Topic: Crisis

No Lockdowns: The Terrifying Polio Pandemic of 1949-52

– May 10, 2020

What’s remarkable in light of the near-global coercive lockdown for COVID-19 is how the terrible and terrifying disease of polio was managed almost entirely by a private and voluntary system of health professionals, innovators, parental responsibility, localized caution, and individual volition and caution where needed.

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Yet Another Regulation that Blocked Widespread Testing

– May 10, 2020

Nebraska, one of the five free states and home to Warren Buffett, jettisoned the harmful regulation (which is more a redundancy than an oxymoron). So instead of using one testing kit per person, lab techs test five people at a time.

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Lord Sumption: The Lockdown Is Without Doubt the Greatest Interference with Personal Liberty in Our History

– May 9, 2020

These have been trying times for those who believe that individuals have a right to work and see one’s loved ones. In a mere few days in March, we watched as many of the rights and principles we believed we could take for granted were swept away at the …

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Local Charity Is the Best Charity in the Time of COVID

– May 9, 2020

If you feel compelled to help others, leverage your local knowledge. Understand that the free market historically has been one of the greatest deliverers of social welfare in human history.

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Lockdowns Have Deeply Harmed the Most Vulnerable Among Us

– May 8, 2020

Keep this in mind when you see journalists, academics, and internet activists defending the lockdowns from the comforts of their home offices, and sneering at the recently unemployed who venture to point out that the current state of affairs is unsustainable.

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Public Choice and the Lockdowns

– May 7, 2020

Public Choice seeks to apply our assumptions about human beings and their behavior to the state in the same way we apply those assumptions to other human institutions. It asks us not to be romantic about political power and the way it operates.

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Masks in Sweden: A Followup

– May 6, 2020

In response to my piece on Masks in Sweden, I received the following fascinating note which compares the attitude in Sweden with that in the United States. I think readers will find this very interesting.

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How to Stop Food Shortages

– May 6, 2020

What Americans really have to fear are “anti-gouging” laws applied to food. If food prices are not allowed to rise when supply and demand conditions warrant, shortages will occur and, potentially, famine. It is difficult to believe that anyone has to make such a point in 2020, but that is where we are.

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Science and the Pandemic

– May 5, 2020

I can think of no greater offense against a genuinely scientific attitude than to support policies – especially ones adopted in haste and in a panic, and which diminish the amount of information that is uncovered and put to good use throughout society – simply because these policies are recommended by some epidemiologists.

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Why “Operation Warp Speed” Could Be Deadly

– May 5, 2020

For some, perhaps those in crowded urban environments, taking a COVID-19 vaccine may seem like a wise choice. Individuals choosing to be vaccinated deserve the safest possible vaccine, a vaccine for which insurance companies insuring vaccine manufacturers will provide liability protection.

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Austrian Economics

An “Austrian” Agenda for Post-Coronavirus Recovery

– May 5, 2020

The “enemy” in our case is not a “them,” but the “us.” Only by facing, challenging, and defeating the ideas of collectivism, welfare statism, and the political paternalism of governmental planning with which too many Americans have become intellectually and culturally “infected,” is there a way back to the prosperity that we can have.

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Elvis Was King, Ike Was President, and 116,000 Americans Died in a Pandemic

– May 4, 2020

For staying calm and treating the terrible Asian flu of 1957 as a medical problem to address with medical intelligence, rather than as an excuse to unleash Medieval-style brutality, this first postwar generation deserves our respect and admiration.

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