Economics ⋆ Page 6 of 18 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Three Years to Slow the Spread Marked the Advent of Push-Button Tyranny

Jordan Schachtel / March 18, 2023 / Economics, History, Public Health / 5 minute read

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Covid hysteria and the three-year anniversary of 15 Days To Slow The Spread serves as the beginning period of a permanent scar resulting from government power grabs and federal overreach. While life is back to normal in most of the country, the Overton window of acceptable policy has slid even further in the direction of push-button tyranny. Hopefully, much of the world has awakened to the reality that most of the people in charge aren’t actually doing what’s best for their respective populations.

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The Administrative State Strikes Again: Monetary Edition

David Stockman / March 14, 2023 / Economics / 13 minute read

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They have done it again, and in a way that makes a flaming mockery of both honest market economics and the so-called rule of law. In effect, the triumvirate of fools at the Fed, Treasury, and FDIC have essentially guaranteed $9 trillion of uninsured bank deposits with no legislative mandate and no capital to make these sweeping promises good.

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Why Are the Chickens So Sick?

Joel Salatin / March 14, 2023 / Economics, Policy / 9 minute read

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The parallels between HPAI expert orthodoxy and covid orthodoxy are too numerous to mention. Fear porn is rampant in our culture. The HPAI worry feeds food worry, which makes people clamor for government security. People will accept just about anything if they’re afraid. Does anyone really think human cleverness is going to beat migratory ducks? Really? Think it through and then embrace a more natural remedy: well-managed decentralized pastured poultry with appropriate flock sizes.

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Where Is Occupy Silicon Valley?

Craig Pirrong / March 13, 2023 / Economics / 5 minute read

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Silvergate’s failure was not a scandal. SVB’s failure per se was not a scandal (except to the extent that our vaunted banking regulators failed to prevent the most prosaic type of failure). Again–the scandal is the politically tainted response that will have baleful consequences in the future, as the response virtually guarantees that there will be more SVBs in the future.

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Are You Being Frightened Not to Travel?

Jeffrey A. Tucker / March 8, 2023 / Economics, Government, Policy / 6 minute read

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Let us hope that the lockdown years were aberrant but it would be wiser to see them as a possible template for what some sectors of elite society truly do have in store. And with Covid, the key to compliance is always and everywhere the same: fear.

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Theorists vs. Practitioners

Jeffrey A. Tucker / March 7, 2023 / Economics, Philosophy / 7 minute read

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Theory without a reality check can make the world unlivable. This is because theorists can build beautiful models that hide grave errors, intentionally or not, and there is no means by which their mistakes are revealed until you test them against the real world. You never want them in charge of the whole project.

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The AMA Said Trust Your Doctor on Smoking

Kevin Homer / February 10, 2023 / Economics, History / 5 minute read

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Doctors who opposed smoking faced ridicule from their colleagues. Dr. Alton Ochsner, a renowned surgeon and sentinel voice warning of the dangers of tobacco, began publishing on the connection between smoking and lung cancer in the early 1940s. His 1954 book Smoking and Cancer: A Doctor’s Report was negatively reviewed in prominent medical journals, characterized as a medieval model of logic that belongs in the nonscience section of a library. Prior to his appearance on Meet the Press, Dr. Ochsner was told he could not discuss the relationship between smoking and lung cancer on air.

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Amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations: An Annotated Guide

David Bell / February 1, 2023 / Economics, Government, Law, Policy, Public Health / 37 minute read

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The amendments to the IHR are intended to fundamentally change the relationship between individuals, their country’s governments, and the WHO. They place the WHO as having rights overriding that of individuals, erasing the basic principles developed after World War Two regarding human rights and the sovereignty of States. In doing so, they signal a return to a colonialist and feudalist approach fundamentally different to that to which people in relatively democratic countries have become accustomed. The lack of major pushback by politicians and the lack of concern in the media and consequent ignorance of the general public is therefore both strange and alarming.

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The West Must Never Again Go Totalitarian

Joakim Book / January 26, 2023 / Economics, Policy / 7 minute read

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We might still have food on the shelves — though of worse quality and at much higher prices. We might still have the ability to move and work and travel, but heavily circumscribed, always at risk of canceling and always with papers showing the number of needles in your arm, or your scarred heart tissue. Nobody is torturing us (yet anyway) and for the most part we have some semblance of rights and freedoms remaining. ut we’re closer to that horrific totalitarian world today than we were, say five years ago.

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Where Did All the Workers Go?

Bret Swanson / January 20, 2023 / Economics / 8 minute read

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How can you generate far more deaths in 2021 – ascribing them to unvaccination – with a dramatically smaller number of unvaccinated people? In 2021, perhaps 20-40% of these group life insureds were unvaccinated. In 2020, 100% of them were unvaccinated, yet mortality barely rose. The math doesn’t come close to working.

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Technocratic Dystopia Is Impossible

Robert Blumen / January 17, 2023 / Economics, Policy / 16 minute read

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Grand utopias cannot be realized because, while imagination is unconstrained reality has limits. What is a dystopia other than the role of an NPC in someone else’s utopia? In this case, the utopia is the dream of psychotic elites who imagine that they can have the end products of mass cooperation without the open society that enables it. Much damage can be done in the attempt, but it is only a question of how far it can get before it cancels itself.

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What a Local Alternative Is Really Like

Christine Black / January 15, 2023 / Economics, Society, Technology / 10 minute read

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Demand for local processors has swelled in the last three years because shutdowns and lockdowns scared people about food sources being jeopardized and supply chains disrupted, so they sought local alternatives. With economic uncertainties looming, families and friends processing their own, or neighbors’, farm animals may become more common.

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