Policy

Policy articles analyzing social and public policy including impacts on economics, open dialog, and social life. Articles on the topic of policy at Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages.

the new normal

The Downside of the New Normal

By / / / 9 minute read / Articles
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The world has changed, and overall, it is not for the better. We have changed. Our government has changed. Our values have changed. Covid-19 has given us an unjust legacy of new ways of thinking, new values, and new expectations. It is overall, an unjust system. It is an unrighteous system. It is a system that exacerbates inequality, rewards conformity, and ensures division. The values it promotes are a cancer that will spread through the fabric of our nations and our hearts. Our children and grandchildren will stand in judgment over us if we survive at all. 

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pandemic management

Nothing Like This Ever Happened Before

By / / , / 3 minute read / Articles
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A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. 

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exploding hand sanitizer

And Now the Problem of Exploding Hand Sanitizer

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Compounding the issue was the challenge of dealing with hazardous waste. Disposing of sanitizer should be treated with the same caution as other hazardous waste, but the process is expensive and tedious. This daunting task was magnified by several fires involving vast quantities of unsellable hand sanitizer across the country in the past year.

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pandemic lockdown policy

The Plan: Lock You Down for 130 Days

By / / , / 4 minute read / Articles
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Imagine the early days of the next pandemic, with public health and the media fomenting fear of a new pathogen. The impetus to close schools, businesses, churches, beaches, and parks will be irresistible, though the pitch will be “130 days until the vax” rather than “two weeks to flatten the curve.” When the vaccine finally arrives, the push to mass vaccinate for herd immunity will be enormous, even without evidence from the rushed trials that the vaccine provides long-lasting protection against disease transmission.

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threats to liberty

Twenty Grim Realities Unearthed by Lockdowns 

By / / , , , / 14 minute read / Articles
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If you haven’t changed your thinking over the last three years, you are a prophet, indifferent, or asleep. Much has been revealed and much has changed. To meet these challenges, we must do so with our eyes wide open. The greatest threats to human liberty today are not the ones of the past and they elude easy ideological categorization. Further, we have to admit that in many ways the plain human desire to live a fulfilling life in freedom has been subverted. If we want our freedoms back, we need to have a full understanding of the frightening challenges before us. 

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cdc director

New CDC Director Is Another Lockdowner 

By / / / 4 minute read / Articles
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We are all hoping for a clean repudiation of these policies, and even a flip of the narrative such that participating in this disaster would be a mark against people in terms of career development. We are nowhere near that point yet. It’s the opposite. The regime is still hiring and promoting out of the lockdown party for the future. They cannot admit error and are working to make sure they never have to do so. 

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fraying order

The Fraying of the Liberal International Order

By / / , / 9 minute read / Articles
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To no one’s surprise, the rising and revisionist powers wish to redesign the international governance institutions to inject their own interests, governing philosophies, and preferences. They also wish to relocate the control mechanisms from the major Western capitals to some of their own capitals. China’s role in the Iran–Saudi rapprochement might be a harbinger of things to come.

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Remdesivir protocol

Why Are Hospitals Still Using Remdesivir?

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Alas, the federal government insisted that if hospitals wanted to get paid, they had to treat Covid patients with Remdesivir. The fact that this drug was made by their good friends at Gilead Science and everybody was getting rich from the deals they cut had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. It was all done for love of the people. But just to make sure that Remdesivir could attain its current billion-dollar status, the feds incentivized hospitals with a 20 percent boost to the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir. 

Why Are Hospitals Still Using Remdesivir? Read Journal Article

threat is not incentive

A Threat Is Not an Incentive

By / / / 6 minute read / Articles
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With Trudeau’s recent press conference in which he claimed to have never coerced people into compliance, we have entered a doublespeak world worse than anything the “fake news” and “truthiness” era of Trump could have imagined, where words neither signify anything permanent nor offer any real meaning on which the powerless can rely. 

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rights gone

And Just Like That, Your Rights are Gone

By / / / 8 minute read / Articles
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Here in the US, the “government creep” that happens into your life is gradual. It oozes its way into your liberties, at first slowly, as they inch their way in, bit by bit. Then you awaken one day, and suddenly your rights are gone. This is what I’ve been hearing and seeing happen for years now, but especially the past three+ years of the COVID19 mania.

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biology of administrative state

The Biology of the Administrative State

By / / , / 12 minute read / Articles
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Using strategies found in nature to find analogies for complex political and cultural organizational strategies has merit. It opens up new ways of thinking about human society and social structures. So, can we use biology to predict how these organizations will react on the world stage in the future? 

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republican

The Illusion of Republicanism

By / / , , / 17 minute read / Articles
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The open society is also dependent on a positive narrative of freedom and self-determination. As an open society, however, it must be open in terms of how – and thus by which values – this narrative is justified. That is to say, it has to accommodate a pluralism of narratives which agree in the conclusion of implementing in society the moral obligation for every person to respect the right to self-determination of every other person.

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