Policy

Policy articles provide in-depth analysis of social and public policy, examining their wide-ranging impacts on economics, social life, public health, individual liberty, evidence-based decision-making, and institutional accountability.

We cover critical areas such as healthcare and vaccination policies, pandemic responses and WHO, economic subsidies, national security strategies, withdrawals from international bodies, and pathways to reform that restore freedom, truth, and human dignity over centralized control.

All articles from Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages to support global access, foster international dialogue on governance and reform, and empower readers worldwide to challenge flawed interventions.

End These Travel Restrictions Now

End These Travel Restrictions Now

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We are turning back the clock: away from high civilization to a much lower form without a solid guarantee of even the freedom to travel, while giving up the dream of universal human rights. Confidence in a better world with more human connection is being replaced by isolation, fear, and compliance as guiding principles. The price will be very high.

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health care

Time to Rethink the Core Question: What Is Health Care?

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The health policy worldview determines its success only in the fact that they have controlled the individual health decisions. Any mistakes in policy will be taken into account in the next decision. There never is a policy failure as long as the decision makers remain in charge to tell us what is best. The individual worldview requires that each patient be treated uniquely, with a personal relationship with a doctor viewing their needs and desires as important and unique. This attitude is wholly counter to centralized control of all health care decisions. 

Time to Rethink the Core Question: What Is Health Care? Continue Reading

state-power-covid-crimes-4

State Power and Covid Crimes: Part 4

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With help from the media, social media and police, people were frightened, shamed and coerced into submission and compliance with arbitrary and increasingly authoritarian government edicts. The intense and unrelenting propaganda unleashed on the people by governments using sophisticated tactics of psychological manipulation and enthusiastically amplified by the media was astonishingly successful in a remarkably short time.

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CDC language police

The CDC Puts Itself in Charge of Language Too

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The problem is that the CDC evidently believes that there should be no social stigmas. That if one commits a crime, is in prison, is an addict, or is involved in behaviors that most find offensive or are illegal, it is not ok to use a term to directly describe that activity because societal judgement might hurt someone’s feelings.

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State Power and Covid Crimes: Part 3

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There are signs that some pivotal countries might be at tipping points in the dominant narrative of safe and effective vaccines. Eminent British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, an early promoter of Covid vaccines, now describes this as ‘perhaps the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetime.’ 

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State Power and Covid Crimes: Part 2

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How anyone can look at the Covid vaccination and mortality metrics of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan and still hold fast to the ‘safe and effective’ vaccine narrative is beyond comprehension. Instead, one more initially plausible hypothesis is that the behaviour of the virus is Covid vaccine-invariant, and a second hypothesis is that the vaccine may actually be driving infections, serious illness and deaths by some mysterious mechanism not yet identified by scientists – although some studies are starting to point the way. 

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State Power and Covid Crimes: Part 1

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Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.

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Fauci lied

Fauci Fibbed on the Day Everything Changed

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The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium. 

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government programs

The Growing Gap Between Reality and Pop Science

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Government programs need to be rigorously evaluated, particularly when they affect public health and individual rights. The objectives should be clear, whereas in this case they were vague and constantly shifting. And the outcomes data should be straightforward, whereas in this case they depend on complex and variable statistical processing of small samples.

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fifty questions

Fifty Questions to Which We Demand Answers

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Though many in positions of power would prefer that we forgot, the strict lockdowns that consumed the world in 2020 are extremely well documented. Above all, these lockdowns were a chilling demonstration of just how quickly western officials, policymakers, scientists, journalists, and soon entire populations could be convinced to adopt a degree of totalitarianism in their everyday lives. Until we have real answers as to how exactly they happened, and why, there’s no reason for any thinking citizen to have confidence in the current crop of officials who claim to represent them.

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political economy pandemic response

The Political Economy of the US Pandemic Response

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In this essay, written from a broad economics perspective that incorporates an understanding of incentives, institutions, information, and power, we address the following three broad questions: (1) What were the roles and responsibilities of our institutions when faced with a threat like Covid? (2) What were the costs and benefits of the response that transpired? (3) What is the need and potential for institutional and social reform?

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