Based on Mill’s arguments, the classical liberal tradition toward contagious diseases refuses the right of authorities to oblige individuals to be tested on suspicion. It also opposes the confinement of individuals exercising their individual rights.
John Stuart Mill on Contagious Diseases and the Law Continue Reading
Finally we come to the biggest problem of all. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule?
If the authorities in the West make politicizing medicine a policy, it could quickly destroy the doctor-patient trust beyond repair. We should never allow what the CCP did in China happen in the free world. We still have some time. We should remain aware and be willing to fight to preserve the integrity of modern medicine.
Eventually, a consensus will emerge that the Coronavirus response was, like the Vietnam War, a colossal, politically-driven, panic-driven, intergenerationally unjust, deeply destructive overreaction that caused far more harm than they prevented.Often—and certainly regarding both Vietnam and Coronavirus—treading lightly would have been far better than intervening so aggressively and foolishly. Far less would have been far more.
Covid Policy Tactics Were Borrowed from the Vietnam War Continue Reading
China’s leaders visit as much hardship on their people as they want, whenever they want. The global COVID containment system, like the global communist system, is itself propaganda; though the brutality is real, individual human beings are mere set pieces in service to a narrative with a goal that was never obtainable.
What lockdowns and mandates have done to society is a painful truth, and one that we will be dealing with for many years. As much as we all just want it to go away, and as much as we all have great cause to celebrate this day, as much as the real of the mask mandate represents a symbolic end, no one should lose sight of the deeper problem: all of this happened to us, and not only to us but to billions of people the world over.
From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing.
Here’s Why No One Wants to Talk About Sweden Continue Reading
Is liberalism a lost cause? Many say so. Many today dream that it would stay gone, forever doomed to be regarded as a failed experiment in a world longing for authoritarian control whether by the right, the left, the technocratic elite, or something else. Demoralized and depressed by so much “shock and awe,” and living in times of ubiquitous surveillance and unrelenting diktat, many others are inclined to give up the dream of freedom completely.
We can see the long arm of history reaching from the times of the Black Death to modern epidemics, where coercion and state control are accepted by a terrified public and conveniently deemed by a power-hungry elite to be the only acceptable way to combat natural disasters, even at the risk of tremendous and unnecessary collateral damage.
Looked at through the prism of Germany, war is the destruction of that which economic growth builds. Worse, war is the destruction of the very human capital without which there is no growth. Freedom is the path to economic revival.
After Disaster: The Case of Post-War Berlin Continue Reading
There are so many questions and far too few answers. This one junket is just the beginning but it is a massively important one. We know now that the idea that China managed the virus well is a complete myth (it did not “demonstrate that the infection can be controlled”). The countries that locked down less or not at all had better outcomes in every area: health, economics, culture, and education.
What Happened on the Junket To China in February 2020? Continue Reading
The free world is stuck tallying the costs of its catastrophic foray into totalitarianism. Most of these costs were predicted well before the policies were ever implemented. Hundreds of millions have gone hungry. An entire generation of children has been abused and traumatized. Young people were robbed of some of their brightest years. Small businesses and those who depended on them lost their livelihoods. Trillions of dollars were transferred from the world’s poorest to its very richest.
