it.

Elon also publicly excoriated the “lockdowns” as “fascistic” – which is absolutely correct though perhaps not in the sense he meant it.

Fascism isn’t defined by goose-stepping and Jew-baiting. These are incidentals. Mussolini – who coined the term and based it on the Roman fasces, or lictor’s bundles, which were the symbol of state authority – defined it as the partnering of the state and corporate power.

 

Does this sound familiar?

The “lockdowns” – ordered by the government – did not lock down corporations. Both were declared essential (by themselves) and given leave to operate, while individual proprietors and small businesses were not. The government, in other words, advantaged the corporations – the “big box” retailers and grocery stores, etc. – and itself at the disadvantage of the not-corporate, with the obvious intent being not public health but the health of corporate/state power. If health were the true reason, the “lockdowns” would have applied generally.

 

Elon gets this, apparently. At least, partially.

He sees the “de facto house arrest(ing”) as “unethical” but does not see the immorality of partnering with the government to enrich himself via mandates that advantage his corporate power. He does not get that if the government can force people to buy electric cars because of assertions about climatological health then surely – logically – it can force people to take a Needle for the sake of assertions about public health.

Elon’s heart may be in the right place. But it’d be better if his mind were.

He is, at least, on the right track. Perhaps it will occur to him that it would be much more ethical – and far more moral – to build electric cars that sold on the merits, without resort to mandates.

He’s a smart guy – and a very rich guy. He could do it – and by doing it, show the world how it could be done. Offer “ludicrous speed” to those who can afford to pay for the indulgence, as Porsche and Ferrari have always done (without needing subsidies). But offer reasonable cost to those who need it.

And then they just might buy it – without being forced. Without forcing others to subsidize it.

If he were to do that, he’d actually be a libertarian  – instead of one who believes he is.

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: San Francisco Tech Firm Paying Employees $20,000 If They Leave San Francisco

Posted by M. C. on September 27, 2020

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2020/09/san-francisco-tech-firm-paying.html

This is how crazy it is getting for big lefty cities.

The San Francisco-based high-tech payments company Stripe is offering employees a one-time cash payment of $20,000 if they leave San Francisco, Seattle or New York, reports The San Francisco Business Times.

Firms such as Stripe have begun to realize that it is extremely expensive to have a large office presence in these lefty cities where local taxes are sure to spike and it is expensive to compete for employees 

The mad lockdowns instituted by the local governments in these cities ended up teaching these firms that it is not necessary to have employees all located together in one giant complex. That working at home for some does not cut productivity.

Stripe will still maintain a significant office presence in SF but the offer should be tempting to many. Stripe plans to pay employees up to 10% less if they leave the big cities but the combination of the $20,000 payment plus much lower costs for housing in most other parts of the country will make it a sound move for many.  

According to Bloomberg, VMware Inc. has instituted a similar policy, and Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. are also considering similar measures.

–RW

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Digital Currency Will Take Away the Independence of Every American – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 25, 2020

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/09/no_author/digital-technocracy-trumps-paper-money-democracy/

It Isn’t About BLM, Or Face Masks, Or Lockdowns, Or Even Vaccination – – It Is About A Digital Currency That Will Take Away The Independence Of Every American

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Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns If They Think They Can Get Away with It | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

Make no mistake, many politicians would love to impose lockdowns again, and indefinitely. After all, the power to micromanage the behavior of every business and household in the manner of covid lockdowns is a power undreamed of by even the most despotic emperor of old. It’s not a power a regime would abandon lightly.

https://mises.org/wire/governments-will-impose-new-lockdowns-if-they-think-they-can-get-away-it

This year’s stay-at-home orders and lockdowns imposed by governments on their populations represent a watershed moment in the history of the modern state.

Before March 2020, it is unlikely that many politicians—let alone many ordinary people—thought it would be feasible or likely for government officials to force hundreds of millions of human beings to “self-isolate.”

But it turns out governments were indeed able to force a sizable portion of the population to abandon jobs, religious practices, extended families, and community life in the name of “flattening the curve.”

Whether through fear manufactured by the news media or through outright threats of punishment, business owners shuttered their shops and offices, churches closed down, and schools abandoned their students.

Over time, most governments lessened their restrictions, largely out of fear that tax revenues would collapse and out of fear that the public would become unwilling to obey lockdown edicts indefinitely.

Those fears—not scientific objectivity—have been guiding the gradual loosening of lockdowns and lockdown-related restrictions in recent weeks. After all, in many jurisdictions—both in the USA and in Europe—cases and case growth are far above what they were back in March and April when we were told that high case totals absolutely required strict lockdowns. If case numbers are higher now than during the previous peak, why no new lockdowns?

Make no mistake, many politicians would love to impose lockdowns again, and indefinitely. After all, the power to micromanage the behavior of every business and household in the manner of covid lockdowns is a power undreamed of by even the most despotic emperor of old. It’s not a power a regime would abandon lightly.

But could they get away with it? This is a question every prolockdown politician is asking. For the extent to which lockdowns have been scaled back and lessened, we cannot thank any enlightenment or change of heart on the part of politicians. If lockdowns now seem to be receding, it’s because policymakers fear another round of lockdowns would be greeted with resistance rather than obedience. In short, the retreat of lockdowns is a result of an uneasy truce between the antilockdown public (which is by no means the whole public) and the prolockdown politicians. The politicians have conceded nothing in terms of their asserted authority, but they nonetheless fear greater resistance in the future.

Regimes Continue to Threaten More Lockdowns

Although they’re slowly backing off on full lockdowns for now, governments have been very careful to maintain that they retain the power to reimpose them—including full-on strict and ruthless lockdown—at any time. In some areas, this has already been done, such as in southern Australia and in New Zealand. In the state of Victoria in Australia, for instance, residents in recent weeks have been subject to strict curfews and even road closures preventing them from traveling more than a few miles form their homes. Those who dissent—such as a pregnant mother who was arrested for merely discussing an upcoming protest—are brutalized. Meanwhile, military personnel enforce martial law, dragging people from their cars and demanding they show their “papers.”

China continues to impose regional and partial lockdowns. Belgium, meanwhile, insists it may yet still impose “total lockdown.” Back in July, the UK’s Boris Johnson told the nation’s residents to follow the social distancing rules now or face harsher lockdowns in the future. Last week Johnson’s government announced strict new social distancing rules, prohibiting any gatherings of more than six people in most cases.

Nor have American politicians abandoned these newfound powers. In Utah, which did not impose a lockdown in March or April, the authorities are still threatening a possible future “complete shutdown.” Governors in states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, and Michigan have all threatened new lockdowns if the residents don’t do as they’re told.

(Only two governors, to my knowledge, have said they will not impose future lockdowns. Earlier this month, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed “we will never do any of these lockdowns again,” and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, which has never imposed a lockdown at all, has also said lockdowns are not on the table.)

In many cases politicians have substituted face masks and targeted lockdowns (of bars and nightclubs, etc.) in lieu of full stay-at-home orders. This limits public dissent by limiting the number of businesses and industries where people are thrown out of work and business owners are effectively robbed of their property. Fewer destitute or jobless voters likely translates into less active dissent.

This permanent embrace of emergency power is to be expected. Governments have long used crises as an excuse to expand government power, often with the glowing approval of the electorate. After the end of World War II, for example, the party platform of the British Labour Party explicitly sought to extend wartime economic planning indefinitely. The idea was that central planning had won the war and now it would “win the peace.” This meant a host of boards and commissions that would control everything from farming to housing.

But that’s just one example. As Robert Higgs has shown in his book Crisis and Leviathan, using wars and other crises to permanently expand state power is just standard operating procedure for countless regimes. It’s what governments do.

Governments Are Limited Only by the Public’s Resistance

On the other hand, governments are limited by how much the public is willing to tolerate. As Étienne de La Boétie has shown, all regimes—even authoritarian ones—are ultimately limited by public approval and obedience. Without public opinion on their side, regimes become constrained, even in a police state.

Ludwig von Mises built on this notion when he noted in his book Liberalism:

there has never been a political power that voluntarily desisted from impeding the free development and operation of the institution of private ownership of the means of production. Governments tolerate private property when they are compelled to do so, but they do not acknowledge it voluntarily in recognition of its necessity. Even liberal politicians, on gaining power, have usually relegated their liberal principles more or less to the background. The tendency to impose oppressive restraints on private property, to abuse political power, and to refuse to respect or recognize any free sphere outside or beyond the dominion of the state is too deeply ingrained in the mentality of those who control the governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion for them ever to be able to resist it voluntarily. A liberal government is a contradictio in adjecto. Governments must be forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people; that they could voluntarily become liberal is not to be expected.

In other words, governments don’t refrain from exercising ever more power unless they are prevented from doing so. But what did he mean by a government being “forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people”? Mises was very much a man who understood how states work in the real world. So it’s a safe bet that he didn’t think the public’s “unanimous opinion” was somehow magically transformed into a government limiting itself.

Rather, Mises understood that governments are limited by pressures applied by groups external to the state apparatus itself. These could take the form of widespread noncompliance, peaceful protests, or even armed resistance. But to think that governments will limit themselves without at least the fear of some form of resistance would be fanciful, to say the least.

And this is likely what is limiting governments in their dreams of ever-harsher lockdowns right now. We’ve already seen this dynamic in action in Serbia, for example, where the regime attempted to reimpose a nationwide lockdown. This proposal was greeted with both peaceful and violent protests. The state partially retreated and opted instead for much weaker regional lockdowns. Protests also continue to grow in Germany, and have even cropped up in London.

In the US, of course, protests of various types have appeared since April, and given the volume of anger over lockdowns and business closures expressed across a wide variety of media, it’s easy to see why state and local governments should expect trouble if they try another full-scale lockdown. One need only step out one’s front door in many areas to see countless examples of passive noncompliance and resistance to mask orders and social distancing decrees.

Complicating matters is the low state of public approval of police forces. It’s true that police tend to receive public support when they are seen battling rioters and thugs. But public support would likely wither quickly were the police unleashed on middle-class suburbanites who fail to follow stay-at-home orders.

If American governors and mayors try a new set of lockdowns, just how far will they willing to go to enforce them? Will they call in the national guard and open fire on middle-class dissenters? If police attempt to break into homes in the manner we have witnessed in Australia, things might turn out quite differently here. In situations like that, at least some residents will defend themselves with firearms.

Ensuring compliance will also become especially difficult as lockdowns empty the public purse. As the economy weakens, so will tax revenues, and public welfare programs can’t subsist on newly printed money forever. As local, state, and federal amenities and free money programs come up short of funds, it will become harder to buy off the voters with yet another government check.

Admittedly, governments can always double down on enforcement by imposing strict police states. This can work in the short term. But then what? Outside of places like China and Australia, it appears many regimes aren’t yet prepared to find out. But they’re not willing to concede defeat, either. The lockdown state will press the issue as far as the voters and taxpayers are willing to let it go.

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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