MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Shutdowns’

Doug Casey on the Real Story Behind Collapsing Supply Chains and What it Means for You

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2021

IBM used to have a motto: Machines should work; people should think. That’s great. Except most low-level employees doing dog work aren’t good thinkers. And in today’s world, a lot of them won’t even want to work. We’ll have an increasingly large number of what the communists call “useless mouths,” which can be easily transformed into what they call “useful idiots.” It amounts to a sociological time bomb.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-real-story-behind-collapsing-supply-chains-and-what-it-means-for-you/

by Doug Casey

International Man: The COVID hysteria and the shutdowns have caused supply chain disruptions. Central bankers and the media were quick to pin the blame for soaring inflation on these disruptions.

It seems like sophistry—a fallacious argument with the intention of deceiving. What is really going on here?

Doug Casey: Government officials always want to be seen as smart and action-oriented. Whenever anything untoward happens, they like to step up and pretend to be saviors.

Today’s public thinks that the government not only can but should run the world. The COVID hysteria is a custom-made excuse for them to do so. Unlike people who produce actual goods and services, however, government employees can only take other people’s property and tell them what to do.

Because the essence of government is coercion, they can solve problems only by creating more problems, and new problems provide excuses for more intervention, making the government look even more necessary.

COVID will go down in history as more than just another mass hysteria. It’s likely to be classed as an episode of mass psychosis. It’s the Salem witch trials times a million. It is even bigger than the Great Cultural Revolution in China. The public has been convinced that a dangerous—but relatively minor—virus is going to wipe out the planet, and now, on top of the virus, we have to deal with experimental vaccines, which are likely to be made mandatory, either directly or indirectly.

Vaccine mandates amount to lighting a stick of dynamite in a nitroglycerine factory. That’s true politically, economically, and perhaps medically.

International Man: In her recent comments about the state of the US economy, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said:

“There are also bottlenecks in certain supply chains, and mismatches between supply and demand have led to price increases. And yet, the data indicates that these mismatches will resolve with time as more businesses are able to keep up with demand.”

What do you think about the US government’s explanation for higher prices and the economic situation?

Doug Casey: Higher prices in today’s context are essentially a matter of monetary inflation—money printing. The Fed is printing up 120 billion dollars every month to fund the government’s deficits.

If you increase the number of dollars in circulation, of course prices are going to go up. And it’s not a so-called transitory phenomenon.

It’s interesting how “the narrative” works. A neat new word comes up and quickly becomes a popular meme. All the talking heads repeat it, reassuring each other. But this isn’t transitory; it’s growing and will get completely out of control. If they slow money-printing, they risk a wholesale deflationary credit collapse.

As far as the bottlenecks are concerned, the COVID hysteria created them. We still have about 9 million unemployed able-bodied people. Most were producing goods and services 18 months ago, but now they can stay at home, watch TV, and use their stimmy checks to gamble on RobinHood because they don’t have to pay rent. Something like 7.5 million households haven’t had to pay rent, and maybe 2 million haven’t had to pay their mortgages. Landlords are said to be out like $60 billion—they can sue, I guess, but that money has been frittered by deadbeat tenants, many of whom will soon be living on the street. But that’s another story…

In any event, less is being produced and more’s being demanded because of all the money being printed. But it gets worse. Modern economies have long and complex supply chains, where everything is expected “just in time” to cut inventories and improve efficiency. A problem arises if a force majeure eliminates a critical component. For instance, take a microchip for a car; cars have thousands of them, and if some are missing, the whole production line stalls. If Burger King can’t hire cooks because of COVID, meat-packers have to close production lines, cattlemen are stuck with cows, their feed producers don’t get paid, and ripples spread. “For want of a nail,” as Shakespeare noted in Richard III.

Mandates to be vaccinated—apart from creating antagonism—ensure many workers will quit, creating more bottlenecks.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Mandatory Covid-19 Vaccination Is Unethical and Unscientific | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2020

If a vaccine were clearly 100 percent efficacious and 100 percent safe, there would be no need for coercion; people would voluntarily line up to take the vaccine. Real vaccines are never 100 percent efficacious or 100 percent safe.

https://mises.org/wire/mandatory-covid-19-vaccination-unethical-and-unscientific?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=79c8cbe69c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-79c8cbe69c-228343965

The post-covid-19 world is a surrealistic nightmare. Businesses have been shut down arbitrarily without any evidence that these shutdowns save any lives. Tens of millions of Americans have become unemployed due to these shutdowns. There are already demands for mandatory covid-19 vaccination even before a vaccine is available. “Make vaccines free, don’t allow religious or personal objections, and create disincentives for those who refuse vaccines shown to be safe and effective.” This is an empty statement, as any vaccine available will neither be 100 percent safe nor 100 percent effective. Based on the initial study of the Russian vaccine in a very limited number of patients, it is not even clear that the vaccine will be safer than the disease itself.

Justifications for Mandatory Vaccines

If a vaccine is 100 percent effective, there is no justification for mandatory vaccination. Anyone who wishes to be protected can voluntarily take the vaccine. It would not be possible for someone declining the vaccine to harm someone who voluntarily takes the vaccine. Any call for a mandatory vaccine is an explicit admission that the vaccine is not 100 percent effective.

If a vaccine were 0 percent effective, there would be no justification for anyone taking the vaccine. There must be some intermediate percentage of effectiveness that maximizes the utility of mandatory vaccination. As the vaccine becomes more effective, fewer people can possibly benefit from mandatory vaccination. As the vaccine becomes less effective, a lower percentage of people who could possibly benefit from mandatory vaccination will actually benefit.

Utility of mandatory vaccination requires that the vaccine be effective in some of those who would not voluntarily take it (conscripted helpers), that the vaccine be ineffective in some of those who would voluntarily take it (beneficiaries), and the stipulation that conscripted helpers interact with beneficiaries, that these interactions lead to extra infections despite other means of prevention, and that the extra infections result in serious illness or deaths. That is a lot of ifs. There is no way to know what this optimal effectiveness would be. There is no way to know how many coerced vaccinations are necessary to prevent one infection or to prevent one serious illness or death (number to treat). Given that the number to treat cannot possibly be known prior to vaccination, mandatory vaccination cannot be ethical even by utilitarian calculation.

Concerns about Efficacy

An ideal vaccine induces an immune response that neutralizes a pathogen. The immune response can be antibody or T-cell activity. Claims that a covid-19 vaccine will prevent infection are not precisely true. Immune responses are not like antimissile defenses that destroy the missile before it reaches the body. A better analogy for an ideal vaccine would be the inducement of an immune response that prevents invading pathogens from breaching a wall using siege ladders or battering rams. The immune defenses cannot act until triggered by the presence of the invading pathogen. An ideal vaccine can neutralize the pathogen before it enters tissue cells, replicates within the tissue cells, enters the blood, invades distant organs, and causes clinical disease or death. The process of neutralizing the virus is not instantaneous, so while the battle between immune defense and invading pathogen is taking place, the host is technically infected and theoretically can transmit the pathogen to others. The best that we can hope for is to prevent clinical disease, and to minimize the duration of time that the host can transmit the pathogen to others.

Studies of the Russian vaccine did not measure efficacy in terms of prevention of clinical disease. The measure of “efficacy” used was detection of antibody response to the vaccine antigen. But there is no guarantee that the presence of antibody will prevent infection, prevent clinical disease, or prevent death. There is no evidence that severe disease or death from covid-19 is due to the absence of antibody. Studies on immune response in patients with covid-19 show that patients with severe disease have higher antibody levels than patients with mild disease. There are concerns that cytokine storm, a consequence of too much immune response rather than too little immune response, may be an important cause of death in covid-19. Cytokine storm is a potential side effect of any vaccine. As usual, the devil is in the details.

Concerns about Safety

Advocates for mandatory vaccination always stipulate that the vaccine be safe. What is safe? No vaccine can possibly be 100 percent safe. The elephant in the room is always: How large is the risk? The Lancet‘s study on the Russian vaccine studied 76 subjects. There were 38 in the vaccine group and 38 in the control group. A study of this size would not be expected to detect a vaccine fatality rate of 1/50. Fever occurred in 100 percent of one subgroup (20 subjects) and 31/38 subjects receiving the Gam=COVID-Vac agent. The ages in the study ranged from 18–60. The mean age of the subgroups was 25–32 years of age. Given the low age of the participants and the high percentage of asymptomatic covid-19 cases in young patients, it is not clear that the vaccine was even safer than infection with the virus.

Several decades ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to eliminate tuberculosis from the United States. The plan was to test everyone with PPD and treat all the positive PPD patients with a drug called INH. This plan had to be stopped after fifty patients died from liver failure due to INH toxicity. The liver toxicity was missed by small-scale clinical trials but was discovered by the much-larger-scale public health program. Neither the CDC nor the Food and Drug Administration can know that a treatment or vaccine is safe. The more people are vaccinated, the more side effects will be discovered. This is a huge ethical problem for mandatory vaccination. If everyone is required to be vaccinated, there will be no control group for comparison of safety and efficacy.

Advocates of mandatory covid-19 vaccination assure the public that the vaccine will be safe. Why was it necessary for government to indemnify the vaccine manufacturers against any liability for their vaccine prior to production? This is a clear case where one should ignore what government says and watch what government does. Government clearly knows something that is not being disclosed to the public. This is the opposite of transparency, yet anyone who opposes vaccination is labeled as stupid, uniformed, or inadequately concerned about their elderly neighbors.

Catastrophic Tail Risks

Some risks are not known ahead of time. Some risks will not be manifest until years later. Consider a hypothetical situation where a vaccine causes sterility ten years later. There would be no way to detect this risk ahead of time. Imagine that all of humanity is vaccinated with this vaccine. Humanity would be wiped out when the last person dies. No matter how small the risk for an existential threat, why would humanity take this chance over something as ordinary as a bad flu? Rather than treating antivaxxers as a threat to civilization, we should be grateful that some people will always volunteer to be controls in our medical experiments by declining treatment.

Markets Offer the Best Solutions to Complex Problems

How efficacious will the vaccine be? How safe will the vaccine be? We don’t even have an American vaccine to assess, yet authorities are calling for mandatory American vaccination. Even when vaccine options are available, we will have limited information about efficacy and safety. There are no objective answers available about efficacy and safety, so how can objectively correct decisions be made balancing risks and benefits? Markets offer the best solutions to these subjective questions. Just as markets determine value by the process of price discovery, the balance between risk and benefit of a vaccine can only be determined by how many people are voluntarily willing to take the vaccine.

Conclusions

Vaccines are a wonderful hedge against the risks of contagious disease. We are fortunate to have vaccines as options. However, mandatory vaccination can never be justified. If a vaccine were clearly 100 percent efficacious and 100 percent safe, there would be no need for coercion; people would voluntarily line up to take the vaccine. Real vaccines are never 100 percent efficacious or 100 percent safe. Judgments about risk versus benefit can only be made by individuals facing the risk. People who decline vaccines are not stupid, nor are they misinformed, nor do they have callous disregard for their neighbors. Advocates of vaccines who are disappointed by the number of people willing to accept the vaccine should stop blaming those who decline and reevaluate their poor abilities of persuasion. Vaccine skeptics are necessary as controls in ongoing assessment of efficacy and safety. Vaccine skeptics are necessary as a hedge against catastrophic errors by experts.

Author:

Gilbert Berdine, MD

Gilbert Berdine is an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and an affiliate of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.

Be seeing you

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Thanks to Shutdowns, Many Will Learn That Public Schooling Isn’t All That Essential After All | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 20, 2020

When people start experimenting outside educational norms, ivory-tower elites feel almost obliged to nudge their disobedient subjects back to the government schooling plantation. Harvard Magazine had to make sure that the rubes did not stumble upon the benefits of homeschooling by publishing a piece skeptical of the practice. The article put particular emphasis on Elizabeth Bartholet’s perspective, the faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, and her call for “a presumptive ban on the practice” in the Arizona Law Review.

https://mises.org/wire/thanks-shutdowns-many-will-learn-public-schooling-isnt-all-essential-after-all?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=e04e082419-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-e04e082419-228343965

While some of America’s most demagogic politicians try to exploit the COVID-19 outbreak, some Americans are trying to make the most of their de facto state of house arrest.

Government-imposed lockdowns have resulted in the shutdown of a number of schools across the nation. During this period some schools have gone online, while others have closed up indefinitely. Society is conditioned to believe that children cannot possibly be able to receive an education under such circumstances. After all, education can only take place in a classroom, at least in the social planners’ view.

However, some families are daring to do the unthinkable by experimenting with homeschooling. Counter to the opportunistic political class, which views every crisis as a moment to undermine people’s liberties, a number of homeschooling proponents have flipped the script to promote homeschooling. What better time to do so, when most families are stuck at home and don’t even know when schools will open up again.

Even in times of uncertainty, people have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to experiment and try different methods without the tutelage of central planners. Unfortunately, we live in a political culture in which voluntary alternatives to state-dominated institutions never show up on the chattering class’s radar. Public education happens to be one of the rituals in the American civic religion that one dares not question lest one is burned at the stake of public opinion.

When people start experimenting outside educational norms, ivory-tower elites feel almost obliged to nudge their disobedient subjects back to the government schooling plantation. Harvard Magazine had to make sure that the rubes did not stumble upon the benefits of homeschooling by publishing a piece skeptical of the practice. The article put particular emphasis on Elizabeth Bartholet’s perspective, the faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, and her call for “a presumptive ban on the practice” in the Arizona Law Review. Bartholet invoked some of the most egregious forms of newspeak by suggesting that homeschooling is “essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18.” In her ever so enlightened view, the very thought of homeschooling is “dangerous.”

There’s a lot to break down in Bartholet’s antihomeschooling screed, but let’s focus on her assertion that homeschooling is “authoritarian.” This notion is risible. Such claims don’t even pass a laugh test when considering that the majority of the curriculum in contemporary public schools puts forward progovernment narratives when it comes to taxation, social welfare programs, war, and every other pillar of the modern-day managerial state. Parents voluntarily making educational arrangements in their children’s best interests is the polar opposite of authoritarianism, unless the definition of the word changed in our sleep.

Also, what does Bartholet have to say about the current public education system taking children away from their parents and subjecting them to more than fifteen thousand hours of school time over their K–12 careers? Some politicians don’t even think this amount of time locked up in school is enough. For example, California senator Kamala Harris proposed extending the school day to ten hours. Curious minds would like to know what Bartholet thinks about Harris’s idea. I, for one, would not hold my breath at this point. For the high priests of public education, more time interacting with the state represents virtuous behavior, whereas unplugging from the public education grid is tantamount to heresy in the managerial priesthood’s view.

Academics such as Bartholet should spare us the sanctimonious hand wringing over the dangers of homeschooling. Bartholet is concerned that homeschooling is an impediment to a child’s right to a “meaningful education” and their right to “be protected from potential child abuse.”

Education reformer John Taylor Gatto has demonstrated in his life’s work that public schooling is anything but education. In fact, he has a book titled Weapons of Mass Instruction in which he eloquently makes the case that public schooling is designed to create malleable cogs in the machine and discourage any form of independent thinking.

As far as child abuse goes, I’d invite Bartholet to take a look at what’s taking place in America’s allegedly “safe” government schools. During the 2017–18 school year, approximately 962,300 violent incidents took place across the nation according to a study from the Institute of Education Studies. In this report, violent incidents consist of rape, other forms of sexual assault, robbery, physical attacks, and threats of physical attack.

Similarly, the Associated Press found approximately seventeen thousand cases of sexual assault committed by students from 2011–15. Moreover, the number observed in that period does not portray the full extent of the problem, because a significant number of sexual assaults are unreported. For example, some states don’t even track the stats, and those that do record have different standards for how they categorize sexual violence.

Although public schools may be “safe spaces” for politically correct curricula, they do not guarantee safe environments for students’ physical and mental health. According to a study from the US Department of Health and Human Services, 49 percent of school children in grades 4–12 reported being subjected to bullying by other students on a monthly basis, while 30.8 percent reported that they themselves engaged in bullying. How’s that for constructive socialization?

Allow me to come down somewhere in the middle: some children will require traditional schooling models, albeit in a privatized setting. On the other hand, other students will thrive in homeschooling environments. Markets serve to satisfy the demands of diverse sets of consumers, not the political desires of central planners. For the political left, who claim to be “pro-choice” and “diverse,” they sure love sticking to one-dimensional models for education. The idea of nonstate education is not a radical proposition.

Throughout American history, countless Americans have built parallel educational institutions without the central direction of the state. Americans have always found ways to get around government-imposed obstacles and will continue to do so despite the draconian measures that state governments have taken during the current pandemic.

American homeschooling has increased considerably in the last two decades despite the government barriers in place and the social pressure that naysayers exert to make sure America’s youth don’t veer away from the government schooling conveyor belt. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of homeschooled students doubled from 850,000 in 1999 to 1,800,000 in 2012. Such numbers will likely grow as more families begin experimenting with education at home.

I tip my hat to the homeschoolers. They’re the ones who are engaging in revolutionary acts by categorically rejecting the public school industrial complex. Hopefully, more Americans learn about the benefits of homeschooling while government shutdowns continue and millions of Americans are kept under house arrest. As for Bartholet, she can continue decrying homeschooling all she wants. The good news is that markets don’t care about the opinions of ivory-tower elites. Regular people are the ones in charge, and they determine how services will be provided. As long as Bartholet’s idea of homeschooling prohibition does not become a political reality, she can continue yammering on about the supposed authoritarianism of homeschooling in the confines of her Ivy League pedestal for all I care.

Millions of homeschoolers and other Americans who opt for nonstate education programs will go on with their lives without having to worry about what some Harvard elite has to say about their educational choices. Once the pandemic subsides, we should start focusing more of our time on a different public health problem. That is government schooling. I’ll gladly support a permanent lockdown of government schools; that way, we can prevent the statist mind virus from spreading even further.

Be seeing you

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Cloward–Piven Strategy -Are COVID-19 Lockdowns and Shutdowns The Answer To The Progressives Prayers?

Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2020

The overloading the welfare system part is well on it’s way.

Will proposed monthly COVID-19 payouts turn permanent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.[1]…

The authors pinned their hopes on creating disruption within the Democratic Party:

“Conservative Republicans are always ready to declaim the evils of public welfare, and they would probably be the first to raise a hue and cry. But deeper and politically more telling conflicts would take place within the Democratic coalition…Whites – both working class ethnic groups and many in the middle class – would be aroused against the ghetto poor, while liberal groups, which until recently have been comforted by the notion that the poor are few… would probably support the movement. Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe.”[4]

…

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »