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.

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When Haircuts Were Illegal

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Let us not forget those months when the haircut was illegal. When governments finally allowed them, it didn’t allow blow dryers and made customers follow arrows on the floor and use only “touchless” payment methods. That’s pandemic control in a nutshell. What a disgrace this entire period was to science, rationality, human rights, and freedom.

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What Covid Containment Has Done to Our Children

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For the past two years, what Western governments have done to the next generation — all in the name of keeping them safe, of course — has been calamitous. Instead of trying to ameliorate problems for our children that were already clear, well-documented and steadily worsening over time, in March 2020 the authorities began to perform particularly gruesome social experiments on them. What kind of generation will result?

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Doing Good by Hammering the Poor

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Two years into the Covid-19 event, there are no excuses left for perpetuating these harms, no possibility of denying their existence. It is past time that the staff, and staff associations, of international organizations found the spine to stand for the populations they claimed to serve, and demand that their organizations adhere to basic public health principles. 

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The Battle for Control of Your Mind

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These new digital surveillance and control mechanisms will be no less oppressive for being virtual rather than physical. Contact tracing apps, for example, have proliferated with at least 120 different apps in used in 71 different states, and 60 other digital contact-tracing measures have been used across 38 countries. There is currently no evidence that contact tracing apps or other methods of digital surveillance have helped to slow the spread of covid; but as with so many of our pandemic policies, this does not seem to have deterred their use.

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The Next Ten Battles

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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? 

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Revamping Our Dysfunctional Drug Approval Process

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Ending this cycle of perpetual disinformation requires revamping our dysfunctional drug approval process. An independent board free of pharma industry conflicts must be established to oversee trials for re-purposed medicines. Recommendations should be based on trials designed by impartial experts and actual results, not the desired ones, and policymakers or prescribers who ignore the findings should be held accountable.

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Must We Make a Case Against Dictatorship? 

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Very few people really want to live in a world in which the administrative state exercises the sort of unmitigated power that the CDC, the DOJ, and the Biden administration are now advocating as a continuation of how we’ve done public affairs for the better part of two years. That system has led to disaster. To continue it will lead to more disasters still. 

Must We Make a Case Against Dictatorship?  Read Journal Article