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.

Washington Post

No, Washington Post, the Experts Were the Whole Problem

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In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post’s editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.

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vaccine travel mandate

The “Best Available Science”: The CDC and the Vaccine Travel Mandate

By / / , , / 13 minute read / Articles
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Continuing to exclude unvaccinated noncitizens, non-immigrants from entering the United States is a policy that puts politics over science. Politicians claiming the opposite to be true are funded by the very industries that benefit most from continuing with such a policy. Their pushback against ending the mandate is justified by their faith in the “best available science” yet that science cannot be produced by the very institution on whom the continuation of the mandate rests. 

The “Best Available Science”: The CDC and the Vaccine Travel Mandate Read Journal Article

Clean vs. Dirty: A Way to Understand Everything

By / / , , / 15 minute read / Articles, Popular
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The clean vs. dirty distinction was once an indicator of class, perhaps a desiderata of germaphobic pathology, even a harmless eccentricity. But in 2020, the obsession became extreme, an aesthetic priority that overrode all morality and truth. It then became a fundamental threat to liberty, self-government, and human rights.Today this demarcation has invaded the whole of our lives, and it threatens to create a horrifying caste system consisting of those who enjoy rights and privileges vs those who do not and serve (at a distance) the elites. 

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spartans

What We Can Learn from Ancient Spartans about Courage

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The neo-fascists may (and probably do) think of themselves as putatively superhuman beings, but they are just as prone as any other group of people to squabbling among themselves, in this way undermining or derailing their plans. The ‘resistance’ to their unscrupulous programme of domination – that means, everyone who has taken up the fight against them – therefore has to remind themselves that, even when things look bleak, one has to remain steadfast, and courageous. 

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Lockdowns: Excerpt from the Announcement Speech

By / / , , / 15 minute read / Articles
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President Trump said well these bureaucrats came at  him from every side. They were all telling him what he had to do. He had the right instincts. He  knew that he shouldn’t close down the country. But he did it. He got rolled by his bureaucracy. 

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emergency declaration end

One Thousand One Hundred Thirty Five Days

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The Covid pandemic policies have had far-reaching impacts on our society. People now have lowered trust in public institutions, raised worries about privacy and freedom of speech, and the financial ramifications will persist for a long time. As we tally up the damage, it’s vital to draw lessons from these missteps so future responses are more balanced, open, and successful in tackling public health crises without compromising civic rights and public confidence.

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big pharma

Big Pharma’s Co-Pay Coupon Racket

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Drugmakers rely on shady promotional gimmicks to keep the cost of brand-name medicine high, and you’ve seen them in action. In the many, many, many television commercials you’ve seen for various drugs—and Big Pharma is the second largest advertiser by industry—consider how many mention a coupon the manufacturer offers. In fact, the share of brand-name prescription drug spending that included a coupon rose from 26 percent in 2007 to 90 percent in 2017.

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Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene

The Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene

By / / , / 11 minute read / Articles
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Because lies embraced our whole culture since 2020, and because public intellectuals for the most part did not stand up to the lies at the time, and because many even participated in the lies (hello, Sam Harris); since horrible things happened to those of us who did stand up to the lies — most public intellectuals at this moment cannot address the really important events of the recent past.

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congress

Congress Has a Leverage Point on Pandemic Policy

By / / , / 8 minute read / Articles
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Unlike the PREP Act and the other emergency pandemic powers, this one is set to expire at the end of September. In other words, absent any action, PAHPA and all its authority to wage biomedical warfare are finished, thereby providing House Republicans with tremendous leverage to clip the agency’s wings. How can Republicans move on from this disaster and reauthorize the agency that is responsible for the worst tyranny in American history?

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