As the “two weeks to stop the spread” has ballooned into all kinds of permutations that limit freedom and encouraged ideas to further limit freedom, people are looking at who to blame.
Obviously, Democrats want to blame Trump. He was their most recent punching bag. Any Republican that rises to power becomes the new punching bad. See Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Conversely, Republicans want to blame Democrat leaders, not the feckless President Joe Biden, and the Deep State led by bureaucrat Tony Fauci.
However, I think we ought to look at some things that happened recently to understand who to blame.
Last night at the Las Vegas Raiders game, there were huge lines of people trying to get into the game. The Raiders had a vaccine mandate. You had to prove vaccination status to get into the game.
Why?
Because some lawyer somewhere said that the Raiders risked a lawsuit if they had a “superspreader” event at a game. Of course, we know that there are no superspreader events when people are en masse like that. Spreading happens inside in close quarters, like at a wedding.
Digging further, I have a good friend who lives in Kentucky. His kids attend a parochial school. His daughter is unvaccinated by the choice of her parents. Don’t think he is a bad parent, statistics around the world show kids don’t die from Covid. She has to stay home and quarantine now because she was exposed to Covid. Who exposed her? A vaccinated kid. Who doesn’t have to stay home? Vaccinated kids. Amazing since it’s the vaccinated kids that are getting Covid.
Why would a school send a perfectly healthy child home? Lawyers. They are afraid of a lawsuit.
In law school, lawyers are educated to look at downside risk. Once they analyze that, they are equipped to argue on behalf of their clients. Unfortunately, very few lawyers understand costs and opportunity costs, along with what happens at the margin. Any good economist worth their salt would tell you that’s where the action is. What’s the benefit, and associated costs of producing one more?
Unfortunately, none of the statistics on Covid are standardized. They also have been manipulated by politicians and government organizations like the CDC and NIH. That makes it hard to compare and contrast, be transparent, and most importantly have a cogent argument that would persuade the other side that they are incorrect.
Instead, it allowed politicians and the chattering class to fill the void. We know that whenever that happens, it’s not going to turn out well.
It turns out the vaccination isn’t a vaccination at all. When we were growing up, we were told that if we received a vaccine, we were immune. You couldn’t get the disease. I remember in 1986 working on the floor of CME. There was a mumps outbreak on the floor. It spread rapidly from pit to pit. 99% of us had been vaccinated but some people hadn’t. I actually had the left side of my face swell up. I went to my doctor and he said that I was having a “sympathetic reaction” which happens sometimes but I didn’t have the mumps and couldn’t get the mumps.
There are some things we know about Covid. It is not smallpox, plague, or even the 1918 Spanish Flu. We know it really is dangerous to people over 70. It’s dangerous for obese people to get it though most of them survive. If you have cancer or some other disease, it can be dangerous but most people survive. The average age of death in the US today is 78, and the average age of a Covid death is 78.
There are dark people throughout our society and always have been. My definition of a dark person is one that would impose total control over someone else, and use government and commercial power to enforce that control.
The only way to enforce this type of control is at the tip of a spear. Monarchists killed and tortured people. Communists slaughtered millions of people. Former NY Governor Cuomo killed thousands in nursing homes via bad policy that he himself was immune from. Cuomo used the threat of the regulatory state to keep people in line. Political power is often better than a vaccine.
We also know that there are dark people pulling the levers of our society that will use the vaccine, Covid, and anything else they can get their hands on to restrict freedom and opportunity from people. Once the Covid crisis is out of the news, and it won’t be until the mid-term elections are over, those same people along with others will seize on climate change to accomplish the same goals and pull even stronger levers. A lot of those people went to law school, or are being advised by people that went to law school.
Many of those dark people have immersed themselves in behavioral economic theories to understand choice architecture so they can design systems to control people. Choice architecture is being sold as “libertarian paternalism” but once these people get their hands on it you can scratch the word libertarian from the definition. Legal professor and behavioral economics advocate Cass Sunstein is not your pal, friendly and amiable as he is.
Social media companies aid and abet these people. It’s not a master plot. It’s the proclivity of the people that work for those companies. It’s the natural tendency of people like that.
Here is an example. I was reading through the Democratic tax bill. It’s pretty hard left-wing in the taxes it wants to enact. One tax being proposed is a tax on stock buybacks that corporations engage in when they don’t have better use of cash. It’s a penalty and penalties are the first option for these dark people.
Here is AOC last night at the elite NY Met gala. By the way, her ticket was probably comped to this gala. As someone I know said, “Good to have patrons.” Probably got the gown for free too and someday it will be in a museum somewhere. It’s better relegated to the dustbin of history or used as incendiary material to start a fire.
An alternative free-market economically efficient idea to a buyback tax would be to scrap the tax on dividends that companies and individuals are forced to pay, thereby allowing companies to decide between buybacks or dividends on an equal footing.
But, the dark people don’t see the world that way. They don’t like competition.
Instead, what has happened throughout the history of humankind is that when a strict or totalitarian society is set up, the elite of that society has loopholes to jump through. It doesn’t matter if that society is virtual, or physical. Stalin and his cronies didn’t have to endure the policies they put forth. I notice our democratically elected Congress was exempt from Obamacare mandates, and they are exempt from Biden’s new mandates as well.
Many of the elite are wealthy enough to rise above any government regulation or mandate, or even tax. They can afford to hire armies of accountants and lawyers along with the ability to argue their cases in court. Sometimes they argue in front of judges their pals appointed. They might have back door financed those pals. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s wealth isn’t in Illinois. It’s in South Dakota (low tax) and Bermuda (low/no tax). JB imposed strict mandates on his subjects in Illinois, but his family flew on their private jet to their estates in Wisconsin and Florida to avoid the policies. California Governor Gavin Newsome and his posse showed up at French Laundry to dine maskless (and at the time unvaccinated) to enjoy the haute cuisine there while the rest of the state had difficulty going to their local restaurant and had to take extra precautions when entering a grocery store. Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak had all kinds of mandates, but then had a May fundraiser where everyone was maskless and no precautions were taken. Speaker Nancy Pelosi just had a fundraiser in the wine country of California where the staff serving the check writers had masks, but none of the elite at the fundraiser wore them. Smiles all around as the little people served them.
These dark people are great actors. They act as if they care but they don’t have any idea. They are being advised by lawyers who help them interpret existing law to get what they want.
It’s been said millions of times before, “rules for thee but not for me” and it is the way life has been for millennia. We are seeing no difference when it comes to Covid.