Category Archives: politics

October 6, 2021 · 5:07 pm

Let the idiots go

 A poll shows that a good portion of the South is open to secession.

It has been over a hundred and fifty years since that traitor Lee surrendered, and these idiots still can’t give up on this pipe dream.  

But you know what, we should let them.

That seems a bit extreme but hear me out.

A lot of societies’ problems are averted when you allow a release valve.

There would probably be less hatred toward any president if we didn’t criminalize frustration and I were allowed, hypothetically, to say, “Some presidents really deserve to die.” But that’s hypothetical. A more realistic example is that the Amish have Rumspringa—the Amish force everyone in their community to experience a year in the outside world. While I haven’t done a huge amount of research, my understanding is that Amish communities that encourage Rumspringa have a higher retention rate than communities that don’t. Additionally, there are numerous anecdotal examples of companies letting employees express their frustrations resulting in lower job dissatisfaction, even if the employee’s concerns are not addressed.  

If people feel they have a release valve, they are less likely to go off the rails. 

Hence why I think we should have Congress pass a law that will allow states to secede.  

Here are the requirement that should be met:

  • 2/3’s of the state legislature and 3/4’s of the state’s populace in a general vote have to want to leave the Union. 
  • They will agree to take a percentage of the federal debt equivalent to their electoral college percentage with them.  
  • They may keep any arms for the national guard and half of the military resources already in the state if they want, but all nukes will be moved out if there are any.  
  • For one year, people can move in or out, but after a year from the secession, where you live is where you have citizenship, and you renounce citizenship in the place you moved out of.
  • If that state wants to come back, it will first have to spend 20 years as a territory before it can be up for statehood.  

I see two, maybe three states actually going through with this insanity: Wyoming, Vermont, and maybe Alabama (based on how far they voted for one party over the other). The Union would not be weaker by losing any of these shitholes.  

Having the option to leave most of the illiberal parts of America (and by that, I mean both Trump’s illiberal right and Sander’s illiberal left) would focus more on getting their own states to leave the Union rather than annoying us with their dumb ideas at the federal level. Further, when the most illiberal right (Wyoming) and illiberal left (Vermont) states leave the Union, most of the people who support their blithering idiot beliefs will flock to those states to engage in their fascist/socialist paradise, leaving the rest of the states without their dumbest (yet highly vocal) fringes.  

This will lead to better policymaking in our nation, and a retreat of the worst of both parties on all forms of media as the fringes will both want to move to their promised lands and preach only to the converted.  

Think of it there are no downsides to this.  

The high bar for leaving will prevent most states from leaving, keeping the Union intact. In fact, the high bar will cause the psychos of both sides to move to the fringes even before they leave. Certainly, that will make Vermont and Wyoming more insane than they currently are…but they’re already places you couldn’t pay sane people to live in, so…not much of a loss. However, the MAGA idiots who refuse to admit that fascism is bad and that their fascist attempt in January happened and was a bad thing won’t be pushing through voter suppression laws, laws against the internet, or whatever else lunacy they’re going to come up with when their God-king isn’t put back in whatever date they’re going to come up with next.

And right now, I’m sure we’re all forgetting how vile the Bernie supporters are, but take a moment to remember the idiots who tried their anarchist commune in Portland last summer and ask yourself if being rid of them won’t also be a good thing.

Certainly, given that both groups are bad at things like math, they’ll fill into states with reputations for extremism (even though those states are not nearly crazy enough to leave the Union)…but honestly, Texas, Florida, California, and Massachusetts can suffer. I don’t think we’ll care if they have more crazy to deal with.

But once both extremes have a release valve option, they will focus on that, not on fabricating evidence of a stolen election, not on putting up barriers to free trade, not on demanding that the internet be shut down, or companies be broken apart.  

Certainly, both the fascist/socialist models will result in economies that will look like the worst of North Korea, but, hey, those dumbfucks choose that lifestyle so that I will be perfectly okay with a closed border policy with those nightmare civilizations. The worst-case scenario is that both fringes will try and declare war…, but it’s not like we have to worry that intelligent people will be moving en masse to these utopian hellholes. I mean, we all get a laugh over how bad Libertarians fucked up when they took over a town. This will show the other two extremes are equally bad. What will result will look as bad as America’s early ill-planned attempt to invade Canada.  

And because both extremes on the right and left have earned a reputation for anti-vax behavior, having them all crowd into one place…the problem will solve itself quickly.  

What will not happen is you will not see a massive amount of states leaving the Union and the whole country falling apart. With just one or two states leaving and a legal means to move there built-in, you will see the craziest of the crazies moving rather than trying to push their insanity in whatever state they currently live. And maybe, just maybe, both sides will get two states, but after that, those states will act as a fly trap for all the other lunatics. This would make the rest of us safer.  

I see no downside. 

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August 25, 2021 · 11:19 pm

The Many Problems of Afghanistan

It is beyond pathetic for what has happened in Afghanistan.

Millions of people are now being subjected to tyranny, oppression, and genocide.

And the fact is this is a clear moral issue. Not a single member of the Taliban deserves anything more than a painful, screaming death. They are all filth, and they deserve nothing but pain. Nothing. There are no exceptions.

But given the speed at which Afghanistan fell, it is clear that staying was a bit of a waste of time. If people cannot fight for their freedom, you can’t give it to them by holding back the evil.

It is regrettably clear that even if we had stayed for another decade, we would not have improved anything.

Now, while I believe Biden has to take the blame for this is how it was carried out, I also realize that he had only three options. (1) Do the right thing and send 200,000+ active-duty soldiers in with the express intent of killing every last member of the Taliban, Dresden-style firebombing of the mountain hideouts, burning every lost poppy field, and establishing successful industries in Afghanistan even if they will compete against American industries…there was zero chance of getting support from Congress or the American public on this. Zero. While every “America First” fascist (and yes, if you have ever uttered the phrase “America First” in the last five years, you are a fascist) deserves the exact same treatment of their Taliban brethren, they regrettably make up a disturbing portion of America and an even more disturbing percentage of the legislature. It might have been the right thing to do, but we know it could never be done. All too often the case in America. (2) He could have continued the status quo and kept things going in their inefficient way. This, of course, would have broken Trump’s deal with the Taliban. Now, no one thinks Trump and all his followers should be viciously tortured to death for his vast treason more than me, but the fact is that said corrupt deal did give us several months of almost no U.S. military deaths. Even if Biden had wanted to do the right thing and say “fuck Trump’s deal,” it would have meant a new onslaught of murders by the Taliban against U.S. forces…which would have led to Congress and the American public demanding a complete and immediate withdrawal. Which would have just left us in the same situation but with only more U.S. dead. I get the bind Biden was in. Trump made a deal with the Devil and did it in a way that would only screw anyone who took over. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. (3) The third option was to pull out. So the same end as Option 2 but with fewer U.S. deaths. And the fact is that it appears now that the President of Afghanistan was in league with the Taliban, which led to such a quick fall of the country. Maybe this was the worst-case scenario of Option 3, but this was never going to go well simply because isolationists and fascists (is there a difference?) had made the first and second options impossible to carry out. I don’t like what is happening. I just don’t know if I was in the same position that I would have done much differently.

This was a cluster fuck of epic proportions spanning over 30 years of bad decisions.

And this is due to a series of mistakes. Ones we must acknowledge so to prevent an evil like this from ever happening.

So first, let me deal with Carter and Reagan, whom I am going to give a pass for the most part. As much as I think Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semitic piece of shit who would roll over and play dead in the face of any move by Soviet Russia…I also don’t think there was any viable option for Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded. Post-Vietnam, there was no way to convince Congress and the American people to send in troops to oppose the Soviet invasions, nor was there support at the time to send the Mujahideen weapons to fight the Soviets. So as much as I despise him as a pathetic excuse for a human being, I’m not sure any president, given the Congress he had, could have done anything. Meanwhile, Reagan did the best he could, working with congressman Charlie Wilson; he provided the best opposition he could have against the Soviets. Had he been president for the collapse of the Soviet regime, I believe in my heart of hearts he would have offered the necessary support to rebuild the country, we will never know for certain, but I know of no evidence to the contrary that he would have believed in nation-building.

So let’s start with where blame does belong. George H. W. Bush started the worst of policy choices here. He had the opportunity to send money to rebuilt Afghanistan after the Soviets left (he had the option to rebuild the entire Warsaw Pact) but failed to do so. Because, in the end, the Bush clan is a bunch of brain-dead isolationists. Utterly worthless. Reagan’s single biggest mistake was not dropping Bush in 1984. Had Bush worked to build democracy in the former Communist nations, we would be living in a much better world today. But like all isolationists, he could only see the immediate issues. Yeah, he would stand up to a lunatic who had visions of nuking Israel and other allies, but if someone didn’t present an immediate danger, he couldn’t be bothered to care about anything.

The lesson to learn from Bush is that we always have the opportunity to build positive relations with other nations to strengthen democracy and capitalism throughout the world. Globalism isn’t a debate; it’s a fact. Anyone who thinks they can stand against globalism belongs to be listed with the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus (no offense to those noble species who were never as dumb as the MAGA crowd) as their ideas aren’t just old; they’re extinct. We need to strengthen EVERY LAST NATION in its efforts to establish the rule of law, free markets, open government, and individual freedom because it is the only way to ensure our prosperity and liberty. Right now, that means sending out vaccines to the whole world; soon, it will mean signing TPP and every other free trade chance we can. But we can never stop in this push toward universals liberty, and any hiccup in that push will only result in suffering for us and the world.

Then we had Bill Clinton, whose attitude to almost all foreign issues was to ignore them. Tony Blair may have been able to drag Clinton into defeating the evil of fascism in the Balkans, but it was a pathetically small amount of effort. Clinton’s indifference proved the warning of P.J. O’Rourke: “Our previous attempts at isolationism were successful. Unfortunately, they were successful for Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan. Evil is an outreach programme. A solitary bad person sitting alone, harbouring genocidal thoughts, and wishing he ruled the world is not a problem unless he lives next to us in the trailer park..” The lesson here is clear, isolationism NEVER works. Never has, never will. And anyone who claims it does is a short-sighted idiot who should be ignored on all issues (looking at you libertarians).

Then, of course, you had W. From stating in his debates with Gore that he did not believe in nation-building, you knew that this man was never going to be good at this (as opposed to Gore promising the continued indifference of Clinton, which would have been just as bad if not worse). The problem was that after 9/11, it was obvious that isolationism didn’t work. But someone who only believed in isolationism wasn’t equipped to rebuild a nation. Bush and his whole cabinet seemed to believe that democracy would magically spring up in Afghanistan and Iraq once we get rid of the tyrants. The problem is that isolationists don’t understand how much work went into creating this nation (or any successful democracy in history). It takes time and effort, and none of the people in the Bush administration wanted to do this work.

The lesson here is that if you’re going to do nation-building, actually do nation-building. There should not have been a police station, D.A.’s office, or government bureaucracy in America that did not have an exchange from Afghanistan learning U.S. methods (which not only would have improved Afghanistan methods but probably would also have decreased the systemic racism we have regrettably learned are still all too present in too many parts of the U.S. government). There should not have been a single school in the U.S. that did not have at least one Afghani or Iraqi foreign exchange student. The Peace Corps should have been expanded and sent to Afghanistan in ways that the office has never seen. We should have been sending contractors to build infrastructure and build relations with that nation. There should have been no consideration for how building the Afghani industry would affect American competitors… that’s the free market deal with it. We should have burned every poppy field, killed every drug pushing warlord, shot every man raping children or beating women, trained every woman in Afghanistan in how to use a gun, knife, or her hands to disarm misogynists—with the intent to kill—and killed through summary judgment any man who acted against a woman who defended herself. Leaving the broken bodies of misogynists hanging in the center of town probably would violate some war crimes tribunal, but they would have been in line with actual Justice. No, it’s not a cultural thing…treating women as less than human is evil. If your culture makes that claim, then YOUR CULTURE IS INFERIOR. And it needs to be destroyed. Islam can be practiced without evil, and I’m more than willing to say anyone who believes that Islam has to be practiced with should be shot, be it the Taliban or a MAGA racist. We did none of that. We need to never make that mistake again.

Then Obama pretty much continued the same mistakes of Clinton with a touch of W. Indifference mixed with just a bit of isolationism that doesn’t understand that building a democracy is a work in progress.

Of course, the worst was Trump. Trump was unquestionably evil, and he admired evil. So when presented with the evil of the Taliban, he loved it. He thought they were his kind of people. He made a terrible deal with them and released thousands of the most vicious members of the Taliban. If you don’t think the fall of Afghanistan would have occurred much, much slower if Trump had not released all these criminals, you’re an idiot.

What we learned from Trump is fairly obvious. First that the Secret Service is a bunch of traitors for not doing their duty and protecting us from “all enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC.” There is not a Secret Service member who does not deserve to be charged with every crime against humanity Trump committed. You had guns and could have chosen to make the world a better place. You chose evil under the excuse of “I was just following orders” to protect him, like the rest of your Nazi brethren. Fuck all of you coke-snorting, whoring, traitors. I’m not a big fan of a military officer who was in the room with Trump, either. You had a duty to defend this nation; you failed. You sat by while he and his ilk planned to leave our allies in Afghanistan to the butchers, released the very criminals in power right now, not to mention the planned sterilization of immigrants, the torture of immigrants, using the office to get foreign powers to lie for him for political reasons, and while he planned a coup. Just because Trump and his allies were incompetent does not forgive the fact that they are criminals guilty of treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. And the Secret Service did nothing to protect us from that evil even they could have. Every last member of the Trump Administration and Secret Service should be rotting in The Hague right now.

What we really learned is that Rome was really onto something when they had a law that demanded every citizen kill anyone who would attempt to set themselves up as a king. And we need more Republicans like Brutus and Cassius.

Biden, and for the most part, we have learned from Biden that government needs to plan for worst-case scenarios. All too often, be it in war, social programs, tax schemes, anything…they assume everything will work perfectly and there will not be any problems. This is possibly the government’s single dumbest flaw, and so the fact that Biden committed it isn’t exactly a shock…but it’s still offensive that not a single person in government seems to have learned to stop engaging in this kind of foolishness. We need to start having people in government who ask, “yeah but what if your assumptions go badly, what are you going to do then?” I know the last 20 years have shown that the government has planned for a lot less than any thought could be possible, but we desperately need to gear our plans for worst-case scenarios.

What we also learned its that we need to join the International Criminal Court, and the second after signing that treaty, putting Trump and all his allies on a plane for The Hague where they will all die in prison. We learned that we can no longer tolerate this evil, and at this moment that is exactly what we’re doing by allowing Trump to exist.

Given the recent news in the world, I can easily believe there are gathering clouds somewhere that I don’t see immediately. Over the last couple of decades, I have learned that what I know of foreign policy, or what anyone outside the government, is usually incomplete at best. So maybe in 20 years, I’ll learn something the will make me understand why Biden pulled out on this timetable…time will tell. And I damn Clinton and Obama for not doing anything, but I also admit that it would have required them to spend all their political capital early in their presidencies to push for major reform—in Obama’s case, that would have better use of his political capital—so I don’t know it if believable to believe they would have done it. It was the wrong thing to do, but I’m a fool if I expect politicians to be saints. If I’m going to put somewhere, it is because, despite the fact that the Bushs were all branded with the label neoconservative, they were unquestionably isolationist who did nothing that neoconservatives would have advised. Nothing. The greatest blame sits with Bush senior, who had the greatest opportunity to rebuild not just Afghanistan but the entire Eastern Block…but because of his short-sighted idiocy, he laid the groundwork for nearly all the foreign policy hells that we are not dealing with. W. might have had the right intentions, but he had his father’s vile tendencies and was not fit to run this show. And Trump is just a terrorist who, of course, supported other terrorists.

In short, this fiasco has shown that there are years and years and years of blame. And that if we are going to stop the endless circle of only half-heartedly supporting democracy. If we are to survive, we need to learn from our successes in Germany and Japan, and to a lesser degree, Taiwan and South Korea, and do what we can to help our current allies from becoming the next Afghanistan or next Hungary.

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June 20, 2021 · 12:57 am

Why I don’t care about Critical Race Theory

So the latest nonsense argument about education is Critical Race Theory. What is that? Which is either looking at history with an understanding that race has been a motivating factor in the creation of many government laws and systems which may have outlived the original racist creators (which is just common sense) or a vicious progressive plan to teach all white children that they are evil just for being white. It depends on who you ask. Also, there seem to be people who are claiming it’s every single possible point in between those two extreme points.

Before we get into an argument about what it is, let’s remember that this is the latest in a long line of education issues where both sides take ridiculous positions…1776 project…1619 project…Common Core…New Math..No Child Left Behind…hell, the first of these arguments I remember is from my teens when rage against Ebonics was all the rage.

No matter what the argument is, they are based on this idea that any of these ideas or practices have infiltrated the entire education establishment. The people in charge (either school boards and their Teacher’s Union masters or the corrupt legislators beholden to big business depending on who is doing the irrational screaming) have given orders on high about this or that trend, and principals tell their teachers what the new policy is, teachers go to in-service training, and then every teacher in the school is suddenly teaching that America is always racist or that Shakespeare is irrelevant or that math is entirely new…and of course, every student will hear these unique pieces of propaganda and mindlessly imbibe them going forth for all time repeating the lies of the progress or populist about the evils of capitalism or socialism and forever work for social justice warrior or corporate shills. Again, it depends on who is telling this story…and they seem to switch with almost the regularity of the tides.

The problem is that this has absolutely nothing to do with reality.

And I say that as a veteran of two decades in education, having worked in public school, charter school, special needs schools, and online schools. I have taught almost every high school subject to nearly every grade and education level (from tutor to substitute to AP to Special Education ELL students.) And every place, I have been successful and promoted until there were ethical lines I wouldn’t cross and had to leave—thus I would say I would say I’m an above-average teacher who has a good grasp of how the education system works.

And rather than this monolithic idea that ideas come from on high and are beamed directly into the brains of students, let me tell you exactly how this might go.

Let’s take the much-ballyhooed 1619 Project as a possible example.

A school board votes to adopt the 1619 Project as part of the district standards. If the district has three high schools, one principle will be gung-ho about it; one will care about it only to the limit of the fact he doesn’t want to make waves, one will hate it and try to figure out what is the bare minimum she has to do to make it look like she is following district policy. The school board will likely never check to see if anything is being done. They will tell their staff of the new policy based on how much they care themselves. From here, there will be a small segment of teachers who either really believe in it and are gung-ho as well; then there will the new teachers who think every idea is great and buy into it even though they have no idea what it is; there will be some who hate it and will start considering what information they can also include to undermine the 1619 Project at every turn while still appearing to follow the orders from on high; there will be the veterans who don’t give a fuck what the orders from on high are—they’re teachers, and they know what they will do. Finally, there will be a vast swath who will, as always, do the bare minimum because they have tenure, and they gave us caring about the kids decades ago. Then all the teachers and administrators will be forced to go to in-service training on the 1619 Project—even the people who are gung-ho will hate this because, in the history of teacher in-service training, there has never been a single relevant, important, or interesting said. EVER. Teacher in-service is a scam designed by an idiot to get taxpayers to have these idiots teach teachers irrelevant bullshit. You know what they say, those who can’t teach, teach teachers. (Side note, I have never seen so many hip flasks in my life as when I’m at a teacher in-service…and everyone knows who has the hip flask, and we all gather around them in the closest off-campus parking lot at every break). So then this broad spectrum of teachers, all of whom have learned less than nothing at the in-service, and they will try to teach the students. Now the worst that can be said here is that if a teacher has a gung-ho principle they will probably have to waste time making a show of doing this, but if they have not bought in they will never actually teach more than the key words that any kind of test that might be given out would require.

Now there is a spectrum of students as well. There are those who have been raised to be good little progressives or those who are rebelling against populist parents who will buy into the 1619 project —every word of it—not because of the teacher but because they already looked it up. And there will be good little populists and those rebelling against their progressive parents who will disagree with all of it. There will be the students who want to learn and hear whatever their teacher says for or against and do their own research (maybe with the help of a teacher who cares about a balanced education), but they won’t just buy what the teacher said. These three groups will, at best, make up 10% of the student body. Then you will have another 10% who have mastered not drooling on themselves, not having a consistent thought in their heads, and sitting in their seat—these students when they graduate will become known as swing voters—but like their later stage, these larval forms of idiots don’t retain a single piece of information between each time they blink their eyes. A worst, this will also make up 10% of the student body. Finally, you will have the mass bulk of the student body. They will memorize whatever their teacher says only as long as they need to get the B or C on the test their parents want and then will forget everything that isn’t related to what they think they want to do in the future. None of them plan to be historians so that they will remember exactly nothing of the 1619 Project five minutes after the test.

And what do you end up with, exactly the same number of students who believed in the 1619 Project after the school board’s orders as would have considered in it if the school did nothing.

That is the deplorable state of education.

Teachers have almost no effect on students. Intelligent students are going to learn no matter what. Students who don’t care aren’t going to care until life forces them to learn something. Students who parrot ideas will parrot ideas.

This is a sad statement, but despite the fact that I have probably worked with somewhere around 2,000 students in my career, I can probably count the number of students whose life I have changed on the one hand. I introduced hundreds of smart students to a lot of new ideas…but I probably only hastened what they would have found on their own. Maybe in subtle ways, I’ve improved the lives of hundreds…but in the sense of taking a student who was doomed to never go to college or doomed to be a loser and brought them up to being a fulfilled human being, less than six. And I cherish those few students.

And I think I’ve probably done more than most teachers. But we don’t have that much of an impact on the lives of students–and we certainly can’t change the way students think.

Lots of people look back on this or that teacher as being important because they were there for them or they introduced them to this book or that idea…but the fact of the matter is most of those students who have positive visions of teacher are looking through the exaggerated rose-colored glasses of nostalgia with information gathered by the idiot brain of a teenager (and even the genius teenagers are idiots…because they’re teenagers.). They would have still been successful in life even if that teacher had not been there for them. Study after study after study shows that the values and habits that make for a successful student are set before a child sets foot in pre-school. That’s sad, but it’s true. Yeah, if a school system has a really good series of teachers that from pre-K to 12th, they might be able to change the lives of students. But the fact is that every school system is, in reality, a mishmash of inept, apathetic, competent, and great teachers. Next to no student gets a consistent line of great teachers. (There are a few charter schools that have famously been able to be the exception, but the fact is that they’ll never be able to expand their success to an entire nation.)

And then, of course, there is the problem that all of this is making mountains out of molehills. The 1619 Project has been around for a few years, but I still have not seen a single news article that can point to a school that is using the 1619 Project as the basis for their history curriculum. I’m sure there is a handful out there. And I’m sure this a smattering of idiot teachers who have adopted it on their own…but like all screaming about this or that idea in education, the most you can show is a dozen or so teachers in the whole country who are doing anything for or against. You have an easier job herding cats than finding any consistency in education policy. The Department of Education declared that through scientific research, Phonics is better than Whole Language almost 20 years ago…go into any elementary school in America today and you’ll still anywhere from a third to two-thirds of the teachers still using Whole Language. There is no plan or consistency; it’s just teachers doing whatever the hell they want.

So when people scream to the heavens about Critical Race Theory, I have to laugh. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure some dumb teachers will teach it in its worst form, and some will teach a knee-jerk, equally bad version against it. But on the whole smart students will do their own reading and the ones who don’t care won’t care.

Until you want to switch to an entirely voucher-based system until you want to enforce higher standards for teachers and set basic standards for every school until you want to destroy the Teacher’s Union (along with all public unions) until you want to do a dozen other more important reforms no educational movement (for good or for ill) that the media wants to focus on is very irrelevant because it has no chance of actually becoming an effective policy anywhere.

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February 7, 2021 · 7:59 pm

The Private Sector Should Handle Social Issues, Not Government

This was a weird week. I actually saw supposed libertarian Rand Paul talk about “fair” in a Senate hearing. This was weird because traditionally, libertarians have been all about what is true, right, or just—these terms, while still not exact, are far more meaningful in an adult life than the concept of fairness. The libertarian position for decades has been, “Children whine about fair. Adults care about what is just.” And this is because we were all told that “Life is not fair” as children, or, at least, I thought we were. But there is some other odd things about these actions from the supposed libertarian.

To put this in context, these comments came during the hearings for Secretary of Education nominee Miguel Cardona. Paul asked if it was fair to have biologically male transgender students compete in athletics against female students. Cardona pointed out that not allowing students to compete can be equally unfair, politely held to the Biden administration line of enforcing discrimination laws for this aspect of public education, and Paul kept hammering on this being unfair.

Now to be fair, this is not the easiest situation. In an ideal world, biology would never mix up and make the brain set for one gender and the body for another. But life isn’t fair. Nor in a perfect world would people be ignorant and need education. But, again, life isn’t fair. And these aren’t things we can’t fix with the wave of a magic wand. We can, however, in addition to attempts of medical solutions, mitigate some of the hell of having your brain and body not agree by trying to be tolerant and accepting of people and judge them only on their character and merit.

But instead, we choose to argue should the government force transgender girls to not be allowed to compete against biological girls or will the government force natural girls against transgender girls. Either way, the government is forcing something.

Wacky idea. Why don’t we stop the government from forcing people to do things? Why don’t we stop paying for this crap in general?

Hear me out here.

In the great lands of socialism known as Europe, sports are pretty much a private venture. Yeah, there’s some basic P.E. education in school, and I’m sure there’s an exception somewhere, but all actual sports like football or rugby are clubs paid for by those who participate or by revenue from fans. I know it’s weird, in America, supposedly the land of capitalism, where we taxpayers pay to train the players in high school and then college and then pay to have stadiums built in our cities (and there are other ways taxpayers are bilked by professional and non-professional sports)…but in most other countries it’s the private sector that pays for sports. I realize that the U.S. has a long way to go to be number one on a listing of economic freedom, but this is just so egregious that it boggles the mind.

So why don’t we do that? Spin-off all competitive sports away from taxpayer-funded schools and rather let the private sector handle it. Private league and clubs would be formed. And not only would they cost less because suddenly it’s not the haphazardness of spending other people’s money, but every league spending its own hard-earned money. I’m sure there would be leagues that allow transgender athletes, and I’m sure there would be ones that wouldn’t, and I’m sure there would be ones in between that regulate hormone levels in the blood or something. And I most certainly trust that the leagues that are filled with bigots would not be popular and not get private funding and die very quickly because as we’ve seen by Parler’s death and a certain moron’s twitter account, the private sector can be a more effective in squashing hate than the government can. We as the public just have to let them know that we support businesses that have nothing to do with hate.

It’s a shame there wasn’t a libertarian there to bring this up.

Now some people are hating the private sector right now. And wouldn’t trust a set up like this. But they also hate that a private company is telling them what they can and can’t trade on that private company’s app. They hate that some companies are telling them what they can’t post on that private company’s program. There are still the fools who hate if a business decides if they want to bake you a cake or not.

They’re all wrong.

We should be praising private companies for being able to decide how they want to do business.

This last couple of weeks has shown that there are huge problems with some of these trading apps and that they allow idiots hellbent on burning the system down. Still, we also see that the apps and brokerages in question quickly responded in ways that would prevent them from having to declare bankruptcy (and probably to avoid being considered a co-conspirator) in what the SEC may decide is malicious and illegal market manipulation. The government would just have let a company they rango bankrupt and then bail it out with our taxpayer money (the names Fannie and Freddie come to mind for some reason).

While the government doesn’t understand that speech has to be free except when it presents a clear and present danger to public safety (specifically when you have a party that wants to silence companies that don’t agree with them while at the same time telling a crowd of lunatics to engage in a coup). Social media companies finally realize they can shut idiots up, and they don’t have to host them. And as it’s not the government, they can do that.

But while you might not be personally thrilled with the policies Robinhood, Facebook, or Twitter, you have to admit that if the government was in charge of these, they wouldn’t be a tenth as effective or a millionth as responsive.

And most importantly, those companies followed their terms and services. No one will be able to sue Robinhood or Facebook, or Twitter because we all agreed to their terms and conditions. What they did was all there to see if we looked.

And that is probably the one thing the government should be forcing other private companies to do.

If you’re a baker who doesn’t want to bake gay wedding cakes, it is better for people to see out front of the store on a large sign.

If you’re a private Christian school that doesn’t want to hire a homosexual teacher, that better be in the big, bold letters in the want-ad.

If you’re a private sports league that doesn’t want transgender athletes, you have to make it clear in the paperwork that the public can see and decide if they want to do business with you or not.

And once you announce you are a bigot you will lose business and once you announce you are against bigotry you will be in a safe place and only have to worry about the usual economic issues.

And I’m more than happy to not only make that kind of disclosure be public…but to make the violation of this not just some sort of fine for breaking a civil code or something you can be sued for…no let’s make not publishing this kind of thing fraud. A full-on criminal violation. So people will have three choices engage in the market and sell or work with people you don’t like, announce you’re a bigot (and hopefully go out of business), go to jail. The only government force here is ensuring truth in the market place, one of the actual functions that any libertarian would approve of.

But again, why would we ever look to the free market to fix things when we can go round and round in pointless squabbles for the camera.

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April 30, 2020 · 7:11 pm

This is a time to reconsider the UBI

Goldwater Reagan Buckley RINOWe were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we’re told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.–Ronald Reagan, A Time For Choosing

 

In the midst of $1,200 checks and huge unemployment and the utter pointlessness of these attempts at saving an economy that–let’s be honest–was already being destroyed and rotted away by a policy of isolationism, bigotry, and hatred of the free market.  

But on the plus side, this might be a way to bring back an intelligent discussion of the Universal Basic Income. 

Obviously if we instituted it now it would help spare of the worst of the problems caused by COVID-19.  That’s a no-brainer. But this gives us a chance to look at why it could be a long term solution.

 

 

Freidman Hayek
Whenever these two agreed you should probably listen.

In the works of Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ronald Reagan you will find an idea called a negative income tax. The negative income tax says that the easiest way to solve the problem of poverty is not to give people housing, and food stamps, and SNAP, and Medicaid…no the easiest way to solve the problem of people not having money is to give them money. It’s so simple only a government could be too stupid to not get it. At the time the negative income tax was the idea they pushed…but I believe if they had considered it, they would have approved of the UBI. 

Mostly because the UBI has an advantage over the negative income tax in that it requires a far smaller and less intrusive bureaucracy.  

 The basic concept of the UBI is that instead of the welfare/entitlement state (food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, the whole swath of all entitlements) being replaced with a $10,000-15,000 payment to every citizen in the US over the age of 21. At least the intelligent version is that–people like Andrew Yang want to put the UBI on top of all the existing programs and that’s just stupid–misses the whole point of the UBI. Properly done, it reduces huge amounts overhead, it actually removes many of the current system’s disincentives to work or get married. It would actually be cheaper and since we believe in the power of the market we have to believe that in most cases individuals will be much better at spending their money than the government telling them how to spend their money. This idea has merit, I deeply respect many of the people who are advocating this, especially Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute (also here, here, here, and here) but also respect some of those who are against it (here and here though I feel these arguments are a bit knee jerk and don’t look at the bigger picture). And it works even better if you match with a completely flat tax. 

If coupled with a $3,500 voucher for private health insurance (and a law requiring all private insurers to have a $3,500 plan that covers all emergency and genetic conditions) you pretty much catch all of people’s financial needs to survive…not thrive, but survive. Which should be the goal. We want people to know that there is always a safety net to keep them on a footing that they can once again pull themselves up the economic ladder. The UBI would guarantee that they have all the basic needs–food, shelter, emergency medical care–but not go beyond that. It costs less than all of the current dole programs and helps more people with a smaller government. But some just aren’t convinced.

The most prominent argument against them the UBI boils down to: “if you give everyone a minimum income they won’t because they’ll have all their basic needs covered.” This is a really stupid argument for two reasons. The first being that most people through the myriad of welfare systems out there can earn $25,000-$50,000 a year if you know how to bilk all the systems for assistance out there. Removing all those programs and offering everyone only $12,000 a year is hardly offering people more of an incentive to be lazy, quite the opposite in fact. It’s providing them the bare minimum needed to survive and giving them the agency to spend it in the way they see best rather than the way a government bureaucracy sees best. Further, getting those full benefits takes time, so we’ve now freed up people’s time to search for a job, and removed all the disincentives to work that current welfare programs have. So while everyone will have a basic income guaranteed to make sure they can meet the bare-bones necessities of life, they’re not going to be provided with any comfort. In fact, this will likely, just in the replacement of Medicaid, Medicare, Welfare, Unemployment Insurance, SNAP, TANF, and Social Security save $600,000,000 to 1 Trillion dollars off the federal budget right off the top.

But there are other advantages to the UBI that many people haven’t considered.

As the UBI will replace Social Security as the fixed income of senior citizens, the Social Security fund will have to be just rolled back into the general government fund. With that comes all the assets the Social Security System has invested in. Specifically, about $3 Trillion in US government debt currently held by the Social Security fund (a little over that when you count Medicare and other retirement funds which would be made useless by this)…so that $3 Trillion in US government debt will go back to the US government. For those of you not picking up on what this means, this means the debt will be erased, as we will just owe it to ourselves. That’s a little over a tenth of all US debt, gone. Completely gone. Now there is other money in Social Security but I assume much of that will be eaten away in the inevitable transfer from one system to the other (you can’t just switch people who are only on Social Security now to a different program without giving them time to adjust).

So no one is in poverty, we’re spending a trillion less a year, and a good chunk of our debt is gone.

Oh, and our interest payments on debt have also been cut. If we were really smart we would use those savings in interest payments to buy back even more debt and further dig our way out of this hole but, we can only hope for so much.

Oh but there’s more. As everyone is now guaranteed a basic level of income, do you know what you don’t need? You don’t need a minimum wage. Minimum wage laws started as a racist way to keep minorities from competing for a job and continuing because of the dumb comment about needing to provide a living wage certainly doesn’t hold water anymore. Now while not every state will get rid of their minimum wage laws, a good many will. That means that employment will go up in those areas and more people will be willing to take lower wages because, hey, they’re starting off with $1,000 a month. That means people will get experience faster as more people will be employed, which has from there a compounding nature to economic growth from increased employment will be astounding.

And, since farmers are now also getting the rewards of basic income, they will no longer need subsidy programs (they don’t need them now, but this will undercut their last excuse). Not only will this mean we can get rid of one of the most useless expenditures of the federal budget, but it also means we don’t need to subsidize corn anymore, which also means we can end the nightmare that is ethanol. This, in turn, will actually drop food prices the world over, and thus that $1,000 a month will actually go even further than you initially thought. And we get to just end the Department of Agriculture and the Farm Credit Administration.

And now that everyone has income coming in that means job security means a lot less. They can leave a job and still be moderately secure at least for a while even if their income was well above the UBI level. Do you know what this means? It means that while employers can pay less because there is less of a risk of employing someone, it also means employees have greater freedom to leave at any time. That means employers will have to work harder to keep employees they want to keep. That means one of the primary goals of most unions, protecting employees from abuse, is no longer needed. Yes, unions will still need to be legal, but as they will no longer be a core part of employment in America you certainly won’t need idiotic things like the Department of Labor and the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Plus all those rules from idiots like OSHA can go out the window as employers will be too concerned with keeping employees. Granted there will be some need for the state versions of these institutions, but as the need for them will be so few and far between the federal government need will no longer be there.

And since the UBI comes with a voucher for health insurance (which is the reason why we won’t need Medicaid or Medicare), it also means you won’t need the Department of Health and Human Services…and if you just want to double the voucher for veterans you won’t need the Department of Veterans Affairs either. The fact that there won’t be massive fraud in Medicaid, Medicare, and the VA, not to mention the lack of government pricing, the price of all medical care will drop while quality will go up.

And as you’re giving money people for housing you don’t need to government to run housing, which means you can either sell all that public housing or give it all to the states…it also means you don’t need rent control laws. This, in turn, will actually drop the price of housing for everyone. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development can go to. So your bills just went down and that $1,000 goes even further.

So, let’s be clear here, we save on yearly costs of entitlement programs, employment goes up, regulation on business goes down, the debt is cut in half and we get rid of the Departments of HUD, HSS, Agriculture, VA, and Labor (plus a lot of other smaller offices)…and all the opposition has is that people will be lazy if you pay them money (even though they can get more right now under the current system it just comes with incentives to not work that the UBI will not have).

Again, some states will not have the brains to implement the needed free-market reforms that the UBI allows them to do. But the thing is that now people aren’t tied to a particular state’s welfare checks and can use their newfound monthly check to move to a state that is booming because of the free market expansion. Yes I know that under the current system of welfare it is possible to move to a different state, but it’s not easy to do….under the UBI it’s very easy, which means people will go where the jobs are and thus bringing more economic growth in the long run.

Granted, there are millions of ways the UBI could be screwed up as the devil is always in the details. This is a system that can only be set up by amending the Constitution, and while most have not gotten as far as those details here are some things it will need to include: the federal government will not be allowed to give any form of entitlement other than the UBI, the UBI should only be adjusted for inflation every 15-20 years, any increase in the base amount needs to be accompanied by a tax increase (which is why this works best with a universal flat tax so people can see the immediate effects of a 1% increase in the UBI resulting in a 1% decrease in their take-home from their job thus ensuring that few will ever want to use the UBI to enrich themselves beyond the basics).

*I realize that when eliminating these departments there is always one or two offices that will need to remain. Like getting rid of HHS won’t get rid of the CDC because that is still a fairly important thing, but it can be an executive office as so many things are. When I say get rid of the department in reality that will only translate to getting rid of 80%-90% of each department (except Agriculture, you can fire all of those useless idiots without negative effects).

 

 

The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need hayekfall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born. F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty.

 

 

 

 

Some Further Reading:

In our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State by Charles Murray (free pdf of the book on AEI.org)

 

 

Flat Tax Revolution: Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS by Steve Forbes

“The Case for the Negative Income Tax” in The Essence of Friedman by Milton Friedman

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People by F. A. Hayek

 

Three Reasons for Universal Basic Income

A Budget – Neutral Universal Basic Income

 

Experts Think UBI Is the Solution to Automation. This Year, We’ll Find Out.

The case for a universal basic income

Universal Basic Income: Pilot Programs

What happens if you replace every social program with a universal basic income

 

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April 19, 2020 · 3:12 pm

No one is thinking

So I found this image the other day. I shared it. A lot of people liked and shared it, but I have come to realize that very few actually believe it.

The problem seems to be that as with most things people have divided into three camps.

Most, but not all, liberals are worried only about the number of deaths from COVID 19

Most, but not all, conservatives are only worried about the economy.

And libertarians are at least consistent in only being worried about everything is going lead to a government takeover of everything.

Granted these terms are always hard to define, especially as conservative nowadays doesn’t remotely mean most of us thought it meant 20 years ago.

Now the COVID death group has, for the most part, never cared about expanding government power (which has always been a problem), but a lot, but again not all, of the remaining NeverTrumpers are falling into this group, and while vocalizing some concern over Trump’s expanding power the=yore not make it a driving force. Further, this group seems to be absolutely idiotic in not realizing that a good economy keeps people alive. Neoliberal economists (and I mean that covering everyone from Friedman and Hayek to the modern Neoliberals which seems to the be the new term for the New Left from the early 1990’s and early 2000’s*) care so much GDP is because there is a beyond heavy correlation between GDP and longer lives, better medical care, higher quality of life, more innovation, more choice, more happiness. It’s not a perfect indicator, but no one has come up with a better one. Economists don’t care about money because they’re Scrooge, they care about it because it buys better lives. And if the economy tanks PEOPLE WILL DIE. More stress causing heart attacks and strokes, more malnutrition, more suicide, more accidents at home, more domestic abuse, more alcoholism, and drug abuse. The longer this goes on the more people will start dying from other things that are not this virus. And to act as if the virus is the only thing to worry about if just preposterous.

But you know what the care only about the economy crowd is equally dumb. Be it the buffoons who are trying to make this out to be nothing—-this is a big thing.

There were 2.8 million deaths in the US in 2019.  We will have more. A lot more this year. Now, I’ll grant that we were always going to have more because it was projected that the Baby Boomers and Gen X were going to be dying in such large numbers that the number of deaths per year wasn’t expected to ever stop increasing until the mid-2050s—but this is going to push those number up more.  But right now you have people arguing that the death rate isn’t that much higher right now…yeah because COVID is mainly confined to New York. It won’t be forever. Flattening the curve may slow the spread of disease but it is unlikely to halt it. NYC deaths are over double what they usually are for this time of year.  When it hits all those communities where we’ve heard about for the last 10 years that are suffering from high opioid use, high unemployment, high-diabetes and in general shitty life…well, let’s just say that if the South had to choose, they would likely be better off picking a second Sherman’s March to the Sea than what is coming for them. Very ignorant people are thinking that because it hasn’t hit their hospital or their community that this is just not going to ever come to them. History tells me that communities during every plague and pandemic throughout history from the plague that caused Athens to the lose the Peloponnesian War, to the Black Death, to the Spanish Flu have had communities that thought they wouldn’t be affect…and then those communities were all but destroyed. Let me make this very clear: UNTIL THERE IS A VACCINE THERE IS NO WAY OF STOPPING THE PROGRESS OF THIS THING. And at best that probably 12 months away. Yeah, sure, maybe if the whole world wanted to shut down for three weeks and we all sheltered in place and had an obscenely limited list of essential employees we could stop the spread of this thing…but only a damn fool could think we could get that done. A lot of people are going to die, and more importantly, a lot of people are going to get sick and that will also have influence on the economy. Further, just putting this out there, worst case is that like HIV we may not develop a vaccine…or just short of that keep in mind we didn’t have a chickenpox vaccine until the late 80s.

And then, of course, there is the consistency of the libertarians in hating government expansions of power and loving the fact that there are many regulations being rolled back to expedite care for people. All well and good. And I don’t mean to let them off easy, I know there are quarters of the libertarians sphere out there that are as always calling for full-on anarchy at this point and ignoring that public health has at least since the Roman Empire been a power of government…but as it’s hard enough to find libertarian voices out there I don’t think many of us are running into that insanity so insulting it wouldn’t do much good. But I will say that fringe does once again miss one of the points of government that some of the other two groups are ignoring: the government is there to help keep people calm and ensure stability in society. Yeah socialism might work on an Israeli Kibbutz, and the world Trumpkins works well in the backwoods of Pennsylvania were those vile inventions of the modern civilization are not embraced, and absolute libertarianism works in an Ayn Rand novel…but the thing is these extreme only work when you have a small group that all agrees to abide by the same rules—here in society you have people too stupid for any extreme, or frankly any sense of moderation. They panic a lot. And idiots cause problems. And you need to keep them in line so they don’t ruin it for the rest of who do have some purpose in life, true on in every nation, on every continent, in every period of time. People are stupid. They ran for toilet paper as if they thought they were going to die on the Oregon Trail. But, at the moment, Trump is making the best case against the expansion of government power that one could ever possibly hope for, so only the most hopelessly mentally damaged (i.e. his supporters…and Bernie’s) are unaware of how terrible government is right now.

Now if you want to talk about what should we be doing that we’re not, that would be great. Because personally, I think we should be plotting for that scenario where vaccines are far off. How? How about starting with the military and medical forces that are not in areas being hit hard right now we start putting people in their 20s into quarantine and then infecting them. Like a good old fashioned chickenpox party that anyone older than a Millenial who got a chick pox vaccine remembers. Give the people the least likely to be harmed the virus, give them immunity to it, hell try some of the safer drugs on them in scientific trials. A very few will die. But what this will do is ensure that these people are now no longer vectors for the disease. Then go through people in their 30s and 40s who have no other conditions that might make them vulnerable. Then move through the ranks of the rest of the government, and maybe then start finding a way for companies that can pay their people to be out for three weeks to do so they aren’t a problem any longer (I’m not a fan of tax breaks in most cases but this could be one of those exceptions). That’s what would protect the elderly and those who have conditions that make them vulnerable—herd immunity. The fast we establish herd immunity the better. Because that is what is going to cut the problems of death and economic at the same time.

Of course, someone might have a better plan, but I haven’t heard of one yet.

Death, the economy, and government overreach are problems. But just yelling that your concern is the big one is not helping anyone.

In the meantime, we need to start dealing with this in a clear risk versus reward way of thinking. Are homemade masks going to stop the spread? Nope. Will they only have be 5% effective? Probably. And 5% is not nothing. And what’s the cost for that 5%, fairly low. If you’ve ever bought a lottery ticket you’ve said you believe in long shots far worse than that 5%. Further, again to the libertarians, we’re trying to prevent panic.

Meanwhile, the panic you could cause by proposing a particular medicine as a cure, which will probably prove to be nothing but a statistical blip could be devastating. Why? Because drugs seldom work on viruses beyond slowing their progress. It’s why we have vaccines because anti-viral drugs are little more than Hail-Mary passes. And really disturbing, we can’t always find a vaccine for viruses…if it were easy then we wouldn’t have been dealing with 40 years of AIDS.

*Side rant here. I know that political terminology is always a shifting set of meanings throughout history, but does it seem that everything has been thrown out and nobody has any consistent set of words we can use that can give us any damn sense of whom we’re talking about. I believe in absolute free markets, personal choice in social concerns, and a strong interventionist foreign policy…Reagan and I would have agreed on 70%+ of things, but I hardly meet any criteria for “conservative” in 2020…WTF?

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March 28, 2020 · 4:53 pm

Questions that need to be asked about COVID 19

Is it just me, or are we handling this entirely the wrong way?

Let’s state up front that I’m not saying stop social distancing, we’re on this path and it would be idiotic to stop once on it, but let’s start looking at what we did right and wrong here because the is a chance this is going to go in wave and maybe we should think before engaging in this silly policy for a second round.

Probably, the best course would have been for China to be more honest and shut down everything more quickly, but it would have been intelligent if every nation now run by brain dead populists had shut China off when they knew this was going to be a problem and quarantining those who might have been to China early on (we knew it early enough for members of Congress getting intel briefings to know to dump all their stocks, we should have known then to start taking action then).

 

But once it’s out there there are really only two courses of action. Either shut things down to keep “flattening the curve” or to just let the dice fall where they may—the first comes with lower death tolls but large economic problems, the latter with huge death tolls but less economic problems. Every country seems to have decided on taking an idiotic middle path so we can get the death toll of letting the cards fall where they may PLUS an even bigger death toll.
And the real problem here is that no one is thinking. In every discussion of “flattening the curve,” I haven’t heard any discussion of the long term.
What do I mean by the long term? Well, as was so succinctly put in the film the Big Short in quoting research on unemployment “Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.” Now with the unemployment rate going up, with a reasonable expectation being 20%+ starting at our current 4% that’s a 16% increase. That’s 640,000+ people dead from unemployment. And that’s before counting in the fact that we all now the suicide rate is going to spike as cabin fever starts to set in.
So the question is how many people are flattening the curve going to save? The way most articles put it, flattening the curve will prevent there from being a shortage of treatment, ventilators, beds, and the grim kind of rationing that we’re seeing in Italy. But I hate to ask because I understand how callous it sounds, but someone needs to ask the question: Is this preventing people from dying or just preventing doctors from having to make the hard call about who can and cannot be saved. Every discussion of flattening the curve seems to suggest that the majority of people will eventually get sick, and there doesn’t seem to be any discussion on how this will lower the death toll, only how it will lower hospital strain. Honestly how many people who get put on a ventilator are going to survive this? Are we letting nearly two-thirds of a million people die in silence so that a half million people who were going to die anyway have a last few days with a modicum of false hope and doctors able to soothe their consciences by saying they did everything they could?

I don’t have an answer to that. Mainly because no one does real reporting and asks these difficult questions.

But it’s a simple question is it going to save more than 640,000 people?

Is it?  I’ve done some rough estimates that say if ventilators will save 10% of the people who are put on them then fewer will die by flattening the curve…but that is made based on so many assumptions due to lack of information I will never have.  But just because I don’t have that information doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t have or couldn’t get it, but I know from many years of experience government never asks the right questions.

Because if it isn’t then we picked a policy that will actually kill MORE people.
And worse if reporters aren’t asking this question, then you know for sure none of the sycophantic populist buffoons in the White House, 10 Downing, or any of the halls of power are asking it.
Yeah, seeing elderly people dying in the halls of hospitals in Italy is tragic. But what about all the heart attacks, suicides, strokes and other various ways people die due to the stress of unemployment?
It should be a simple question. Which path kills more people. And right now I’m feeling that the tragedy of the elderly dying in hospital halls is actually a smaller tragedy than the nearly two-thirds of a million deaths.
Granted I don’t have numbers or resources to model which path will have the least death. But I do know that doctors can be very short-sighted and have little understanding of practical costs, so while we may be listening to doctors in their own field, it might help to listen to economists as well and ask which path actually does the most harm.
Now, I certainly might be wrong and this is the best path. But what I am sure of is that no one is asking the right questions

Now granted Trump and his idiot followers who think that the stock market is the economy are just willing to throw people off to die because they don’t like how their quarterly profits are looking. But this is not an argument for that. Trump’s a moron and clearly not acting on anything other than his first grade understanding of how the economy works. But the fact that he’s a blithering idiot whom we all wish will get COVID-19 and spare us having to hear his fascist blather ever again, doesn’t negate the fact that the other side of this is not asking the right questions. Just as when the media ignored Obama’s human rights abuses on the border but only cared when Trump did it. They don’t ask the right questions ever, and so we need to demand that these questions be asked.

How many people will die from all causes if we do not flatten the curve?
How many people will die from all causes if we do flatten the curve?
No one seems to be asking these questions. And we need to. We need to find out which version has the least suffering. And then go with that option.

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