Romer: The FDA’s Massive Damage To People’s Health and Wealth
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer provides "a recap with links about how the FDA responded to just a couple of issues since the start of the pandemic."Writes Romer:It might be time to review the massive damage that the FDA is doing by restricting the supply and use of tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.Massive? With enough tests, the US could have avoided the enormous cost that this virus is imposing – at least 200,000 excess deaths and $8 trillion in lost output.[...]Many accounts have noted how the failure of the virus test developed by the CDC delayed the US response to the virus. The fact that has not gotten as much attention is that although the FDA promptly approved the broken test from the CDC, it took an excruciatingly long time to approve tests that actually worked.Read The FDA's Perpetual Process Machine. Related articles:
Muhammad Ali Jr: Dad Would Have Hated ‘Racist’ Black Lives Matter
From "Muhammad Ali’s son says dad would have hated ‘racist’ Black Lives Matter" (NY Post):On the fourth anniversary of his death, Muhammad Ali’s only biological son says that his father would be against Black Lives Matter, calling the movement “racist” and the protesters “devils.”The legendary boxer and activist stood up against racism throughout his life, but Muhammad Ali Jr. says his dad would have been sickened by how the protests have turned to violence and looting after the death of George Floyd.“Don’t bust up s–t, don’t trash the place,” he told The Post. “You can peacefully protest.‘‘My father would have said, ‘They ain’t nothing but devils.’ My father said, ‘All lives matter.’ I don’t think he’d agree.”Of the BLM movement, Ali Jr., a Muslim like his father, said: “I think it’s racist.”“It’s not just black lives matter, white lives matter, Chinese lives matter, all lives matter, everybody’s life matters. God loves everyone — he never singled anyone out. Killing is wrong no matter who it is,” Ali said during an hour-long interview with The Post.[...]Ali goes a step further, calling out Black Lives Matter as a divisive movement.“It’s a racial statement,” he said. “It’s pitting black people against everyone else. It starts racial things to happen; I hate that.”
Ghate: A Pro-Freedom Approach to Infectious Disease
“A Pro-Freedom Approach to Infectious Disease: Planning for the Next Pandemic” is the Ayn Rand Institute’s white paper on America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, authored by the Institute’s chief philosophy officer, Onkar Ghate. You can read it online or download a PDF.Some key points made by Ghate include:He concludes with the following:
- We must not commit the error of assuming the only form of effective action is coercive, governmental action. That assumption is un-American: it is prejudiced against freedom.
- Instead of admitting that their lockdowns were panicked reactions to months of inaction, our elected officials continued to order us around as though the economy and the entire country were the government’s property.
- In a free society the government’s public health goal is and must be different from minimizing at all costs the number of deaths from an infectious disease.
- America is the land of self-responsibility. We each must think how health is best achieved and disease best avoided in our individual circumstances.
- There is no such thing as “our” health or “our” wealth. There is only the specific health and wealth — the specific lives and livelihoods — of separate individuals. To ask government to “balance” these two is a euphemism for asking it to decide who will be sacrificed to whom.
- “Flatten the curve” graphs assume that the supply of healthcare is projected to remain stagnant. Why? If providers could profit from meeting the increase in demand, no one would think of healthcare capacity as a flat line.
- Government-controlled healthcare means rationed healthcare. It is our government’s responsibility to explain clearly how healthcare will be rationed in a pandemic.
- We must have the freedom to think and act for ourselves. If the law focuses government on the task of testing, isolating and tracking carriers and removes government’s power to order statewide lockdowns, we will have that freedom.
- Government must specify when an infectious disease rises to a level severe enough to warrant coercive intervention. And when the threat from an infectious disease is severe enough, government must act to end the threat posed by carriers.
- Government’s powers must be highly circumscribed. It certainly should not possess anything resembling the power to order coercive statewide lockdowns. The guiding principle is that when government lacks specific evidence about a threat, it cannot act.
- Most people will take voluntary countermeasures if they are given reason to do so.
- Had the government been forced to adopt a more surgical approach because the use of the blunt instrument of statewide lockdowns was prohibited, its actions would have been both less destructive and more effective.
- What we need and what is realistically achievable is an approach to infectious disease that codifies into law the best aspects of what Taiwan, South Korea and Sweden have implemented.
- Voluntary countermeasures, not coercive statewide lockdowns, are what the 2017 CDC guidelines for an influenza pandemic as severe as that of 1918 recommend.
- Vital to South Korea’s success is that it appreciates the need to test widely but does not assume this means government must control all aspects of testing.
- Only when we have codified into law the government’s goal — to neutralize active carriers of sufficiently threatening diseases — and its delimited powers — to test, isolate and track — will we get an American response to an infectious disease pandemic.
- The government of a free society has the responsibility to monitor the threat from infectious diseases, to be actively on the lookout for new ones like Ebola or Zika or COVID-19.
- The basic issue is to define when coercive action against the carrier of an infectious disease is warranted because the threat he poses to others is severe enough.
- On the positive side, we need the law to focus government with laser-like precision on its proper goal: to remove the active threat posed by carriers of severe infectious diseases.
- Second, on the negative side, the law must strip federal and state governments of the power to lock down entire states or even just cities in the name of public health.
- What we need and what is realistically achievable is an approach to infectious disease that codifies into law the best aspects of what Taiwan, South Korea, and Sweden have implemented.
- Write to your representatives in state and federal governments. And then keep contacting your representatives until they make the necessary legislative changes.
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Benjamin Bayer has a summary "We can maintain a free society while effectively addressing pandemic" published in the OC Register.BLM Founder Admits They are Trained Marxists
BLM Inc. co-founder Patrisse Cullors states that she and co-founder are "trained Marxists."“We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.” -- Patrisse Cullors"We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth... We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us." -- LeninBurke: Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ is an Intellectual Fraud
David E. Burke's essay The Intellectual Fraud of Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, exposes the intellectual fraud in Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.Burke summarizes DeAngelo's argument as follows:According to Burke, "White Fragility is religion masquerading as knowledge. [...] It’s an unprovable and unfalsifiable theory, deceptively framed to convince readers of their own guilt," and that the entire "theory of White Fragility is unfalsifiable. It is impossible for someone to prove that they are not fragile, just as it is impossible for someone to prove they are not possessed by a demon."Read the full article here.First, DiAngelo argues that white people are inescapably racist, writing, “All white people are invested in and collude with racism,” and that “The white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.”
Second, DiAngelo argues that any white person who does not admit to their own racism is blinded by their “white fragility.” In DiAngelo’s words, because white people are, “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.” This fragility purportedly explains why, “people who identify as white are so difficult in conversations regarding race.”