Is it possible, or even desirable, for economic freedom and progress to be compatible with authoritarianism? Although some may believe so, this is a fallacy. Freedom is indivisible. Political and economic freedom cannot be separated.

This is the position of Ludwig von Mises himself. In Planning for Freedom, he says, “Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.” Regarding a citizen’s reaction to such tyranny, he writes in Planned Chaos that “If one master plan is to be substituted for the plans of each citizen, endless fighting must emerge. Those who disagree with the dictator’s plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.” Mises contrasts the tyranny of socialism with capitalism in Bureaucracy when he writes,

Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individual’s life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management. There is no compromise possible between these two systems.

Some may challenge Mises’s assertion. After all, referral to authority, even to one as great as Mises, does not prove that he is right. Some may say that economic progress surely depends upon the safety of one’s person and one’s property. “Is it not clear,” they say, “that authoritarian regimes provide better internal security, however harsh punishments may be, than their more permissive democratic neighbors?” Some authoritarian countries, such as China and some Arab countries, validate that premise. As long as one obeys the rules, business can prosper. Or so it is claimed. Instead of simply throwing Mises’s claims against the claims of others, let us look at some other issues with authoritarianism.

One of the main problems with authoritarian rule is deciding who gets to choose the dictator. Western society has passed beyond the “divine right” of kings; although noble succession still prevails in some Middle Eastern countries. Most authoritarians base their right to rule on the violent overthrow of the preexisting regime. China, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea come to mind. But this hardly provides a solid intellectual foundation for either current or future rule. Mises claims that democracy is the best form of government because it allows peaceful transitions between administrations. The people decide who rules via periodic elections. When society seems to be going in the wrong direction, a peaceful change of leadership is preferable to attempting a coup.

Dynamism is the essence of a progressing economy. It involves adopting new ways of meeting the demands of consumers and discarding the old ways. Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” This is anathema to authoritarian societies. Authoritarian societies are supported by incompetent sycophants who were placed in favorable positions by the dictator himself. However, where there is no creative destruction there is no progress. My trip to the Soviet Union in the early 1970’s, while an officer in the air force, confirmed what I already knew. The Soviet Union was crumbling from within. There were few consumer goods, and goods available to the ordinary Soviet citizen were shoddy beyond my worst expectation. In Yuri Maltsev’s excellent introduction to Requiem for Marx, he points out that one of the reasons that the Iron Curtain fell was that the people simply gave up trying to live in an increasingly insane society.

Hayek reminds us that the authoritarian has no better insight than anyone else into how to order an economy; neither is it possible for any group of planners armed with the most powerful tools. The billions of decisions required are unknown and unknowable. Few know more than what their industry specialization allows them, and the need for continuous adaptation to market forces is beyond any particular person’s perception. We must all be willing to throw out the old and adopt the new in order to keep pace with changing markets. The law is “change or die.” Death may be slow or sudden, but there is no substitute for change.

The Importance of Understanding That Freedom Is Indivisible

Five years of fiat money expansion has so disrupted economies worldwide that a serious recession is on the horizon. Prices are rising. World trade is under attack. The world is on the brink of nuclear war. Sovereign debt has reached absurd levels. All these insults toward ordinary people are brought to us by out-of-control governments who have no understanding of real economics and, of course, no real understanding of wealth creation.

An example of this is how lavish unemployment benefits have discouraged workers from seeking employment. Do not blame them. It is rational self-interest for millions of people to take handouts when they can. Please instead blame politicians for making it all possible with fiat money expansion. Unfortunately, when the bitter fruits of these failed policies can no longer be ignored, too many will call upon government to take a strong hand and “do something.” The problem is that the government caused the problem in the first place and, therefore, has no viable solution. But that will not stop them. They must appear to be doing something.

The only answer is total freedom in both the economic and political spheres. The economy must go through wrenching adjustments to redirect capital to its best use as determined by consumers and not as determined by the government. Reality must prevail. This fiat money expansion has destroyed much capital by directing it to less productive uses than the public would determine in an environment of total freedom.

We must resist the temptation to believe that a strong man can save us. We can only save ourselves. The modern West is characterized by laziness, frivolous spending, and living beyond one’s means. We must do the opposite. Working hard, living frugally, and saving money are solutions all people can adopt to protect themselves from the encroachments of authoritarianism.

In the research paper Egalitarianism and the Elites, published in 1995 in the Review of Austrian Economics, one of Murray Rothbard’s most brilliant insights was that even the implementation of an egalitarian society requires leadership. As the fall of one system to the implementation of a new model of society cannot come out of nowhere, someone must command and lead this process. And naturally, these leaders will occupy powerful positions.

Indeed, Rothbard’s affirmation demonstrates how human existence is unequal and how some are naturally more qualified to lead the social processes. In a free-market society, the leaders are the entrepreneurs. With their ability to forecast future needs, they generate new solutions and create new productive arrangements. As a consequence, they create profit for themselves and value for their customers.

On the other hand, in a statal society, naturally someone will stand out and command the conquest and maintenance of power. In this sense, there are a lot of possible arrangements, as there are a wide variety of situations in which leaders can be involved. Recently, Western civilization is living a moment in which social constructivism has reappeared, now under the name of “progressivism.” However, even with a new name, progressivism is nothing more than an attempt to refound society.

For those more concerned with the failures of constructivism, Ludwig von Mises in his book Theory and History has already explained why constructivism is arbitrary, in contrast to the complex social process in which individuals are involved. Thus, constructivist movements (as Black Lives Matter, for example) are nothing more than the instruments of people who want to achieve power and determine the path of our society.

They do not just deny the social process of institutional development. The leaders of these movements, using the excuse of the need to create a new society, want to create a new scenario in which they are the dealers. If the actual institutions do not allow them to be in power, they want to break the institutions and create new ones they can control.

As a matter of fact, the leaders of these movements are focused on political power, which will reward them with power and wealth. Improvements in society as a whole don’t matter to them: they are just concerned with the improvements for the group that commands the mass. And all these “social” movements, generally aligned with the radical progressivist Left, attempt to solve any problem through state intervention.

Each problem of private life becomes a public question, and over time, the Leviathan expands more and more, both in terms of income and influence. Allied with the government and the establishment, the leaders of these movements thus achieve relevance in the public debate, occupying positions and being paid to produce nothing.

They are the opposite of entrepreneurs: instead of producing welfare and improving people’s lives, they disseminate chaos to harvest institutional rewards while annihilating the institutions. Family, religion, and market ethics are more and more under attack, and these social movements are working to substitute these private arrangements with state influence and social engineering.

Is also crucial to note that these kinds of movements are legitimized in the public sphere. In general, the mainstream press treats them as the genuine representatives of certain segments of our society. Moreover, the media presents the leaders of these movements as specialists in particular subjects, masking their organizations’ real interests.

Rothbard could not be more on the mark. In the woke progressive movement, there are elites that in reality are not concerned with the agenda they are supposed to support (e.g., racial and gender equality). Indeed, these movements generally end up involved in politics and becoming state parasites while the great mass is fooled and receives only disappointments and worse material conditions.

It happened in the socialist twentieth century, which promoted the biggest mass murders in human history in countries such as China, Soviet Union, and Cuba. And it will happen again under the woke progressive socialism of the twenty-first century: the leaders want to be new kings, and they use the masses as infantry to be sacrificed on the battlefields.

What We Owe the Future
by William MacAskill
Basic Books, 2022; 333 pp.

William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took seriously the implications Peter Singer drew from his famous thought experiment: Suppose you come across a small child who is drowning in a pond. You can easily rescue the child, but if you do so, you will ruin the expensive pair of shoes you are wearing. If you refuse to save the child, wouldn’t this show you are a heartless brute? But, Singer says, nothing in the moral point of the example depends on your close physical proximity to the child. If you had given the cost of the shoes to charity, you could have saved a child living in the third world from death. Singer, relying on a utilitarian framework, next argues that you are morally obliged to give all your income above subsistence to charity, though he recognizes that few will be willing to do so. Further, in order to maximize the effect of your donations, you should investigate which charities are most effective, a prescription the effective altruists enthusiastically embrace. But they have done Singer one better. In order to maximize our charitable donations, we need to make as much money as possible, and that will often require us to seek employment in high-paying jobs and then give as much as we can to charity. Following this advice led Bankman-Fried to his career in investments.

It would be unfair to blame MacAskill for Bankman-Fried’s peculations, as there is no indication of MacAskill’s involvement in them, but his ethical manifesto merits attention in its own right. As its title suggests, it is a radical extension of effective altruism that emphasizes the future. To be “up-front” about it, What We Owe the Future takes a view of ethics detached from our common human lives and, in its endeavor to assume what Henry Sidgwick called “the point of view of the universe,” is utterly bizarre, much more in its theory than in its rather banal practical recommendations.

The key to MacAskill’s ethics is what he calls “longtermism, the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem. . . . [w]hat we do now will affect untold numbers of future people” (pp. 4–5). If human beings live the lifespan of a typical mammalian species, billions and billions of future people remain to be born, and their interests swamp our own.

If you object, “Why should I care about that? I care about my family and friends, not possible people in the far future,” MacAskill’s response is one of disarming moderation: “Special relationships and reciprocity are important. But they do not change the upshot of my argument. I’m not claiming that the interests of present and future people should always and everywhere be given equal weight. I’m just claiming that future people matter significantly” (p. 11).

If you adopt MacAskill’s standpoint, though, you will be unable to maintain the distinction he suggests here. Suppose you give the existence of each possible future person a minute weight compared to persons you value. MacAskill takes utility to be additive; if there are enough future people, the sum of their utilities will outweigh the utility of those close to you. No matter how great the initial disparity between the utility of a person close to you and a future person, the numbers will render a verdict in favor of the future. And, judged from a commonsense standpoint, the situation is even worse. Given the vast numbers of future people, even a slight probability of improving their lot will outweigh the actual interests of those near and dear. MacAskill says that he does not demand that people sacrifice the interests of those close to them in this way but cannot avert this by the logic of his argument. If he seeks to escape by contending that the utilities of all possible future people should be taken as an indivisible whole rather than as a sum of individual utilities, then he cannot block people from giving the interests of those in the present a virtually infinite weight, very much counter to the spirit of his approach.

It is worth looking further at MacAskill’s moral mathematics, which he draws from the great Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, though MacAskill takes it to an extreme that Parfit sought to avoid. As MacAskill rightly says, population ethics is very difficult and technical, but, to simplify grossly, Parfit sought to show that, on certain plausible assumptions, a situation in which some people have very high utilities and others lower ones can be shown to be inferior to an equal distribution of utilities if enough people are added to the distribution. (I ought to say that for this column, we must put aside the Austrian demonstrated preference notion of utility; more’s the pity.) If this process is repeated enough times, we will arrive at the “Repugnant Conclusion”:

Consider two worlds we’ll call Big and Flourishing and the second Enormous and Drab. Big and Flourishing contains ten billion people, all at an extremely high level of wellbeing. Enormous and Drab has an extraordinarily large number of people, and everyone has lives that have only slightly positive wellbeing. If the total view is correct. . . . [t]he wellbeing from enough lives that have slightly positive wellbeing can add up to more than the wellbeing of ten billion people that are extremely well-off. Parfit himself thought this was a deeply unpalatable result, so unpalatable that he called it the Repugnant Conclusion. (p. 180)

MacAskill argues that the most plausible way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, the critical level view, leads to equally counterintuitive results:

In the critical level view, adding lives that have low but positive wellbeing is a bad thing. . . . This view escapes the Repugnant Conclusion. . . . However, the critical level view has its own counterintuitive implications. . . . It leads to what’s called the Sadistic Conclusion: that it can be better to add to the world lives full of suffering than it is to add good lives. . . . The critical level view regards the addition of lives that only just have positive wellbeing as a bad thing; so adding enough such lives can result in worse overall wellbeing than adding a smaller number of lives that are full of suffering. (p. 185)

This objection to the critical level view fails because it remains in the grip of utility maximization over total populations. The critical level view is best taken not as a way to compare populations below the critical level of well-being with other populations, as MacAskill does, but rather as a bar to making any such comparisons at all once the critical level is reached. This avoids the Sadistic Conclusion, since the comparisons in that scenario are not allowed. If MacAskill responds that this limit is arbitrary, the objection may be turned against him. Why should we assume that comparisons of populations’ utility levels are always allowable, an assumption all the more questionable because declining to make it permits us to avoid both the Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions?

Impatient readers may long ago have been anxious to object, “Even if we were to accept MacAskill’s future-oriented ethics, we know little about what will happen hundreds of thousands of years from now. Of what use in day-to-day practice are MacAskill’s speculations?” Here, for once, we may come to our author’s defense. He is well aware of the uncertainty of the future, indeed insists on it, and the policies he recommends are hardly radical, putting aside a few issues, such as a more-than-mild mania about artificial intelligence taking over the world.

Though I fully recognize that this is not an argument, I confess to a strong aversion to this weird band of “effective altruists,” who devote their lives to “doing good,” while largely confining their human relationships to fellow members of the cult and thanking God “that they are not as other men are” (Luke 18:11, KJV). Let us leave them as they anxiously compute their “carbon footprints,” and seek the foundations of ethics in a more human way.

Those in the antiwar movement are accustomed to disappointment in this long-standing environment of militarism, but this one truly stings. Up until the middle of December, there had been a strong push across many grassroots organizations to urge the US Congress to invoke the War Powers Resolution and end military support for the War in Yemen. Hopes were high that America would finally pull the plug on this terrible conflict.

That momentum was dashed just a week prior to Congress going on break for the winter holidays when Senator Bernie Sanders withdrew his call on the matter at the final hour, shortly before it was going to come to a Senate vote, due to the Biden White House expressing its opposition. It goes to show that voices of reason can reach within a whisper of the halls of power, but the thunderous bellow of empire still dominates the room.

Grassroots Efforts on a Pressing Crisis

In the months leading up to the anticipated Senate vote, more than one hundred organizations including The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), Demand Progress, Just Foreign Policy, Concerned Vets for America, Defense Priorities Initiative, Bring Our Troops Home, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft came together to let lawmakers know that a significant number of Americans want the US to stop supporting the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East region which has been suffering under war and blockade for years. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates a quarter of a million people have died from violence, disease, and starvation.

Certainly, the War in Yemen is one of the most complex conflicts to understand as it involves a myriad of opposing groups and foreign intervention. This resolution would have ended US involvement in hostilities against the Houthi rebels who are in conflict with the Yemeni government.

Still, it would not affect operations against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the country, a set of entirely different problems altogether as the US previously helped the Houthis target al-Qaeda in Yemen, but then switched sides and opposed the Houthis in support of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy. This came in the wake of the US signing a nuclear deal with Iran even while Obama administration officials acknowledged that the conflict would be “long, bloody, and indecisive.”

Bipartisan Support to End the War

After many years of fighting between the multiple factions and the hardship of the humanitarian crisis, a ceasefire brokered by the UN was in effect for six months until it expired in October of 2022. With the backdrop of the ceasefire and shifting geopolitical realities, the US Congress put together bipartisan efforts to activate the War Powers Resolution on US involvement in the war. This would be their second attempt after the first bill sponsored by Senators Sanders, Democrat Chris Murphy, and Republican Mike Lee was vetoed by President Donald Trump in 2019.

For Democrats, opposition to the US role in Yemen falls directly in line with the party and key Biden officials’ views as they pushed back against President Trump’s veto in the first use of the War Powers Resolution on the Yemen War. For Republicans, this campaign against the Houthis was the fault of the Democratic president Obama who threw US support behind al-Qaeda’s side in the conflict. Although ending America’s role in the war is popular across the political aisle and among the people, that doesn’t seem to be enough to get in the way of the American imperial motives.

Interests of Empire

The Biden administration’s turn against ending support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen stems largely from geopolitical considerations. Relations between the US and Saudi Arabia have soured in the recent term over disagreements on oil production and Iran policy. The kingdom has turned toward China, a major US adversary, for future collaboration.

Although not completely doing away with the long-standing relationship with Washington, Saudi Arabia is quickly considering the benefits of diversifying into China in this new multipolar world order. Riyadh has recently hosted a summit with China and other Gulf states to deepen ties in their strategic partnerships. In this era of increasingly fierce competition with China, Washington is keeping all of its allies as close as it possibly can by catering to the leadership even though the fact of the matter is that Saudi Arabia is the client state here to the US world empire.

The lucrative trade implications for US arms manufacturers sit at the core of decision-making for the American empire on involvement in Yemen. Indeed, the lobbying efforts by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon led to the Trump veto of the first attempt to end US involvement in the conflict. The defense industry’s mutual financial benefit with Washington exemplifies the notion that war is the health of the state.

All of this amounts to a sense of business-as-usual resignation with this chance to put a stop to just one of America’s foreign interventions snatched away by the hand of the empire at the last moment. Perhaps the vote will come up again in Washington at some point. Meanwhile, the people of Yemen head into another new year of dread as the light at the end of the tunnel fades.

The latest estimates from consensus for the main Latin American economies show a continent facing a lost decade. The region GDP growth has been downgraded yet again to a modest 1.1% for 2023, with rising inflation and weakening gross fixed investment. Considering that the region was already recovering at a slower pace than other emerging markets, the outlook is exceedingly worrying.

The poor growth and high inflation expectations are even worse when we consider that consensus estimates still consider a tailwind coming from rising commodity prices and more exports due to the China re-opening.

How can a region with such high potential as Latin America be condemned to stagflation? The answer is simple. The rise of populist governments in Colombia, Chile and Brazil have increased the concerns about investor security, property rights and monetary discipline.

Argentina is expected to post a modest 0.2% GDP growth in 2023 with 95% inflation and a debt to GDP of 72%. Years of monetary and fiscal excess have destroyed the purchasing power of the local currency and dilapidated the prospect of real growth. In Argentina, poverty has escalated to 36.5% of the population and the government policies double down on interventionism, price controls and higher taxes with the expected negative result. Despite the tailwind of high demand for soja and cereals globally, Argentina dives deeper into Venezuela territory, where consensus expects another year of weak 3% bounce after destroying 80% of the output in a decade, with enormous inflation, 132%.

The problem? The new governments in Chile and Colombia are announcing policies that resemble those of the “Peronist left” in Argentina and the Fernandez government in Argentina is looking more like Maduro’s Venezuela each day.

Chile is expected to post no growth in 2023 despite an estimated higher copper price, and 15% inflation. Colombia, which showed the strongest recovery from the covid-19 crisis until 2022, in which consensus expects a 7% growth, is feared to stop on its tracks and deliver a poor 1.6% GDP growth with elevated inflation, close to 7%.

In Brazil, consensus expects a poor 0.9% growth with 5% inflation. It does not look as bad as Argentina, but the first major announcement of newly elected president Lula has already triggered all alarm bells. Lula stated that he wanted to change the constitution to lift the spending limit and increase government spending even more. The Brazil currency and 10-year bond reacted aggressively to this risk because everyone can remember that Lula’s “economic miracle” a decade ago came from massively high oil prices and, when the commodity bonanza ended, his successor Rousseff sent the country to a deep crisis where spending soared and growth stagnated.

You may say that the rise of populism in Latin America is the consequence of the failed classic liberal policies implemented before, but that would be a grave mistake. Most of these countries have not seen open and liberal economies but crony states. Statism failed and more statism fails even faster.

Global investors see the enormous potential of Latin America. However, when governments start to impose interventionist policies, put at risk property rights with expropriation threats and at the same time massively increase monetary imbalances printing currencies with no real global and diminishing local demand, the combination is destructive.

Why do citizens vote for politicians that implement confiscatory and extractive policies? In many economic debates in Latin American media one can hear the word “redistribution” repeated incessantly. Many believe that wealth is like a pied that can be cut and distributed at will, but ignore that wealth is either created or destroyed, it does not stay flat.

Interventionist policies destroy wealth in three ways: First, attacking independent institutions and introducing political random decisions in legal and investor security which erodes growth potential, investment, and employment. Second, by increasing taxes on the productive sector to pay for massive subsidies paid in a constantly depreciated currency, which creates a double negative of lower growth, weaker local businesses and a dependent subclass that rarely emerges. The productive sector ends forced to operate in the underground economy to avoid confiscatory taxes. Third, interventionism destroys the purchasing power of the local currency by breaking all the rules of prudent monetary policy and financing an ever-increasing government size printing a constantly devalued currency. The combination of these three factors means poverty and stagnation.

Why do interventionist governments do this when they know -and they do- it does not work?

Monetary destruction is the easiest and most effective way of nationalization of an economy. Printing currency is a form of expropriation of wealth, as money creation is never neutral, it benefits the government and hurts real wages and savers.

Why would “populist” governments impose policies that perpetuate poverty and hurt the people? Interventionism does not aim to increase prosperity but take full control of a nation. The three mentioned policies are aimed at grasping full control of a country and make the population dependent, not deliver growth and improve social conditions.

Extractive and confiscatory policies are not social measures, they are profoundly anti-social. The worst is that once implemented, it becomes difficult to unwind. We should learn the lesson everywhere because it is coming to your country soon.

During March of 2020, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, showed us how public health can be managed ethically by refusing to lockdown Sweden’s residents. The rest of the public health discipline, however, entered the territory in which we now place the universally castigated discipline of eugenics. Eugenics breaches ethics and causes enormous harm to the fabric of mankind. Likewise, lockdowns breach ethics and have terrorized or killed millions of people worldwide.

I recently assisted Professor Gigi Foster in preparing a cost-benefit analysis of Australia’s response to covid-19. This analysis, published as a book, shows that the harm caused by lockdowns in Australia exceeds any benefits by at least sixty-eight times. Magnifying these to the rest of the world, I estimate that between three to ten million people have been killed, trillions of dollars have been destroyed, and billions of people have been harmed worldwide by lockdowns; a “gift” that will keep on giving well into the future.

Lockdowns did not only increase noncovid related deaths. A study I carried out jointly with Jason Gavrilis in mid-2022, published by the India Policy Institute, shows that lockdowns also increased covid-19 deaths. Countries which implemented lockdowns and related measures have experienced, on average, more covid-19 deaths than Sweden. If the findings of this study are validated by other researchers, then the sheer evil of these lockdowns and associated policies will baffle future generations.

In this article, I show that the public health response to covid-19 is not the exception but the rule. The evil policies of public health are the inevitable outcomes of the intrinsic information failures and incentives deeply embedded within its structure.

A Pattern of Depredations

What happened in 2020 is typical of public health. As Luc Bonneux and Wim Van Damme explained in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2011 bulletin, a “culture of fear” and “worst-case thinking” were the hallmarks of public health during the avian and swine flu of the early 2000s: “The pandemic policy was never informed by evidence, but by fear of worst-case scenarios.” Sweden’s ethical covid-19 response must not mislead us into thinking that public health can somehow be reformed. Tegnell is not representative of public health.

As a remedy, Bonneux and Van Damme asked that public health be “accountable for reasonableness in a process of openness, transparency and dialogue with all the stakeholders, and particularly the public.” But true to its character, public health did none of this during covid-19 and instead imposed extreme censorship across the world.

Exaggerations and Breach of Pandemic Plans

The pre-2020 public health literature was explicit that policies involving lockdowns must never be pursued since their harms vastly exceed their benefits. The WHO pandemic guidelines of 2019 insisted on proportionate measures, had an extensive discussion of the ethics of each measure, and ruled out reckless measures like lockdowns and border closures. I summarized this literature in The Great Hysteria and The Broken State and in a complaint to the International Criminal Court.

But what happened during the swine flu was multiplied a thousandfold with covid-19. Fixated on the worst-case scenario once again (recall the Neil Ferguson model), public health stoked what I call the Great Hysteria.

It has been evident since around April 2020 that covid-19 is not particularly lethal. Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University wrote to me on April 9, 2022, that covid-19 is 50–500 times less lethal than the Spanish flu. Covid-19 is essentially as lethal as the seasonal flu. Sweden’s official mortality statistics, which adjust the death rate for population size, show no evidence of excess mortality in Sweden in 2020 once we control for the dry tinder effect of 2019 (The mild flu season of 2019 meant that many more of the elderly were vulnerable to respiratory disease in 2020.). We have a so-called pandemic with a lethality similar to the seasonal flu; therefore, covid-19 caused virtually no excess deaths in Sweden during 2020.

Nonetheless, practitioners of public health, except in Sweden, drummed up hysteria by grossly exaggerating covid-19 (calling it a once-in-a-century pandemic) to support the adoption of Chinese Communist Party inspired lockdowns in breach of long-standing, well-established public health findings.

Power without Accountability

Public health practitioners claim that they require the power to destroy property rights and curtail freedom of movement to achieve their goals. In the chapter, “Pubic Health Law,” from Public Health & Preventive Medicine, Edward Richards and Katherine Rathbun explicitly claim that without coercion modern society itself cannot exist: “Public health depends on the power of the state. Public health authorities must seize property, close businesses, destroy animals, or involuntarily treat, or even lock away, individuals. Without the coercive power of the state, public health and modern society would be impossible.” Note carefully their use of the word “impossible.” They claim that, without sacrificing control over our freedom and property, we cannot be saved. But public health also insists that its power (over our freedom and property) must never be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis, thus, precluding itself of any accountability.

The Impossibility of Public Health

The logic of public health and economic collectivism closely overlap; so do their limitations. Both are hindered by a lack of market feedback and insufficient information.

Ludwig von Mises wrote about the impossibility of socialist calculation. Hayek argued that there is a knowledge problem that afflicts central planners. A bureaucrat in a socialist system does not have the capacity to collate and comprehend even a microscopic proportion of the information embedded in the price system. Consequently, decisions in socialist countries are always flawed and inevitably cause great harm.

Similarly, while health is necessarily an individual matter, public health has no capacity to make precise recommendations for each individual. Inevitably, speculative mathematical models underpin public health. These models, like socialist input-output models, are never based on real information so they always end up harming society.

By real information, I mean detailed information about each individual virus particle, the immunity levels, mental health status, and economic circumstances of each individual within a jurisdiction. Yet, without considering the etiology and progression of a disease in the context of such detailed individual information, there is no possibility of a scientifically valid recommendation for individuals. One example of the delusion of public health is contact tracing. Advocates believe they can track every case of respiratory disease using QR codes. Public health is based on the same fiction which sustains socialism and communism. A pretense of knowledge is public health’s fatal conceit. Its “experts” boldly offer solutions to a problem which they can never precisely understand.

Conclusion

Public health cannot be trusted. Its practitioners have shown us repeatedly that they will never choose less restrictive policy options, undertake cost-benefit analyses of their actions, or accept accountability for the massacres and harms they cause. Our only option is to excise this cancerous discipline. Disarming public health is the next major frontier in the advancement of human liberty. If we fail to disband it, the biomedical state that is now in control of the world will devour all of our remaining freedoms.