How We Dealt With The Flu in ‘69 (Video)
Covid-19 is another in a long series of pandemics that have been part of the human experience. Somehow we managed to cobble together the idea of freedom in any case. The most recent serious pandemic of 1968-69 is almost forgotten today – and was hardly paid attention to at all at the time but for the medical professionals who treated it. It was deadly and serious. In those years, we also experienced extraordinary advances in politics, technology, and the arts. We did not shut down.
READ MOREThe “Expert Consensus” Also Favored Alcohol Prohibition
“Most people today regard America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition as a national embarrassment, rightly repealed in 1933. So it will be with the closures and lockdowns of 2020, someday. In 1920, however, to be for the repeal of the prohibition that was passed took courage. You were arguing against prevailing opinion backed by celebratory scientists and exalted social thinkers. What you were saying flew in the face of expert consensus.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
READ MOREHerbert Spencer’s Critique of the Board of Health in 1851
“Although Snow’s work revealed the answer to the Cholera problem in 1854, the biggest obstacle to operationalizing this knowledge into fighting the disease was the public health bureaucracy itself and the entrenched political interests it had come to represent. Snow’s experience, in effect, proved the reality of Herbert Spencer’s assessment. Rather than improve public health, the government had only distorted and politicized the necessary scientific processes.” ~ Phillip W. Magness
READ MOREWhat’s Wrong With Communism?
“Lenin famously said ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ Alas, communist experiments have come and gone. They have left us with no omelets, only millions and millions of broken eggs.” ~ Art Carden
READ MOREThe Legacy of Thanksgiving is Free Enterprise
“It is time to take their experience to heart and celebrate not the collectivism with which they began their start in the New World, but the spirit of liberty, private property, self-responsibility, and freedom of enterprise which they and those who came to America in the following centuries left to us as a legacy of individual freedom, limited government, and the prosperity that only can come from the competitive liberty of the free and voluntary marketplace.” ~ Richard M. Ebeling
READ MOREMoney for the Masses!
“Goldstein treats money like it’s the military: as something we can control, commandeer hither and thither, and that it almost always behaves like we imagine it will. It won’t do.” ~ Joakim Book
READ MOREElections and Legitimacy
“The election results will likely further erode federal legitimacy at a time when Uncle Sam has no trust to spare. How many more election debacles and brazen abuses of power does Washington believe the American people will tolerate?” ~ James Bovard
READ MORE2020-2030 Could Be the Decade of Economic Malaise
“If history shows us anything, this experience may very well spark a renaissance for the ideas of limited government and markets. If only we could learn this the easy way rather than the hard way.” ~ Ethan Yang
READ MORELockdowns Recreated a Pre-Modern Caste System
“The poor and the working class are the new unclean, while the professional class enjoys the luxury of waiting the pandemic out, interacting only with disease-free laptops. The Zoom call is the 21st century equivalent of the manor estate on the hill, a way to interact with others while avoiding the virus to which the people who keep the goods and services flowing must necessarily be exposed. These attitudes and behaviors are elitist and ultimately selfish, even vicious.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
READ MORECovid As a Source of Election Interference
“There are so many other ways to interfere in an election than to tamper with voting machines – manipulating perceptions of Covid is just one of them.” ~ Micha Gartz
READ MOREWhite Supremacy No, Enlightenment Superiority Yes
“Progress isn’t automatic, and worse, regress can happen. We must understand and promote Enlightenment ideas and practices: Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.” ~ Warren C. Gibson
READ MOREThe New Feudalism
“It’s not surprising at all that a “medieval approach” to disease would also result in the deletion of so many modern advances in social/political understanding and consensus. It was reckless to the point of being evil. It has created a new feudalism of haves and have nots, essentials and unessentials, us and them, the served and the servers, the rulers and the ruled – all defined in the edicts passed by panicked dictators at all levels acting on the advice of bloodless intellectuals who couldn’t resist a chance to rule the world by force.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
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