Society in General

No US Legal Precedent for CV19 Vaccine Mandates

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Harvey Risch and Gerard Bradley write at Brownstone Institute Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates Fail the Jacobson Test.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

We are facing, in other words, questions about how best to integrate our perennial commitment to freedom with our equally long-standing concern for public health, in this time of crisis.

Americans are a freedom-loving lot. It is our founding ethos and we have defended it across the world on numerous occasions. At the same time, we have a strong tradition of social altruism and dedication to the common good, especially in times of crisis.

Now that the Covid-19 pandemic has been with us for close to two years and vaccines for almost one, we have learned that the vaccines work to a degree and that they have both known serious risks and theorized potential risks.

Over the last few months, Americans have been increasingly facing demands that they be vaccinated or revaccinated—from governments, schools, employers, shopkeepers, even relatives.

During the pandemic, the courts have rightly relied upon a century-old precedent of the Supreme Court in mandate cases, but they have gravely misunderstood and misapplied that precedent to uphold draconian and unjustified Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

At times of national emergency, government’s overriding goal must be to protect the population while removing the cause of the state of emergency. This means that certain laws, regulations, and policies may be temporarily suspended to accomplish these tasks. For example, if the army needs your car to transport soldiers to the front line, so be it. In particular, during the 1902 smallpox epidemic, the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) ruled that the State of Massachusetts could compel residents to obtain free vaccination or revaccination against the infection, or suffer a penalty of $5 (about $150 today) for noncompliance.

In authoring the majority opinion in Jacobson, Justice John Marshall Harlan argued:

(1) that individual liberty does not allow people to act regardless of harm that could be caused to others;
(2) that the vaccination mandate was not shown to be arbitrary or oppressive;
(3) that vaccination was reasonably required for public safety; and
(4) that the defendant’s view that the smallpox vaccine was not safe or effective constituted a tiny minority medical opinion.

The Supreme Court in Jacobson repeatedly invoked the “common good” of the polity as the principle of sound constitutional thinking about the public health emergency of the day. Just so—then and now. The Court did not, however, equate the “common good” with a reflexive preference for some collective interest over each person’s rights, or with automatic deference to the latest asserted findings of “the science.”

In this context, for the government to assert that its constitutional obligations (as described in Jacobson, for example) are satisfied only “because a government agency says so” would be self-serving and wholly inadequate. Such reasoning would not satisfy the burden of proof; rather, the government would need to demonstrate the relevant, full, non-cherry-picked scientific evidence to make the case.

Now let’s consider the four criteria upon which Jacobson relied in deciding that the smallpox vaccine mandate in 1905 passed constitutional muster, and use them to evaluate today’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

(1) Individual liberty does not allow people to act regardless of harm that could be caused to others.

What seems apparent is that this criterion is addressing the compelling interest in limiting people from acting to spread the infection. In Constitutional law a “compelling interest” is a necessary or crucial action rather than a preferential one; for example, saving the lives of large numbers of people at risk.

In fact, the federal government has already set a de facto threshold for this level. Annually, approximately 500,000 Americans die from tobacco-related diseases. Yet, the federal government has never acted to curtail tobacco use in any meaningful way. This implies that 500,000 deaths per year is not large enough to trigger a compelling government interest.

Thus, it seems that any truly “compelling” interest can only apply to high-risk individuals, who are definable and comprise a small minority of the general population. Furthermore, the lives of such individuals can often be protected by known existing and available pharmacologic and monoclonal antibody interventions (see criterion (3) below), which means that there may be a less-than-compelling interest for universal vaccination even among them.

Additionally, we know now, and both Drs. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky have stated publicly, that fully vaccinated individuals can become infected and transmit the virus to others. A number of such outbreaks have occurred in diverse locales. Thus, there is no apparent compelling interest in mandating vaccination for low-risk individuals specifically in an attempt to reduce infection transmission to high-risk people—just as there is no compelling interest in mandating vaccination to reduce infection transmission to low-risk people.

Just to be clear, government compelling interest inheres in prevention of serious outcomes such as hospitalization and mortality. But we assert that that there is no such compelling interest in Covid-19 case occurrence. The overwhelming majority of cases recover.

Prevention of Covid-19 cases is at most a desirable policy goal and not a compelling interest.

As has become increasingly apparent, natural immunity following Covid-19 infection is stronger in repelling subsequent viral outbreaks than vaccine-based immunity. (Thus, prevention of Covid-19 case occurrence per se is actually counterproductive in ending the pandemic.)

(2) The vaccination mandate is not shown to be arbitrary or oppressive.

Covid-19 vaccine mandates imposed by the federal government and some state governments require vaccination by all adults except those requesting medical exemptions or religious exemptions. Criteria promulgated by the CDC for medical exemptions however are extremely limited, essentially involving only severe life-threatening allergic reactions as demonstrated from taking the first vaccination of the two-dose mRNA series. Religious exemption requests appear to have met variously capricious responses by vaccine mandate reviewers, and some states have prohibited religious exemptions altogether, in violation of (as Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito argued and as we would maintain) constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.

The one quite irrational consideration of all vaccination mandates to date is that the mandates ignore people who have had Covid-19 and thus have natural immunity. There are now more than 130 studies demonstrating the strength, durability and wide spectrum of natural immunity particularly versus vaccine immunity.

Some arguments have been put forward asserting that antibody levels may be higher in vaccinated people than people recovered from Covid-19, but antibody levels per se do not translate into degree of immunity. Antibody levels in vaccinated people decline appreciably starting at four months post-vaccination, whereas antibody levels in Covid-19 recovered stay roughly constant during those months. Other assertions have been that asymptomatic or mild Covid-19 infections may not produce strong natural immunity; however, these claims have been shown to be scientifically unfounded. Empirical population studies on reinfection/breakthrough infection demonstrate that natural immunity is as strong or stronger than vaccine immunity.

Finally, natural immunity can be documented by having ever had a positive Covid-19 PCR, antibody or T cell test, regardless of current status of those tests.

Similarly, Covid-19 vaccine mandates for children are unwarranted because children almost entirely get infected from their parents or other adults in the household, and infrequently transmit the infection to their classmates, teachers or uninfected household adults.

Normal healthy children do not die from Covid-19, and the 33 children aged 5-11 years estimated by the CDC to have died from Covid-19 between October 3, 2020 and October 2, 2021 all had chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, being immunocompromised (e.g., after cancer treatment) that put them at high risk, and even these numbers are much lower than childhood deaths from traffic and pedestrian accidents, or even being hit by lightning. Covid-19 in children is almost entirely an asymptomatic or mild disease typified by fever and tiredness and resolves on its own in 2-3 days of rest. Thus, vaccine mandates for children are unwarranted.

In sum, a policy requiring vaccination of people who are either already immune or of no consequence either for their own health or for spreading the infection is arbitrary. It is oppressive in inflicting a medical procedure on people who do not need it for themselves or for others. Such a policy would even fail the “rational basis” test which so many courts have applied perfunctorily.

(3) Vaccination is reasonably required for public safety.

Vaccination in theory prevents personal infection and disease, as well as transmission of infection to others. The government’s interest is almost entirely in the latter. We now know that the Covid-19 vaccines in the real world don’t prevent transmission all that well.

Further, public safety is enhanced by use of medications for early outpatient treatment that safely allow increase in population natural immunity. An extensive body of studies has accumulated over the last 18 months showing that various approved but off-label medications dramatically reduce risks of Covid-19 hospitalization and mortality when started in ambulatory patients within the first five days or so of symptom onset.

Meta-analyses of hospitalization and mortality risks calculated by the first author are shown in the figures on the next page for two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Additional thorough discussion of standards of evidence of randomized and nonrandomized drug trials, as well as on a number of small trials that failed in the adequacy of their study designs and executions, is posted here. These analyses show that numerous drugs and monoclonal antibodies are available to treat ambulatory patients with Covid-19 successfully, making vaccination a choice for dealing with the pandemic, but not a necessity.

(4) The vaccine has a long popular, medical, and legal history of being regarded as safe and effective.

This criterion decisively distinguishes Jacobson and the smallpox vaccine mandate from what is happening today. Jacobson did not accept dissenting testimony about vaccine safety or efficacy because the vaccine at that time had been a staple in society for almost 100 years.

The genetic Covid-19 vaccines have no such information, have every indication that they are orders of magnitude more harmful, and even the FDA still classifies all three in use in the US as experimental, which means that their EUA designations have only required showing that they may convey some benefit and need not be harm-free, i.e., have not been established as safe and effective, let alone known as such for decades or longer.

According to the VAERS database, to date some 19,000 deaths have been associated with the Covid-19 vaccines, of which more than one-third occurred within three days of vaccination. In this one year of Covid-19 vaccination, this number is more than double the number of deaths from all other vaccines over more than 30 years combined in the VAERS data. It is also more than 150 times the mortality risk of smallpox vaccination, 0.8 per million vaccines (Aragón et al., 2003).

Graph shows VAERS data up to Nov. 12, 2021. Source: https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/11/19/vaers-summary-for-covid-19-vaccines-through-11-12-2021/

The VAERS database also identifies more than 200,000 serious or life-threatening non-death events to date, and this number is almost certainly at least 10-fold undercounted because of the work, difficulty, impediments and lack of general knowledge involved in filing adverse event reports in the VAERS system. Many of these adverse events portend lifelong serious disabilities. But two million serious or life-threatening events is well more than the damage that would have been caused by even untreated Covid-19 occurrence in the same 200 million vaccinated Americans, especially given that two-thirds of them have strong natural immunity from having had asymptomatic or symptomatic Covid-19.

These numbers indicate that these severe events caused by the vaccines very likely outnumber serious Covid-19 outcomes that would have occurred in the same individuals had they not been vaccinated. As well, those numbers would be dramatically lower with general availability of the suppressed but effective treatment medications for early ambulatory patient use.

With regard to efficacy, the three US Covid-19 vaccines showed great promise in their original randomized trials results. However, as these vaccines have been rolled out in hundreds of millions of doses to the general public in the “real world,” their performance has differed from what was originally described.

Thus, if vaccination were to be the only method of combating the pandemic, it appears that vaccinations repeated indefinitely at 6-month intervals would be required, and even that may not be all that successful in reducing spread substantially. There are no vaccination programs for other general diseases in the US that require such a high frequency of compliance. Even influenza, which has a substantial annual mortality, has an annual revaccination frequency, is only perhaps 50% effective over the flu season, is not mandated.

A careful reading of Jacobson shows that it is not just an automatic consideration allowing the government to do what it wants when a pandemic emergency has been officially declared. In a pandemic, courts look to Jacobson for precedent as an apparent direct fit, but even so must evaluate the evidence for satisfying all of the Jacobson criteria.

As we have shown, Covid-19 vaccine mandates do not satisfy any of the required criteria in Jacobson, let alone all of them.

The question to be addressed then is why a pandemic infection with approximately 1/20th the natural mortality risk of the previous smallpox pandemic would be subject to the grievous penalties of loss of employment, loss of medical care, loss of necessary activities of daily life, and mandate of vaccines that unlike in the previous pandemic have no long-term safety data. Given that none of the Jacobson criteria have been met, the infringements and demands of the government and its public health agencies have not been justified according to law. This is the argument that must be made as to why the proposed vaccine mandate is an unwarranted overreach inconsistent with established public health policy and law.

 

 

Covid/Climate Prigs Are Out to Spoil Your Days

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Christopher Gage writes at Oxford Sour Bay of Prigs.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Enamoured by lockdown, the puritans wish for a perma-pandemic in which no-one, nowhere, will be happy.

Not content with dying their hair green and punching steel through their nostrils, progressives here in Great Britain have proposed something rather more exquisitely demented than their usual fare.

The Independent, a kind of Guardian for actors manqué and Cluster B personalities, those who suffer from fictitious ailments of which ‘the doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong,’ asks, ‘Should Everyone Have a Personal Carbon Quota?’

Helpfully, the newspaper lays out exactly what a Carbon Quota would entail.

It begins: “Your home, sometime in the next decade. You click the heating on and receive an app notification telling you how much of your carbon allowance you’ve used today.

“Outside in the drive, your car’s fuel is linked to the same account. In the fridge, the New Zealand lamb you’ve bought has cost not just pounds and pence but a chunk of this monthly emissions budget too.

“Welcome to the world of personal carbon allowances – a concept that is increasingly gaining traction among experts as a possible response to the climate crisis.”

Curiously, this all sounds like one’s entire life would be recorded and regulated and monitored and meddled with by politicians who’ll punish or praise, all in pursuit of a vague utopia. Sounds familiar.

According to my Carbon Quota, I could live happily and healthily, provided I die next Tuesday at noon.

If I were to stay on this planet and offend Mother Nature with my presence, I’d have to limit myself to half a cigarette per day, a slither of ribeye per week, and one soupçon of red wine per month. Such a paltry regimen would dissolve around 90% of my personality.

Besides, Tuesday is no day to die. Especially before the 4 p.m. happy hour.

Perhaps, I could time it just right. I’ll prop up a stool in my favourite dive bar, and impart everything I’d like to say but avoid saying in fear of social ostracization.

I could say that there is a biological reason why women aren’t funny. I could say that, on balance, the British Empire was a good thing, and that anyone whinging about ‘cultural appropriation’ seldom has any culture worth appropriating. I could say, with conviction, that the Jews obviously don’t secretly run the world because if they did, the world would be far closer to utopia than it is now. I could suggest that those who play music on public transport, indeed—in public—should be hung, drawn, and quartered for the benefit of the gene pool. I could say all this before shuffling off into the light.

(If my girlfriend—whose people have won a fifth of all Nobel Prizes despite being 0.2% of the world population—objects, then I’m sorry… I’m saving the planet, darling.)

You can define the confidence of a culture by the pettiness of its laws.

I’d rather shuffle off than live in a world in which one’s social status is tied to one’s ability to pretend falafel is edible, to one’s withering body. I’d rather that than live in a world in which the prigs and puritans, those weird kids from school with ‘Free Da Weed’ Sharpied on their hemp rucksacks, have won the final victory over everyone else. A world in which every consideration is now suffixed with ‘to save the planet.’

We shouldn’t feign surprise. A stubborn one-third of any population harbours latent authoritarian tendencies. All they need is a little nudge and a wink from someone in a lab coat or a pinstripe suit.

Over the last twenty months, we’ve given them plenty to chew on. We’ve sacralised Crab Mentality—that depressingly human tendency to pull down others into the soup of conformity. For many, this pandemic has been the time of their lives. They’ve enjoyed grassing on neighbours, posting their vaccine statuses, their three-mask chic. Don’t mention that sensible Sweden got it right. Don’t mention that lockdown only delays the inevitable, to great human cost. Don’t mention the fatal link between obesity and Covid deaths.

They’d love life in Austria, where the government has mandated a Western first—forcible vaccination for every citizen.

What a time to be alive. This pandemic has valorised negative personality traits. Back in the Old Normal, high neuroticism combined with high agreeableness meant you’d spend your days siphoning your biography for ‘trauma’ to weaponize against the world. Now, it’s a plus. Like Woke intellectuals, the neurotics mistake their personal problems for societal problems.

I assumed a majority of Britons would, like me, rather chew on a glass vial labelled ‘Wuhan Institute of Virology,’ than consider medical apartheid. Nope.

According to YouGov, six in ten Britons support the introduction of a ‘papers, please’ society—vaccine passports.

That’s despite vaccines blunting Covid’s ability to hospitalise and kill, but not its ability to spread—rendering vaccine passports both pointless and poisonous.

Of course, the usual disclaimer applies just in case anyone of a progressive bent is reading: I’m not saying it’s Nazi Germany, but it’s quite clear how totalitarian regimes slip into power with little resistance.

A recent survey in The Economist made for terrifying reading: forty percent wanted masks forever; a quarter wanted to shut down nightclubs and casinos; another third wanted socially-distanced pubs and clubs and theatres; a hefty rump wanted a 10 p.m. curfew, and one-third said anyone coming into this country should be quarantined, like a dog, for ten days. And they wanted all this lunacy indefinitely, Covid or not.

Perhaps that explains why the eco-loons can air with confidence the drudgery they wish to impose upon everyone else. Not a day goes by without some middle-class Insulate Britain bobo blocking the motorway or making ‘demands’ upon the government to act on the ‘climate crisis’.

What nobody asks is how any of this nonsense would make any difference given that Great Britain contributes less than one percent of global carbon emissions. Those who follow The Science don’t cotton on when last week’s gospel morphs into this week’s heresy.

What happens when we reach Net Zero and the weather doesn’t change? I can only guess… ‘That wasn’t real Net-Zero. Real Net-Zero has never been tried.’

They don’t ask such obvious questions because the answer is obvious: they don’t care about all that. As Mencken wrote, they’re governed by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

That’s the problem with do-gooding. There’s always more good to do.

 

How Voter Fraud Is Revealed in 35 US States

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jay Valentine reports on the behind-the-scenes canvassing organizations documenting widespread fraud in the 2020 elections.  Surprisingly, even in states carried handily by Trump, there were large numbers of illegal ballots counted in state and local races.  His article at American Thinker is Meet the Technology That’s Uncovering 2020’s Voter Fraud.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Were You a Phantom Voter?  Now You Can Find Out.

The search for phantom voters is over. Phantom voters are sitting next to you at the restaurant or standing next to you at the bank. They are your friend and neighbor. You may be a phantom and not know it.

Phantom voters, the definition, is morphing from fake voters hiding in UPS boxes to people who advanced computer models predict will not vote.

Don’t get me wrong — there are thousands of phantom voters living in churches, R.V. parks, cemeteries, homeless shelters, hotels, and virtual mailboxes. It’s just that there are as many, perhaps more, who live active, healthy, honest lives on voter rolls. They just don’t know they voted.

You’ve heard the stories, denied by the mainstream press and almost every secretary of state: “there is no significant voter fraud.” Why not say that? There is no way you can check.

Now there is.

After the 2020 election results stopped in the middle of night and vote trajectories magically changed when they fired up again, thousands of people, just like you, didn’t buy it. They formed armies of canvassers in 35 or more states. They did something that has not been done at scale in the history of the country: they started checking voter rolls.

They did more. They filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests at unprecedented levels. Secretary of state offices, once a murky sinecure, had to answer real questions about what was going on.

Here’s what popped out.

Leftists are different from you and me. Unlike us, they care that every vote is cast, and if you do not cast your vote, they will do it for you. And they did. At scale.

In one midwestern state, voter rolls costing tens of thousands of dollars were bought by a billionaire leftist every month for over a year. Why would someone buy a list that doesn’t change much?

Voter lists show people who move. They show people who never or seldom vote.

The white hat canvassing team built a query for one state: “voters who voted in 2020 who never voted before.” Guess what! 265,000.

In the same state, thousands of people came forward with stories that when they showed up to vote, they were told someone had voted for them. Get the picture?

In a southwestern state, in its second largest city, there was a 21-day daily tabulation of cast ballots. Once a ballot is cast, it should not be changed. Not here.

When the millions of cast votes across over 21 snapshots were compared, thousands of ballots had been altered. Some were minor alterations, like a slight name change. Others were more interesting — like when someone voted in person, but his vote was later changed by an absentee ballot.

It gets better.

Those FOIA requests are mining gold. Our midwestern state has documents showing that the state election organization gave online access to a leftist group for weeks during the voting. Citizens had to pay over $20,000 for one shapshot of the voter roll. Leftists could, and did, access it online throughout the process. For free.

And access it they did. Witness statements are being gathered, lots of them, that in the largest city, election officials were trading cell calls about how many votes were needed, and someone was then providing the phantoms to meet the quota.

They knew the names of the phantoms — they had direct access to who voted, who didn’t, and who was likely to never show up.

This is not exclusively a blue-state phenomenon.

In a deep red state, canvassers found more traditional phantoms.

There were the 21 people at the fraternity house. Nothing to see here — until they sorted them by age. All these kids were active voters, many voted, and their age range was from 115 to 57. Some frat house.

These red-state canvassers went deeper. They showed that the phantoms did not vote en masse in the 2020 presidential election. Phew! Feeling better. But wait. They vote in droves in state, county, municipal elections.

Aha — here was another interesting pattern, never seen before.

This deep red state that voted for Trump by double-digit margins did not call out its phantom army when it could not move the needle. When local, state elections were up, well, those people voted — even the 21 at the county jail and the 41 registered at the Recreation Commission.

In earlier American Thinker articles, we created the phrase “sovereign fraud.” That means your government is in on it.

As more than 35 state citizen organization now are using the most advanced search and big data technology to look into voter rolls, and cross-check them with churches, R.V. parks, fictitious street locations, they are concluding the office of secretary of state is corrupt, incompetent, or often both.

Let’s take incompetent.

In about every state, there are voters old enough to have fought in the Civil War, and they still vote. In one state, there are voters — a bunch of them older than Julius Caesar — the Roman guy.

States have voter rolls with multiple people using the same voter ID. When pressed, they have some screwy excuse that it’s a sequencing anomaly. At least one state adds every new voter to the end of its voter ID sequence, as one would expect. Except when it doesn’t. These people have numbers that skip by two and later ten, and they insert voters there, not at the end.

There are hundreds I have personally seen, thus thousands in every state — examples of 16 people, with different last names, living in that one-bedroom, 876-square-foot house. Really?

Let’s go to corrupt.

Secretaries of state, when pressed to cough up those voter rolls, after the confiscatory price is paid, change the data in such a way that it cannot be searched with traditional technology. Tough luck for them; our canvassing friends have search technology five generations ahead, so it gets done.

Canvassers in 35 or more states are digging, and the more they find, the more relentless they become. We are pleased to provide technology that runs a thousand times faster than anything available to any secretary of state or leftist voter fraud group.

These canvassing organizations are the Minutemen of this generation. They come from every background, organize with no central leadership. They blindly figured out how phantom voting was happening, and they are forcing states to audit their voter rolls.

They aren’t blind anymore. They are organized. They have resources and technology, and things are about to change in a big way for phantoms.

 

 

Economics of Infrastructure Investment

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mathew Kahn discusses the ramifications of the major transportation spending recently passed by the US Congress. Of course, as the pie chart shows, infrastructure as many people think of it—construction or improvement of bridges, highways, roads, rail and subways, ports, waterways, and airports—accounts for only $157 billion, or 7%, of the plan’s estimated cost.  Still that is a lot of money (“A billion here, a billion there, and soon it adds up to real money”–US Senator), and Kahn provides a list of concerns in his article What Insights Does Economics Offer About the Nascent Biden Administration Transport Infrastructure Investment Program?   Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The Washington Post has published a piece stating that the Secretary of Transportation, Peter Buttigieg, is the big winner of the Biden Infrastructure Bill as he will be attending many ribbon cutting ceremonies as grateful local mayors shake his hand.

Economic research offers many insights here about the efficiency and equity effects of this multi-billion dollar investment.

Point #1: This is an irreversible investment. When a city builds a new subway line, this billion dollar project cannot be later sold on Ebay and use the $ to do something else. In contrast to light rail and subway lines, dedicated buses feature more option value because they can be sold off or redeployed on different routes in the same city. Given that we don’t know how cities will develop over time, this real option has value.

Point #2; Past expansions of public transit have not significantly increased ridership with the exception of Washington DC. In the case of Los Angeles, improves in rail service (such as the Light Rail on Exposition that I ride) has taken bus riders away from the bus. See our 2005 paper. If crime rates continue to be a concern in cities then the middle class will be even less likely to use the “shiny new” infrastructure. The poor do rely on public transit to move around cities and an expansion will improve their quality of life. An economist would ask whether they value this benefit more than the cash equivalent?

Point #3: The older infrastructure in the nation is located in older cities, where the population is barely growing (or shrinking) and where the voters are mainly Democrats.

Point #4: The highways tend to be built in the suburbs where the voting base leans Republican. My 2011 Brookings piece with David offers several constructive ideas for how to “build back better” here.

Point #5: If progressive cities gain better infrastructure due to the Biden Investment AND if they don’t build much housing (the progressive city NIMBYism is well documented) , then housing prices will rise and the poor and middle class will be further squeezed by this new investment.

Point #6: There are many economics consulting firms that intentionally offer extremely optimistic ridership estimates ex-ante and this helps ambitious government officials to justify projects (i.e to say that it passes a cost/benefit test) when in reality — ex-post evaluations show low usage of the new infrastructure. See Pickrell 1992.

Point #7: Given that unions are powerful in progressive cities, what is the marginal cost of infrastructure creation in these cities? Is the Department of Transportation seeking to build a new capital stock or to enrich a special interest group that supports the Democrats? How many middle class new construction jobs will be created? Will the expansion of the public capital stock crowd out the expansion of the private capital stock as construction crews work on transport infrastructure rather than building private sector projects? What is the shape of the construction supply curve?

Point #8, once the new infrastructure is completed — will this greatly improve urban quality of life in cities such as Baltimore that have been shrinking? How will the Mayor and local civic leaders and private sector stakeholders change their investments and policy decisions? What positive synergies might emerge? Our 2021 Unlocking Book explores some of these themes of investment co-ordination between the private and the public sector.

Covid The New State Religion

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tim O’Brien explains the rites and rituals in his American Thinker article COVID: A New State Religion?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

What started as a virus quickly became epidemic and then a global pandemic. The spread of a contagion laid the groundwork for what has become an industry, and it’s now morphing into a religious ideology with all of the familiar trappings.

That’s a total of $55.5 billion in vaccine sales for 2021 just from the three biggest providers of vaccine in the U.S. And this does not include a wide range of products, services, and industries that have cropped up to service the nation’s and the world’s COVID needs.

From makers of masks, cleaning supplies, hand sanitizer and ventilators, to major pharmacy companies paid millions to distribute vaccines, COVID has become a major industry.

Politicians and bureaucrats at the local, state, and federal level have seized on the COVID crisis to achieve unprecedented levels of power through vaccine mandates, lockdowns, restrictions, and of course, overnight changes to election procedures.

Then, there is the public health sector. These are its glory days. . .COVID is a new field of study, complete with federal grant moneys to analyze every aspect of COVID, so long as the research does not detract from the approved narrative.

COVID is an industry. It’s here and it’s not budging. But it’s more than that. It’s also an ideology with all of the accoutrements of an established religion.

The Baptism of Vaccination

The COVID vaccines are widely understood to be ineffective at preventing the spread of the virus. So, why the relentless emphasis on turning society on its head over flawed vaccines?

Like Christian baptism, the vaccine is the baptism into this new faith. The waters of baptism don’t physically clean one’s soul of sin any more than the vaccine can completely prevent contraction of COVID. In the ideological context, it’s a symbolic rite of passage into the faith.

Once injected, you can count yourself among the faithful, unlike the “unvaccinated” who are the COVID ideology’s equivalent to atheists circa 1400 A.D. It’s okay to shun them, demonize them, discriminate against them, even deny them life-saving healthcare. In fact, you have an obligation to do so, so they learn their lessons and step in line. Otherwise, they will be made an example.

It doesn’t matter that they may have their own religious objections, they may have personal medical histories, or they may even have natural immunity from the virus which is much more effective at preventing spread. What matters is that they can be dubbed “anti-vax,” a term that coincidentally or not sounds uncomfortably similar to “anti-Christ.”

To the faithful, if you’re unvaccinated for any reason, you’re selfish, you don’t care about others. You’re putting yourself before the majority, before the faith.

The Rites of COVID Ideology

Just as Catholicism has its rites in the form of seven sacraments, the COVID ideology does, too. One is the booster shot. If you were vaccinated a year ago, but have not yet gotten your booster shot, you are at risk of being labeled “unvaccinated” once again. Do you want to risk that?

Of course, once boosted, you have the privilege of knowing you are ‘born again.’

This new ideology even has the rite of confession. Were you asked by your employer, or the front office at the football stadium or basketball arena to disclose your vaccination status? How much different is that from the Catholic rite of reconciliation?

The practice of faith often involves sacrifice. The COVID ideology is not without sacrifice. Since adverse effects of the “safe and effective” vaccine are “extremely rare,” the burden is on you to take the risk. If you are one of those who contract chronic heart problems, permanent neurological disorders, or some other life-altering condition, that’s the sacrifice you must be willing to take for the good of the ideology.

COVID’s High Priests

Of course, no faith would be complete without its high priests, the most visible one being Dr. Anthony Fauci. He is routinely asked by leaders and journalists to bless one activity, behavior, or medical treatment over another. A legion of people seeks his final approval or disapproval on behaviors that until now were considered un-sinful. Some may even regard the pontifical bureaucrat as infallible.

He’s not alone. There is an army of COVID clergy with titles like “public health director,” “governor,” “mayor,” “human resources director,” “Silicon Valley billionaire,” “editor,” “producer” and “reporter” all of whom are the keepers of The Word when it comes to COVID. Each has front-line authority to make decisions on enforcement of COVID ideology.

To counter The Word or the narrative of this new faith is to be guilty of the sin of “misinformation,” punishable by banning, censorship, and denial of “communion” in the word’s most literal sense. The only way to regain access to the congregation is to recant.

If you belong to an established faith that holds dear the original Ten Commandments as handed down to Moses from God, you may recall the first one, which says, “I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.”

Keep that in mind, because you may be asked to choose. The God of our fathers, or the god of COVID? Just know that the god of COVID is a jealous god.

 

Media Ignore Worldwide Revolt Against Covid Tyranny

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Brownstone Institute compiled videos from around the world showing citizens protesting irrational restrictions imposed by Covid despots.  The article is Protests and Rage Against Lockdowns and Mandates All Over the World

As deadlines loom for mandatory vaccines, and the more lockdowns come to many countries of the world, people have taken to the streets in protest. In the typical case, local media either neglects to report on this or improperly characterizes them as “right wing” or “anti-vaxx.” It is likely that most people who get their news only from mainstream TV or The New York Times know nothing about what is happening.

The videos below, carefully chronicled by our friend Aaron Ginn, document what the media has neglected, even though this is the largest global protest movement to appear in decades. Keep in mind that this is only footage from select places from the last week. There are many more not appearing here and such protests have been building for more than a year.

These videos indicate the arrival of a turning point. Governments can continue to press these lockdowns and mandates against all scientific evidence and good public health or they can listen to the pains and anger of their own people.

Genova, Italy

Tbilisi, Georgia

London, England

Vancouver, Canada 

Melbourne, Australia

Northern Ireland 

Switzerland 

Vienna, Austria 

Linz, Austria

New Zealand 

Budapest, Hungary

New York City 

Croatia 

The Netherlands 

Toronto, Canada 

Denmark 

Oslo, Norway ​

Finland 

Manchester, England 

Milan, Italy 

Rome, Italy 

Turin, Italy 

Naples, Italy 

Florence, Italy 

Perth, Australia 

Brisbane, Australia 

Paris, France 

Nice, France 

Montpellier, France

Guadaloupe, Caribbean 

Greece 

Prague, Czech Republic 

Slovakia 

Germany 

Iran

Spain 

Oregon, USA 

Colombia 

To be continued…

The Inflationary Road to Serfdom (Great Reset)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Tyler Durden posted at zerohedge This Is How They Intend To Get Us To “You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy”.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The pieces of the puzzle may fit together in ways that you do not expect. For years, the global elite have been openly telling us that one day we will all own nothing, we will have no privacy, and we will be extremely happy with our new socialist utopia. But exactly how do they intend to transition to such a society? Are they going to come and take all of your stuff? Needless to say, there are millions upon millions of very angry people out there that aren’t just going to hand over their stuff to a bunch of socialists. So how are they going to overcome that obstacle?

Well, the truth is that they don’t need to take your stuff to implement their goals.  All they need to do is to destroy the value of your money.

If your money becomes worthless, you will start descending into poverty and it won’t be too long before you become totally dependent on the government.

And as the stuff that you have right now wears out, you won’t be able to replace it with the worthless money that you are now holding.

Eventually, you will own virtually nothing, but you probably won’t be very happy about it.

So high inflation is actually a tool that the global elite can use to further their goals.

The good news is that I do not believe that the global elite will ever be able to achieve their utopia.

The bad news is that they won’t be able to achieve their utopia because western society is going to completely and utterly collapse during the times that are ahead.

But as I demonstrated last week, the truth is that inflation is rising much faster than our paychecks are, and that means that our standard of living is going down.

And inflation is one of the big reasons why the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index just hit the lowest level since 2011.

The Federal Reserve has lost control, and 2022 is going to be a very “interesting” year from an economic standpoint.

On Sunday, we learned that the average price of a gallon of gasoline in California has almost reached five dollars…Gasoline prices are going to continue to move higher, and that is really bad news.

Just about everything that we buy has to be transported, and so higher gasoline prices are going to fuel even more inflation.

Sadly, those that are on the bottom of the economic food chain are the ones that are being hurt the most. At this point, many food banks are really struggling to purchase enough food because price hikes have become so severe…

So many problems have converged all at once.  Some have used the term “a perfect storm” to describe what we are facing, and I think that is definitely quite appropriate.

If you are waiting for life to “get back to normal”, you are going to be waiting for a very long time. As MN Gordon has noted, pre-2020 prices are now gone forever…

But sooner or later, this is what socialist regimes always do.  They tell us to study hard, get a good job and work as hard as we can.  And then they give our money to people that haven’t done any of those things.

Eventually they run out of other people’s money, and so then they just start wildly creating more.

Unfortunately, every time that this has been tried throughout history it has always ended in disaster, and now it is our turn.

More from Jeff Greenfield at Politico Joe Biden’s Empty Inflation Toolbox

Presidents have little power to bring down rising prices.
History shows the public doesn’t care.

Left unspoken was a chilling reminder from history: Inflation has a unique power to kneecap a presidency. Incumbent presidents and their parties do not do well at all when inflation (and attempts to cure it) are on voters’ minds come election time. The gas pump, the supermarket check-out counter, the heating bill, the sticker on the windshield, provide — or seem to provide — powerful indictments against the party in charge.

If that’s not enough to unsettle the White House and its allies, consider this: Presidents have almost no power to ease the pain of inflation, and the voting public cuts presidents no slack at all because of that impotence. Look into the toolbox of our country’s chief executive and you’ll find it empty of effective tools, filled instead with devices now obsolete or laughable or meaningless or politically destructive.

But if you’re looking for a president who did in fact do something to tame inflation — albeit indirectly — it was Jimmy Carter. When he appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve Board, he put someone in a position of real power who was determined to fully exercise that power, no matter the consequences.

With an inflation rate in 1980 of more than 13 percent — “It was the biggest inflation and the most sustained inflation that the United States had ever had,” Volcker recalled — he led the Fed to a historic tightening of the money supply. Interest rates rose vertiginously; at one point the prime rate hit 21 percent. The consequences were dramatic and ugly — a recession more severe than any since the Great Depression. Four million workers lost their jobs.

The “stagflation” — a toxic combination of inflation and unemployment — helped send Carter down to a landslide defeat in 1980. By 1982, the unemployment rate hit 10 percent, a number high enough to cost Republicans 27 seats in the House. By 1984, however, unemployment was moving in the right direction, dropping to just over 7 percent. Economic growth was over 7 percent, inflation had dropped to under 4 percent — and Ronald Reagan won a 49-state re-election.

The United Sates has not faced a genuinely worrisome inflation rate since, and that’s another source of pain for Biden and his party. Americans have had no experience in decades with prices rising across the board; a 6 or 7 percent inflation rate is nothing compared to the Carter era, but it looks particularly worrisome compared with the recent past.

If Biden’s advisors are right, 2022 will see the lessening of inflation, as goods flow into the stores and automobile lots where cash-flushed customers will no longer bid up the costs of scarce items. But that’s more of a hope than a certainty; the White House description last summer of the “transitory” nature of this inflation seems a lot less convincing now, and the prospect of Christmas season with high priced or unavailable goods and sharply higher fuel costs does not bode well for the president’s already-sinking approval numbers.

Footnote:  Road to Serfdom

In ‘The Road to Serfdom’ F. A. Hayek set out the danger posed to freedom by attempts to apply the principles of wartime economic and social planning to the problems of peacetime. Mises Institute provides a text in pdf format here

 

Cobra Theory of Biden Governance

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Previously in August Victor Davis Hanson suggested several theories that might explain how Biden’s administration has destroyed everything they touch.  A summary of that essay is reprinted later on, but this post presents another possible explanation.  James Lewis writes at American Thinker Biden’s cobra presidency.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Have you noticed how Joe Biden says he wants to lower gas prices, so he cancels the Keystone pipeline?

He wants to lower unemployment, so he pays people not to work?

He wants to beat inflation, so the Fed prints more money?

Biden is President Perverse.

The Cobra Effect is economics slang for “perverse incentives.” If you give your kid money every time the kid misbehaves, that’s a perverse incentive. Every parent knows that mandates are perverse. You don’t give your teenager money to buy cocaine. (Or maybe Joe does.)

Conservatives wonder if Joe’s brain is beyond its sell-by date, but that isn’t quite right.

The resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave isn’t just failing; he does the opposite of a competent president. He’s perverse.

The Cobra Effect is a sort of an economics joke based on the story that New Delhi had too many cobras at one time, so the city paid a bounty for dead cobras. Then smart Indian people started to raise more cobras to get the bounty, the opposite of the intended outcome.  Economists use that story to explain economic stupidity.

But Joe Biden has topped stupid and is now the most deliberately perverse POTUS in history.
It’s the only explanation I can think of.

Do you want to stop racism? Teach people how to hate white folks. Are you laughing yet, America?

These are angry, bitter, hateful people with more than a little sadistic glee in their makeup.

You say you love America, and you do your worst?

This is the twisted face of hatred.

It’s Joe Biden’s Cobra presidency.

Background from previous post Biden Has the Destructive Touch

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.  [For details on the listed failures see the article linked in red.]

The Afghan Catastrophe
The Inflation Fiasco
The Border Disaster
Energy Insufficiency
The Race Calamity
The Crime Explosion

So why does Biden so willfully exercise this destructive touch that blows up anything he taps?

There are several possible theories:

1) Biden is non compos mentis. He has no idea of what he is doing. But to the degree he is alert, Biden listens—sort of—only to the last person with whom he talks. And then he takes a nap. When Afghanistan blows up or inflation roars or the border becomes an entry door, his eyes open, and he becomes bewildered and snarly—like an irritable and snappy Bruce Dern waking up in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

Biden has no clue about the actual destructive implementation of his toxic policies, and no concern upon whom these destructive agendas fall. He vaguely assumes a lapdog left-wing media will repackage every Biden incoherence as Periclean, and every daily “lid” as Biden’s escape for presidential research, deep reading, and intensive deliberation. Biden appears to be about where Woodrow Wilson was in November 1919.

2) Or is Biden a rank opportunist and thinking he will ride woke leftism as the country’s new trajectory? He resents his prior subservience to Obama, and now feels he can trump past signature leftist administrations as the one true and only socialist evolutionary. He is not so much the manipulated as the manipulator.

Biden fantasizes himself as a hands-on dynamic leader who bites at reporters, snaps from the podium, and issues his customary interjections. He is therefore “in command” for four or five hours a day. He enjoys acting more radical than Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or “the squad.”—and especially being far more leftwing than his old and now passé boss Barack Obama. Joe is in control and that explains the dross touch. For the first time in his life, such an incompetent has complete freedom—to be powerfully incompetent. Biden is then not demented as much as delusionally running things.

3) Biden is unfortunately what he always was: a rather mean-spirited plagiarist, liar, and nihilist, from his Clarence Thomas character assassination infamy and Tara Reade groping to his foul racist talk and his monumental habitual grifting. His disasters are the same old, same old Biden trademark, performance-art screw-ups.

Biden likes the idea of conservative outrage, of chaos, of barking at everyone all the time. Biden accepts that no omelets can be made without broken eggs, and sort of enjoys screwing up things, as Robert Gates and Barack Obama both warned. “Wokening” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, encouraging hundreds of thousands to pour across the border, and abandoning our NATO allies in Afghanistan—who cares when tough guy, brash-talking Joe on the move jumbles stuff up? The disasters in the economy, foreign policy, crime, energy, and racial relations? Biden is just shaking things up, stirring the pot, baiting people to watch Mr. “Come On, Man” in action, as he blusters and preens and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.

4) Biden is nothing much at all. He’s just a cardboard-cut out, a garden-variety Democratic Party hack, who is against anything conservatives are for. He assumes he will undo all that Trump did, on the theory it is simple and easy for him in his lazy, senior moments. And he is tired anyway of thinking much beyond such Pavlovian rejectionism. A closed border is bad; presto, open borders are good. Improving race relations is bad; deteriorating relations must be good. Energy independence bad; dependency good. Biden works on autopilot in his minimalist day job: just cancel anything that Trump did and worry nothing about the effects on the American people

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target. The Left ensured the base would not bolt in 2020. So, he owes them. Biden, more or less, signed his presidency over to the squad, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama holdovers. They hand him a script; he tries to read it; and they follow up with the details. He is the old “Star Trek’s” tottering John Gill.

The Left may hope their own nihilist agenda sort of works. When it inevitably does not, then Joe, the delivery man, is blamed: so much more quickly, then, will be Biden’s necessary exit. They kept their part of the bargain by getting the basement denizen elected. Now he keeps the deal by handing over the presidency. Biden’s utility had about a six-month shelf life.

Now ever so slowly the leaks, the West Wing backstabbing, the furrowed anchor brows, and the unnamed sources will gently ease him out with 25th Amendment worries (e.g., “Perhaps President Biden might find taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment of some value after all, for his own benefit, of course.”) Kamala Harris is not so inert as we are led to believe.

A cognitively challenged Biden then is pulled in every direction, by his own senility, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his neanderthal hatred of everything Trump was and did.

The problem for America is that theories one through five are not always mutually exclusive, but more likely force multipliers of the present insanity. At some point, some brave congressional representative or Senator will finally have to say to Biden, in the spirit of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

My Comment

It should also be noted that Biden governance follows the classical pattern for leftist autocracies.  The massive spending programs already enacted and proposed serve not only to greatly expand the federal bureaucracy but also to perversely make the population financially dependent on government largess.  Down the line such dependency ensures compliance with diktats constraining citizen’s rights and freedoms.  Trotsky explained how the Soviets got there by nationalizing the means of production.

Trudeau: Let’s Limit How Far You can Drive

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Brad Salzberg writes Trudeau Considers Restricting Distance of Vehicle Travel For Canadian Citizens.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

During the recent COP26 summit, Justin Trudeau hosted a carbon pricing conference showcasing Canada’s carbon policy. He referred to it as “one of the most stringent and ambitious in the world.”

In terms of a domestic carbon program, no emission reduction mandates had thus far been established beyond an agreement between Alberta and Ottawa to limit output at 100 megatonnes per year. Canada emits roughly 730 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent annually. The Trudeau government has now mandated a specific 100-megatonne reduction for our oil and gas sector by the year 2030.

This in itself is not a surprise. What should make the ears of Canadians perk up is one of the proposed restrictions to accomplish the goal. Among other current considerations in the Liberal government’s proposal, we discover the following, as reported by the Calgary Sun this week:

“Limit personal consumption of hydrocarbons by individual Canadians, in terms of allowable miles travelled by motor vehicle, train or air.”

My, my– Canada is certainly filled with surprises these days. Last week delivered another zinger:
“Deliberately coughing at someone during the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a criminal assault.”

Applying our math skills, that’s two examples of unprecedented forms of draconian social measures in the past two weeks. Not that mainstream media will present it as such. In both cases, the information was ever-so-casually tucked into news articles on a larger theme.Let us understand the potential what is being proposed. There may come a time when the distance Canadians can travel in their vehicles includes a hard cap on mileage. Not only would this apply to their personal vehicle, but also to the time they spend idly reading a newspaper while riding a bus.

All of which conjures up a collective yawn from legacy media. As a result, they will likely never juxtapose this “progressive” policy with what Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms has to say about the matter.

6. (1) Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.

(2) Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right:

to move to and take up residence in any province; and
to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.

What would occur in a case where Charter-based mobility rights were violated by Trudeau’s restriction on distance of travel?

A simple question it is. The answer, of course, is nothing at all. Just as it applies to current Charter breaches that result from Covid mandates.

Result: a loss of personal freedom. Predicted extend of exposure from establishment media? Nothing.

Witness as Canada continues to morph into a reasonable facsimile of authoritarian nations of the world.

Footnote:  See also Uh Oh Canada