Government is the national religion

New York Governor Kathy Hochul addressed a gathering in New York City's Christian Cultural Center on Sunday, September 26, 2021.  A short video excerpt from her speech is available at the link below:

The gospel according to Kathy

“And I wear my vaccinated necklace all the time to say, "I'm vaccinated." All of you. Yes, I know you're vaccinated. You're the smart ones. But, you know, there's people out there who aren't listening to God and what God wants. You know this. You know who they are. I need you to be my apostles.”

 

The medieval strategy of lockdown

The article linked below is a discussion of the COVID-19 policies and enforcement in New Zealand written by Phillip W. Magness and published by the American Institute for Economic Research:

 https://www.aier.org/article/how-the-virus-penetrated-fortress-new-zealand/

Phillip brilliantly (and disturbingly) weaves into his discussion a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death.

The fact that the lockdown policies were imposed without legislative participation should be familiar to all by now:

On March 22, the nation’s government announced a month of sheltering in place. The order came from on high with the stroke of a pen, without legislative deliberation or even the process of law. Enforcement persisted for nine days despite having no legal justification – just an illegal executive decree by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Months would pass before the country’s high court censured this abrogation of democratic governance. It did not matter. Ardern’s actions were “unlawful, but justified” to halt the pandemic, the bold actions of a “hero” who knew better than her own people.

The economic  damage will also sound familiar:

Like much of the world, the lockdowns left New Zealand’s economy in tatters. The country posted its largest GDP contraction in three decades for the first quarter of 2020. Much of the contraction likely stems from the country’s tourism-heavy economy, which seems unlikely to recover anytime soon as it is effectively proscribed for an indefinite term by government mandate. 

The strategy to eliminate the virus includes the use of detention facilities: 

You see, Ardern’s strategy for lifting the internal lockdowns rested upon maintaining one of the world’s most restrictive border entry policies. The New Zealand border remains closed for all intents and purposes for foreign visitors prohibited save for a tiny number of exceptions. New Zealand residents who were stranded abroad at the start of the pandemic – likely numbering in the tens of thousands – may only return after going through a mandatory 14-day quarantine under strict guard at a designated border facility. 

Persons who do not qualify for a handful of exemptions must also foot the bill themselves – a total of $4,000 (NZ) for the privilege of being cooped up in a government-managed hotel room.

For all intents and purposes, Ardern created Fortress New Zealand – a bubble strategy in which the internal reopening rests entirely upon the government’s ability to erect and maintain a nearly impermeable barrier to entry from the rest of the world. Furthermore, such a strategy must continue indefinitely until there is a coronavirus vaccine or cure.

After 100 days of zero new cases, the virus reappeared:

It happened on the 102nd day, and it took the world by surprise. The festivities of the milestone and the associated electoral campaign had yet to dissipate, but COVID-19 was back in New Zealand. A family of four tested positive in Auckland, triggering a panicked government plan to contain its spread.

Within 24 hours the country’s largest city was back under lockdown. Police checkpoints, internal travel restrictions, police and military in the streets, arrests for violating lockdowns, runs on supermarkets, appeals to snitch on violators – a mad rush to contain the spread by any means necessary.

Far from a paragon of science-guided policy, the New Zealand approach hearkens back to the time of medieval plagues and associated superstitions – of walling oneself off in a castellated abbey in the countryside for the duration, of hoping, praying the crisis will pass by your fortress as it ravages the outside world, and of inevitably letting one’s guard down at a moment of frivolity and celebration.

The Ardern government’s current low case count only conceals a much greater and self-inflicted vulnerability that arises from the lockdown strategy. The policy of eliminating COVID-19 by shutting out the rest of the world only “works” if one assumes that they can perfectly maintain the bubble until somebody on the outside discovers a vaccine, or the virus dissipates globally from external herd immunity.

But the medieval strategy of lockdown-imposed isolation is inherently fragile – so fragile, in fact, that it can collapse into chaos at any moment, precipitating a mad rush to regain the illusions of control over the situation.

Far from adopting this strategy as a model, the world must avoid the corner of perpetual recurring lockdowns in which New Zealand now finds itself. And New Zealand’s government would be wise to drop the hubristic pretensions of commanding and controlling a virus through medieval self-isolation, seeking instead an alternative strategy that is robust to unexpected setbacks and equipped for long-run recovery.

Is New Zealand being used as a role model for Hawaii and other island nations/states?  If so it is time to revise the government imposed strategy of lockdown and isolation.

Liberty Defined

The Mises Institute recently published an essay by Ron Paul.  You can read it at this link:

https://mises.org/library/liberty-defined-2

The following are some highlights;

Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others.

To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.

Understanding how governments always compete with liberty and destroy progress, creativity, and prosperity is crucial to our effort to reverse the course on which we find ourselves. The contest between abusive government power and individual freedom is an age-old problem. The concept of liberty, recognized as a natural right, has required thousands of years to be understood by the masses in reaction to the tyranny imposed by those whose only desire is to rule over others and live off their enslavement.

And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that that power is always abused. Every single time.

The choice we now face: further steps toward authoritarianism or a renewed effort in promoting the cause of liberty. There is no third option. This course must incorporate a modern and more sophisticated understanding of the magnificence of the market economy, especially the moral and practical urgency of monetary reform. The abysmal shortcomings of a government power that undermines the creative genius of free minds and private property must be fully understood.

The goal is liberty. The results of liberty are all the things we love, none of which can be finally provided by government. We must have the opportunity to provide them for ourselves, as individuals, as families, as a society, and as a country.

Representative Government Suffers from the Principal-Agent Problem

 A recent article by Robert Higgs was published by the Independant Institute.  A few of the highlights are as follows:

...the framers of the U.S. Constitution created an institutional framework for the operation not of a democracy, but of a representative republic. There’s that troublesome word – representative.

It’s not simply that the so-called representatives are bad or corrupt, though they may be. It’s that the job they purport to do cannot be done even by the finest, most uncorrupted representatives imaginable.

No agent can truly represent a variegated group of principals, especially a large one whose members disagree along many dimensions. Some principals will have their interests seemingly fostered; others will not. The latter will simply be bludgeoned by force of law to submit.

The complete article is at this link:

 http://blog.independent.org/2017/08/24/principal-agent-theory-and-representative-government/

Read about liberty

Thomas E. Woods, Jr hosts a daily podcast: The Tom Woods Show .  Tom has a list of recommended reading.  This is how he describes these books:

If you’re like me, you are annoyed by books that teach you (only) three new things. My time is limited. I like books that are full of things I didn’t know, or ideas I’d never thought of.

The books I recommend below belong in that category. They teach you something new and unexpected on every page. And they are a perfect antidote to the propaganda fed to us in the ideological prison camps where most of us spent our formative years.

The following is the link to Tom's recommended reading, enjoy!

 

http://tomwoods.com/goodbooks/?omhide=true