We're building a bridge from Austrian theory to its application in business. This can help us gain a greater understanding of the merits of Austrian economics.

Presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 9 October 2020.

For more information on the Economics for Business program, visit Econ4Business.com.

The new government powers sold as "temporary" and "emergency measures" are likely to endure long after the end of the current crisis. Politicians and pundits will insist "we" need these powers to be permanent so that governments can address future crises by centrally planning the production and the use of resources.

From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 9 October 2020.

See also Peter Klein's March 2020 Power & Market post, "Coronacrisis and Leviathan".

What we are now witnessing in the larger society is the result of decades of work within academia and government to destroy the private-property system of the West and replace it with a new socialist order. From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 9 October 2020.

The Jacksonians saw central banking for what it was: a way of making the rich even richer, while ripping off ordinary people. We remember the Jacksonians not just because they were right about the central bank, but because they were also very successful in their fight against the Bank and its allies.

From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 9 October 2020.

There are two distinct classes in America, and we have to break up. And we have to break up sooner rather than later. If we are to avoid a disastrous conflict, each side has to let the other go.

From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on October 9, 2020.

[From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on October 9, 2020.]

At breakfast, I ran into Ed Griffin who wrote that wonderful book The Creature from Jekyll Island, the greatest book written about the monstrosity that was created 110 years ago and he said, “I heard you’re talking this afternoon. What are you going to talk about?” I said, well the title of my talk is the Constitution and Central Banking. He said, “Oh, you’re going to go for about thirty seconds,” because there’s nothing in the Constitution about central banking whatsoever. But there is, of course, a history that brought us to where we are now and my job, with deference to the great speakers who have appeared before me, is to try and tie a lot of this together by telling you about the history and telling you about how the Constitution has been tortured and twisted even as we speak in an effort to allow big government to control our lives. And then I have a little surprise for you at the end of my talk. Don’t let me forget the surprise. I’ve revealed it to one person, Professor Newman, I know he’s going to remind me to reveal the surprise.

So, when we were colonists and the king was looking for ingenious ways to raise money, one of those ingenious ways was the Stamp Act. This required that every adult in the colonies—not in Great Britain; it would have fomented a revolution there—but every adult in the colonies have in their possession, on every piece of paper in their home, every book, every pamphlet, every financial document, every letter, a stamp issued by the British government. So, you went to a British government—you think the post office is bad today—you went to a British government post office here in the colonies and purchased these stamps to put them on the papers in your home. Question: How did the King and the Parliament three thousand miles away know if you had the stamps on the papers in your house here? The answer, the Writs of Assistance Act. The Writs of Assistance Act permitted British agents—see if this sounds familiar—to go to a secret court in London and ask the secret court for a search warrant to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found which was evidence of any lawbreaking by not having the stamps on your papers. So, it would not be uncommon for you to hear a knock on the door, and it was a British soldier very politely showing you the writ of assistance and telling you, We have the right to come in your household—ostensibly to look for the stamps. Of course, he might be looking for alcohol that you couldn’t prove you had paid tax on; he might be looking for furniture that you had imported from the island that you couldn’t prove you paid tax on. He might even be looking to expel you from the house so that he could take it over for himself and his buddies, which is why we have the Third Amendment written ten years later.

This all happened in 1765. The Stamp Act was so unpopular that Parliament eventually rescinded it, but before Parliament rescinded it, a group of students at the College of New Jersey, now called Princeton, did some quick math and concluded it cost the government more to enforce the Stamp Act than was generated by the sale of the stamps. Now that’s a headscratcher. We all know that George III was an idiot, but was he that stupid that he would enact that tax that cost more to enforce it than was generated and collected by it? Unless the purpose of the Stamp Act was not to collect money, but to remind the colonists that the king was still the king and he could enter their homes at his whim. One of the Princeton students who wrote the report was a 5’4” kid from Virginia by the name of James Madison, known then and throughout his life to his colleagues as Little Jimmy. I hope when I go to heaven I get to stand next to Little Jimmy, because I’ll look like Shaquille O’Neal by comparison.

We fought a revolution; we won the Revolution. Jefferson wrote that “We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.” Tom Woods explained them: they are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they come from our humanity, they don’t come from the government. And because they are natural rights, the government can’t take them away, whether it’s by edict under the name of science, whether it’s by edict under the name of power, whether it’s by a majority of votes, whether it’s by the vote of everyone but one. These rights belong to us and they are ours to exercise as we see fit.

That is, at least, the theory of the Declaration of Independence; the rights that Jefferson calls inalienable we also refer to as natural. Most judges are too secular to use the word natural, so they’ll call those rights fundamental, but they basically mean rights that preexist the government. After we won the Revolution and we wrote the Constitution, Little Jimmy is the scrivener in Pennsylvania. He’s the one collecting the notes; he’s the one refining the language. We all know that that constitution would never have been adopted, but for the promise of the addition of a bill of rights. We also know that that constitution would not have been adopted but for a bribe. The bribe was an agreement by the new federal government to assume the debts of the state governments that they had incurred in the Revolutionary War. Now you can’t call it a bribe. When I call it a bribe—the government actually bribes people?—I get my fingers burned. That’s like saying abortion is murder, taxation is theft; you’re not supposed to say these things on television, but when you do say them, people’s ears perk up. Yeah, it was a bribe. New Jersey got its debts removed and the feds agreed to take over those debts in return for New Jersey ratifying the Constitution, yes, and the same was the case with the majority of the other states as well.

Madison is the most interesting character in all of this because of the various phases of his career. As a student at Princeton and during the Revolutionary era, he’s a radical along with Thomas Jefferson. When he’s crafting the declaration of the Constitution of the United States, he’s a big government person that’s using all kinds of artifices to craft this constitution which allows the federal government to sap the authority of the states and even to take away liberties from individuals. But then something happens to him. He’s a member of Congress; it’s time to write the Bill of Rights. He’s the chair of the committee of the House of Representatives to write the Bill of Rights, and he writes twelve amendments; only ten were adopted, the ten that we now know as the Bill of Rights. So, that iconic language, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” is Madison’s. All of that beautiful language, your right to say what you want, to think what you say, to publish your thoughts, your rights, your worship or not to worship, your right to assemble or not to assemble, your right to keep and bear arms—which is not the right to shoot deer, it’s the right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government.

That quintessential American right, your right to be left alone—all of those rights are articulated by Madison in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights, of course, is adopted in record time and the first ten amendments are part of the Constitution. And then it becomes time for the Federal government to pay off that debt that it assumed. And so, Alexander Hamilton, who was the secretary of the Treasury, persuades President George Washington and Vice President John Adams and all the big government Federalists who control the House of Representatives and the Senate to enact the First National Bank of the United States. And who do they look to as to whether there is authority in the Constitution to enact a bank? The guy that wrote the Constitution, the guy that just wrote the Bill of Rights, the congressman from Charlottesville, Virginia, little Jimmy Madison. But, this is a different Madison at this point. Madison knows there’s no authority in the Constitution for a central bank and Madison gives one of the greatest speeches in American history, known simply as the bank speech. Google it. It is a masterpiece of the following argument: the federal government has no authority but what was given to it in the Constitution. He doesn’t say this because he was too modest: I know because I wrote the Constitution. But the argument is clearly there. (By the way, if you do Google it, they didn’t have stenographers in those days, they had people writing as fast as they could, so some of the bank speech is literally what came out of Madison’s mouth, some of the bank speech is a summary by the persons taking notes of what they heard Madison say.

But by the time of the bank speech, the former radical, the then big government guy, now becomes a small government Anti-Federalist. They call themselves by the name that’s alien to our ears today, the Democratic Republicans, but this was Jefferson’s maximum individual liberty, maximum state rights, minimum federal government party. Madison has now left the Federalists and he’s back with them. Maybe some of this was personal, I don’t know, but clearly when he gave that bank speech, he exalts two of the ten amendments: the Ninth Amendment, which says, Just because we listed rights in the first eight, doesn’t mean that those are the only rights. There are other rights that human beings have, which the government shall not disparage. And the Tenth Amendment, which says, Those powers not delegated in this Constitution to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people, respectively. Among those powers never delegated away and among the rights never articulated in the first eight, was the right of the states to create a bank. So, Madison’s argument is clear: there’s no authority under the Constitution for the federal government to create a bank. This argument will come back to haunt him. The bank, of course, passes. Professor Newman gave us a wonderful historical description. It was a disaster. It passes, and then it passes out of existence because it was such a disaster.

When it comes time for the Second National Bank, Madison is in the second half of his second term as president of the United States. He vetoes the Second National Bank of the United States, and then his buddies start to get to him and he changes his mind and he signs into law the Second National Bank of the United States—and by doing so contradicts everything he said in the bank speech, all the arguments that he made about how the federal government can only do what is delegated to it in the Constitution. And this is 1816; the bank comes into existence in 1817. In 1819, the State of Maryland decides to tax the bank. It taxes the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States and that tax is challenged in the Maryland state courts, and the State of Maryland prevails in the state courts, and then the federal government appeals it to the Supreme Court, and we have arguably the most consequential Supreme Court case in American history after Marbury v. Madison, which gives the court the right to engage in judicial review, to void what the Congress and the president have done when they exceed their authority under the Constitution. This case is called McCulloch v. Maryland.

McCulloch is the head cashier at the branch of the Second National Bank of the United States in Baltimore, and he is suing Maryland, asking the Supreme Court of the United States to invalidate the tax by invalidating the bank. So, the issue before the Supreme Court is, Does the Constitution of the United States authorize the Congress to establish a national bank? If you read the Bank Speech, Madison’s greatest artistry next to the Bill of Rights, it is clear that it doesn’t, but this is a different Madison and this is a different era, and by this point John Marshall—who, as Professor Newman pointed out, was an investor in the Second National Bank of the United States but sold the investment before ruling on the case—John Marshall writes again, one of the more consequential decisions he’s ever written. But this one—rather than restraining the government as judicial review did in Marbury v. Madison—this one unleashes the government.

So, where in the Constitution can the federal government establish a bank? Here is the government’s argument: well, the federal government can tax, the federal government can collect taxes, so the federal government needs a bank in which to put the taxes that it collects. Well, wait a minute, up to this point the federal government has put tax dollars that it collected into private and state-chartered banks. Why do they need their own bank? Ah, after the seventeen clauses in the Constitution giving seventeen specific, unique, discrete powers to the federal government is the Elastic Clause, also known as the Necessary and Proper Clause, which says, I summarize, I paraphrase, Congress shall have the power to do whatever is necessary and proper to put into action the foregoing authorities that we have given it. So, is the bank necessary and proper—not necessary or proper, necessary and proper—in order for the government to collect taxes and to store the tax dollars before it wastes them?

So, I’m going to take a little break from this. I’m going to come back to necessary and proper. Two theories of the origins of law: one is our humanity, natural rights; by the exercise of reason, we know right from wrong. The other is what’s known as positivism—whatever the lawgiver says the law is, as long as the lawgiver has written it down and it’s been ratified, that’s the law. So, positivism would say “necessary and proper” literally means necessary and proper. John Marshall comes up with an inverse positivism. Because the Constitution didn’t say absolutely necessary, the word necessary doesn’t mean necessary. It means needful or helpful. So, McCulloch v. Maryland says “necessary and proper” doesn’t mean necessary and proper because it didn’t say “absolutely necessary” and Little Jimmy could have put the word absolutely in there but he didn’t. So, by arguing from a word not present in the Constitution, Marshall upholds the constitutionality of the bank.

What about the Tenth Amendment? The bank speech dwells on the Tenth Amendment: the states never delegated away the authority to establish banks. We know that because the states have established their own banks. Ah, Marshall says, But the Tenth Amendment doesn’t say whatever is expressly delegated to the federal government. So, again, this inverse positivism. Two words that are not in the Constitution authorize him to expand the power of the federal government, and in doing so, he writes the following language, which is frequently quoted today, much to our dismay. “Let the end be legitimate. Let it be within the scope of the Constitution an all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.” Basically meaning, If Congress wants to do something because it is helpful to the specific powers given to Congress, it can do so. This case, and Marshall’s language, has been cited thousands of times. Regrettably, it is still the law of the land; it is the lynchpin to allow the federal government to get away with the chicanery that it gets away with today.

We’re fighting the War between the States. Lincoln’s government is issuing greenbacks pursuant to a statute the Congress authorizes which allows them to pay the government’s bills in worthless, not gold- or silver-backed, but worthless greenbacks because people are accepting the greenbacks. This is challenged shortly after Lincoln’s death in a very famous case called Hepburn v. Griswold. A lot of these challenges are not somebody suing the federal government because they think the greenbacks are unconstitutional. It’s two private citizens suing each other because one wants to pay his debt to the other in greenbacks and the other says, The war is over, Lincoln’s dead, the legislation was temporary, I’m not going to accept the greenback. So, the litigation is over whether or not a debt, a legitimate, not denied debt under a contract, can be paid in greenbacks. And the Supreme Court says, No, Congress did not have the authority during the Civil War to issue greenbacks because the Constitution says only gold and silver is money in the United States, and there’s no central bank at this point in time.

And then there occurs something that everybody’s talking about today called court packing. So, Andrew Johnson is the president of the United States and the radical Republicans who control the Congress do not want him to be able to appoint new justices to the Supreme Court. So instead of expanding the Supreme Court, they shrink it. It goes from nine to six, meaning when somebody dies or leaves the court there’s no seat for him [Johnson] to replace somebody with. The Supreme Court goes down to six, Johnson is impeached, he survives the impeachment, he doesn’t run for reelection. Ulysses S. Grant is elected. What do the radical Republicans do? Increase the court back up to nine, and Ulysses S. Grant appoints three of his buddies to the Supreme Court. And then there’s a second challenge, again involving a private contract, this one called Knox v. Lee, and the same issue is before the court in 1871 that had been before it in 1869, except you have a different makeup on the court. And this time the court says, Greenbacks, greenbacks. The government can issue whatever it wants and these are lawful for debt.

This case, Knox v. Lee, and its companion cases are known to lawyers and judges as the Legal Tender Cases. They have been argued by scholars time and again, over whether the Legal Tender Cases were properly decided. Justice Scalia told me he did not think they were properly decided but believed that it would be cataclysmic if the Legal Tender Cases were to be overruled and greenbacks not backed by gold or silver were to become money. That is the last time this issue of the power of the federal government to issue paper money is resolved, and the challenges to the Federal Reserve never succeed. There have been a dozen efforts by various litigants to challenge the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve as we now understand it, and all of these challenges are swatted away by judges saying either, This is a political question and if you don’t like the Federal Reserve, go elect a Congress that will undo the Federal Reserve, or—this is judge-made law, this is what judges do when they don’t want to decide cases—You don’t have the standing to bring this litigation, meaning, Your injury is not unique to you and therefore under the Case or Controversy requirement of the Constitution, we’re not going to hear the case. So, the last time the courts examined the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve, it had to do with how people get on the Federal Reserve and is it constitutional for the president to appoint these people and for the Senate to confirm them. And the court said, We’re washing our hands of it.

Some years ago, Lew Rockwell asked me to give a talk entitled “Do We Still Have a Constitution?” At the time I gave the talk, I said barely. I’m not sure that we still have a Constitution now because of the ability of the government, the ability of courts, to twist and torment words, and we have this thing called precedent. Just because John Marshall in 1819 said that “necessary and proper” really means needful and helpful, should we be bound by that? For those of us who believe that the Constitution is an instrument of restraint, this is the contrary of that. For those who believe like the progressives and the Left today that the Constitution is an instrument that unleashes the federal government, they delight in this. The Madisonian view of the Constitution was, I take this from the bank speech, I don’t take this from his signing the legislation. (By the way, when you sign the legislation establishing the Second National Bank, he never repudiated the bank speech; he never repudiated his veto. He just signed it because the popular will was so strong. He also signed it because he wanted to help his fellow Virginian James Monroe get elected president of the United States and he didn’t want the issue of a Second National Bank to be a campaign issue in the presidential election of 1816.) But just because we have these precedents that permitted the big government people to get away with what they wanted 150 years ago, should we be bound by them today?

Unfortunately, that’s the way the legal system works. All those beautiful words in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, some of which I summarized for you, work in a law school classroom and can excite us in an environment like this. But unless we resist the forces of government that are sapping power liberty, whether it is our liberty to say to the government, I have the right to take chances and you can’t take that right away from me, or whether it’s our liberty to leave, or liberty to ignore the government, our right to travel, our right to say to the government You shall not pass this threshold. Whatever these rights are, they only work when we exercise them. We can talk about them all day. We can write about them well into the night, but unless courageous people exercise these rights, we are going to be stuck under the thumb of government, whether it’s a state government like New Jersey or Michigan or New York or whether it’s a federal government like we have today.

There’s an argument that I made holding up my iPhone during the Justice Kavanaugh hearings which evolved around his personal behavior in which I said, Here’s my problem with him: he thinks that the federal government and the state governments can get in here without a search warrant and he’s written that. And I encouraged Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask him about that. Nobody asked him about it. He may be conservative politically on certain social issues, but not when it comes to the power of the government to intrude in our lives. I fear that with the court today. I once had the privilege to interrogate Justice Scalia before about twenty-five hundred people at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I was pounding him on the natural law, and he looked at me and he goes, “You’re a freak for the natural law. The fourth amendment only protects persons, houses, papers, and effects. That’s the language in the fourth amendment.”

I say, “Justice Scalia, this is an iPhone.”

“Yes, I know. I may be older than you, but I know what it is.”

“In the iPhone is a computer chip. Is the computer chip an effect?”

“I’d rather not answer; I think that case is coming before us. You tried to trap me and tried to trick me.”

Well, I mean, I knew the case was coming before them and I did try and trap and trick him, but I also wanted to make a point. The language that Madison used—persons, houses, papers, and effects—was intended to protect our right to privacy, what Madison called the right to be left alone.

So, where does all of this leave us today? We know that most of what we have heard about covid is utter nonsense, driven by those in power who want to use a crisis to control us. I have never heard a more articulate vision and version of that nonsense than my longtime bosom buddy Tom Woods just gave us earlier this afternoon. We know from reading Bob Hicks’s masterpiece Crisis and Leviathan that government always grows in crisis. We also know that there is nothing in the world more permanent than a temporary government program. And we know, we can laugh at the juxtaposition of words, but we know what the government will do. It will hang on to that power, keep it long, keep us under its thumb, get us accustomed to it. There is no concentration camp easier to manage than one where the inmates are familiar with its terrors, because they have allowed its terrors to be visited upon them in the name of democracy and electing people to terrorize them.

I expect that when I die, I will die in my bed peacefully surrounded by those who love me, faithful to first principles; but not everybody will have the luxury of dying that way. Some young people here may die in a government prison, faithful to first principles. Some young people here may die in a government town square, to the sound of the government’s trumpets blaring, but faithful to first principles. When the time comes, you will know what to do, because freedom lies in the human heart and no government, no army, no tyrant can take it away. But it must do more than lie there. We must exercise it. We must terrify the government, because, as Jefferson said, “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Thank you and God bless you.

About twelve years ago [in 2016], an obscure law professor wrote a law review article arguing that the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, and paper money is unconstitutional. Her name: Amy Coney Barrett.

[From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on October 9, 2020.] 

Today I’m going to talk to you about what’s been going on in our country for over half a year now, not just in the United States, but around the world. Some of this we all know, but we’ve been getting, let’s say, not the entire story for much of the time and we’ve had to wait to hear additional experts chime in to say, Wait a minute, maybe the first experts were all wrong. It’s been hard to know exactly what to think and what numbers we ought to be looking at when it comes to this covid-19. Should we be looking at cases, should we be looking at percent positive rates, hospitalizations, deaths? All kinds of numbers have been thrown at us, some with context, some without. So, I’m going to spend a little time reviewing this and making a bit of a clarion call to enjoy human life the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. Now since March, we’ve experienced lockdowns and restrictions of various kinds, supposedly all in the name of science, you understand. If you don’t support these things, you must hate science. That’s the intellectual level of the conversation. We were told, We need fifteen days to flatten the curve—fifteen days. I believe we’re on day number 209 of fifteen days to flatten the curve. Remember the old days when the concern was, We don’t want to overwhelm the hospitals? We can’t cure this thing, but at least we could get the hospitals in the condition they need to be in and allow them to be able to cope with reasonable numbers of people, and we would flatten out the number of hospitalizations and deaths over time, so as to allow the hospitals to be able to cope with them rather than have everybody arriving at the hospital all at once.

OK. Then, you start to see on social media all your friends saying the hospitals are overwhelmed. It was like a memo had gone out that the word we were all going to use was “overwhelmed.” Like your friends couldn’t even be creative enough to come up with a different word; they all had the same word: the hospitals are overwhelmed. Because their other friend said the hospitals are overwhelmed, because the other friend said that. What actually happened was that in April alone, 1.4 million jobs in healthcare were lost, because far from being overwhelmed, the hospitals were mostly empty. As a matter of fact, in May, NPR ran a story with this headline about all those field hospitals that they built because of all the overflow that was supposedly going to happen. Headline: “US Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients.”

Hmm, what was going on here? The hospitals were never overwhelmed at any time, with the possible brief exception of New York City. In California, we began to see how the goalposts began to be changed. What they were worried about at the time they were telling us about flattening the curve was thirty thousand hospitalizations. We really have to be careful about hitting that number. The current hospitalization number in California as of this time—we’re in October 2020—is just over three thousand and they’re still so panicked that they won’t open anything. They’ll open a little tiny thing and you have to put your mask on in between bites while you’re eating at a restaurant. So, it’s one-tenth what they feared. There’s state after state after state. Washington, DC, not a state, but nevertheless, Washington, DC, that’s an example of one of many places in the US where the numbers all indicate, have indicated for months, that the state is clearly at the phase justifying reopening. The numbers clearly indicate, from what they said at the beginning—we need to reach such and such—well, they’ve reached it, and now they keep changing it.

Now it’s not hospitalizations anymore, now it’s “cases” and as we’ll talk about, the way that testing is being done even the New York Times had to say Maybe your coronavirus test shouldn’t have been positive. Even the New York Times was reduced to admitting this—that as many as 90 percent of the tests, because the testing is so sensitive, are yielding just viral debris that isn’t infectious at all. But you’ve got to go and isolate yourself for X number of days for no reason. And we’re going to use this number, and we’re going to wait till this number hits zero, which even just given the problem of false positives is impossible. So, you can’t have your life back in some states unless you more or less take it back. That’s what they’ve done to us. Also, in Washington, DC, the public schools have been closed, but they put a cap of eleven students per room on private schools, no matter how big the room is. That basically cripples the private schools, for no reason. There’s no scientific basis for that.

Then it became You can have your life back once there’s a vaccine. What? There might never be a vaccine. As Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School puts it, “The timeline for a vaccine is anywhere between 6 months from now and never.” So, at some point, we have to figure out how to live with this kind of situation. Well then, when it started to look like maybe we might get a vaccine, then the story became Even with a vaccine, you can’t have your life back. And if you object to that, you’re the problem. You’re not listening to the science. Everything that brought people joy was abruptly taken away and every time it looked like it might creep back in, you get another headline about how you can’t have this back, you can’t have that back, this’ll never be the same, maybe we’ll never have sports again, maybe we’ll never do…And it’s almost like they take a perverse delight in this. Well, if ever there were a use of the expression “get bent,” I would say it’s right about now.

Now, of course people will say, Wait a minute, what, do you just want people to die? Again, this is the intellectual level of the conversation. You just want people do die. How do you talk to somebody like that? So, in order to do that, I’m going to appeal to the above midwit-level population and I’m going to remind people of the important lesson in Henry Hazlitt’s great book Economics in One Lesson. This is a book that’s sold millions of copies and Hazlitt’s one lesson, as we all know in this room, is that if you’re going to evaluate an economic policy, it’s not enough to evaluate the short-term consequences for one earmarked group. Any blockhead can do that. If you want to know the long-term consequences or the real consequence of it, you look at the long-term effects on everybody, not the short-term effects on an earmarked group.

For example, suppose the government taxes the public to build a stadium. Well, the midwit will simply point to the stadium and say, “Hey, look at this wonderful thing that the government did. It’s a stadium.” And yes, we can all see with our physical eyes that there’s a stadium there, but they think that’s the entirety of the analysis: a stadium has somehow appeared. There’s no thought of costs, opportunity costs, where the money came from, where it would have gone otherwise—none of that is even considered, because those things can’t be seen with your physical eyes. To understand the fullness of the policy, you have to be able to think and see with your mind’s eye.

Likewise, with rent control people think, You impose rent control and people get lower rents, and that’s the entirety of the analysis as far as they’re concerned. There’s nothing further we need to consider. We just take these fat cats and just force them to lower rents, and then everybody gets lower rent and that’s, as far as the midwit is concerned, that’s the end of the discussion, because that’s what he sees with his physical eyes. But, for people capable of seeing with their mind’s eye, they ask other questions like, How many people are going to start building low-cost rental housing if they know that this ceiling has been imposed? There will obviously be far less housing built, which will make the problem of housing people worse. We also know that at these particular rates, you have a million people and surfeit of demand, so if you’re a landlord, you can be a jerk, you don’t have to fix that leaky pipe, you don’t have to do any maintenance, because if somebody’s upset about it, you got 8 million other people who would be very happy to take that person’s place.

So, in other words, if you see with your mind’s eye, you understand that rent control is a lot more complicated than just Duh, we forced them to lower the rent and it’s low for everybody. And in fact, if, for some reason, you wanted to lower rents through the means of government impositions, you would actually want to do the exact opposite of rent control. You would want to control every single price in the entire economy except rents, because that would make entrepreneurs not want to go into the production of anything other than rental property because everything else would be unprofitable. The one thing they could produce would be rental property, which would lead to a collapse in rental prices, which would be great for everybody. So, literally the opposite of what these people recommend would be the best thing. But the point is, we have to think about all the consequences for everybody.

Well, the same thing goes for public health, because my talk could be called “Public Health in One Lesson.” Because yes, if you simply focus monomaniacally on one virus, you might be able to say, Look at what we did for this one virus. You might be able to say that. I’m not even sure they can say that, but they might be able to say, Look what we’ve done for people with this one virus, and then, being midwits, they leave the discussion right there. They don’t bother to investigate the seventeen other aspects of health that have catastrophically collapsed because of that one thing they did. All they say is, look at what they did in the short run for this targeted group instead of saying, Look at the long-run consequences for everybody. And because they don’t look at that, it’s not even mentioned.

When was the last time Dr. Fauci, who is viewed superstitiously by everybody, even acknowledged that there are collateral damages from lockdowns, even mentioned them? Nothing. And so they’re, therefore, able to turn around and say, You just want people to die. Okay, well, let’s play that game. They want to play it, let’s play it. How about this? We know, for example, coming out of the UK, that there will be more likely to be at least as many, if not more, preventable cancer deaths than covid deaths because of the diversion of resources into covid and the panicking of everybody about it. And so we read Richard Sullivan, professor of cancer and global health at King’s College London, director of its Institute for Cancer Policy, saying “The number of deaths due to the disruption of cancer services is likely to outweigh the number of deaths from the coronavirus itself. The cessation and delay of cancer care will cause considerable avoidable suffering. Cancer screening services have stopped, which means we will miss our chance to catch many cancers when they are treatable and curable, such as cervical, bowel and breast. When we do restart normal service delivery after the lockdown is lifted, the backlog of cases will be a huge challenge to the healthcare system.”

We read on October 6 in the Daily Mail coming out of the UK, that health secretary Matt Hancock says, “Cancer patients may only be guaranteed treatment if COVID-19 stays under control.” How about that? This is the Daily Mail, which is much more honest than the American press. “Almost two and a half million people missed out on cancer screening, referrals or treatment at the height of lockdown—even though the NHS was never overwhelmed.” They had the honesty in the UK to say that. “Experts now fear the number of people dying as a result of delays triggered by the treatment of coronavirus patients could even end up being responsible for as many deaths as the pandemic itself.” Now, we won’t see that kind of effect right away. It’s not like a huge number of cancer patients are going to die immediately in 2020, but it does mean that people who might have lived an extra fifteen to twenty years, may live just another three or four, and we’ll see those numbers in the coming years.

Then we heard a United Nations report in April saying that “economic hardship generated by the radical interruptions of commerce could result in hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020.” UNICEF later increased that number to 1.2 million child deaths, and at Oxford University Professor Sunetra Gupta has reminded us several times, in recent weeks and months, of the UN’s prediction that as many as 130 million people could be at risk of starvation because of the lockdown, because of the possibility of famine in several dozen places around the world. Now who are the ones who don’t care about human life?

But, that’s not all, because in the United States in Oakland, California, we have Benjamin Miller of the Well Being Trust who tells us, as coauthor of a study on deaths of despair—so that’s drug or alcohol abuse or suicide—that an excess—that is to say, above what would normally occur—of 75,000 deaths will occur as a result of all this. Not to mention the CDC itself estimates that in the United States alone, there will be more than 93,000 excess noncovid deaths this year because of what’s been going on, including over 42,000 from cardiovascular conditions, over 10,000 from diabetes, and 3,600 from cancer. A recent UK study just out found that the risk of death was increased because of lockdowns by 53 percent among seniors with dementia and another 123 percent among seniors with severe mental illness. For four decades, India Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Stayarthi rescued thousands of children from slavery and human trafficking and he fears that that’s going to be reversed. He says the biggest threat is that millions of children may fall back into slavery, trafficking, child labor, child marriage. Well, with millions of families being pushed into poverty, they’re being pressured to do something, to put their children to work to make ends meet. So this is being done.

They’re trying these lockdowns even in the developing world, where people live hand to mouth. When you live hand to mouth, it means that every day you earn enough money to feed yourself for that day, and they’re being told to stay home for weeks and months. I think we see where this is going. Now, the people of Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, when they got wind of their government’s lockdown plans, they rose up and said, We’re not abiding by this. There will be no lockdown. And so there wasn’t. We could learn from them.

Even The Atlantic had to admit, “When you ask them to stay home, in many cases, you’re asking them to starve.” In the UK, The Telegraph says, “The absurd demand that developing countries adopt economically disastrous lockdowns is driving untold misery.” How often is that mentioned in the US? Ever? Any of our people ever mention that? No, it’s You want to kill people, because you want to live your life. Or because you don’t want two years of your kids’ lives taken away from them. Because now we’re being told, Maybe you can have your life back in the spring of 2022. Not fifteen days to flatten the curve, probably spring of 2022 you can start getting back all these pleasurable things that make life worth living. Okay. So, it seems to me that the crazies who think that public health should mean a monomaniacal fixation on one virus and then pretending that none of the other stuff is happening should have to answer for this a little bit more.

Now, some of this stuff that I’m talking about now appears in—wait for it—the free e-book I wrote on this subject: Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong about the Lockdown. They’re even wronger than you thought—wrong as wrong can be if you value human life and flourishing. So, in the United States, you can get this free book by just texting the word lockdown to the number 33444, and you’ll like it because it smashes these SOBs completely. Or you can get it at wrongaboutlockdown.com. Yes, I bought that domain, I was so happy to nab that one.

Not to mention that of course over the course of this people’s life savings have been depleted, their livelihoods have been destroyed and things that give their lives meaning and fulfillment abruptly removed. So, we’re supposed to believe that all that matters is just biological existence. And this prompts some interesting philosophical questions. If I could live to be 120 and enjoy robust health for all those years, but the price was we would destroy all the architectural treasures of Europe, we would abolish music altogether, and we would restrict social life to 5 percent of its formal level, would I choose that? Who would? Human happiness is not some optional extra. These things, like close, intimate relationships or so-called large gatherings, like concerts, theater, lectures, church, sporting events, the arts in general—if you think these are merely dispensable adjuncts to human life and flourishing, you have no business being in charge of anything. These are life itself, and as I’ve said in a previous talk, for anybody who performs in front of an audience—and particularly think about your children, dancers, musicians, athletes, magicians, comedians, singers, actors, whatever—they’re basically being told, Maybe you can never have this. Maybe you can never ever do what brings your soul happiness. And yeah, maybe we can’t have these until we have a vaccine, said Dr. Zeke Emanuel. “We may have to give up cherished things for a long time,” he says—things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family for at least eighteen months. Maybe this talk could also be called “Get Bent.”

Well, another terrifying statistic came out recently, showing the grim if entirely predictable effects all this inhuman regimentation has been having on the young, particularly those between 18 and 24. Now, the federal government has a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And they, among other things, look at percentages of people who have considered suicide within the previous twelve months. Now typically, before all these lockdowns occurred, in the 18–25 group, it fluctuates between just under 7 percent and 11 percent of those people have contemplated suicide in the previous 12 months. What we now know is that just in June—not twelve months, just one month—it’s now over 25 percent of them have contemplated suicide in just one month. Now why is that? We’ve taken away everything they love, deprived them of the opportunity to socialize and to experience those irreplaceable moments of youth and demanded they accept this dystopia as the new normal and tell them there’s something wrong with them if they long for normal human life, the kind that is lived by humans. Yeah, that’s selfish, that right there. That’s selfish.

One of my friends has a friend in Melbourne, Australia, which is under a severe lockdown. Here’s what this friend wrote:

It’s been three months since I saw another human face besides [my partner’s].

Seven months since [my partner] and I had a little break together in the form of going and having a coffee down the street.

Over a year since I last sat out in nature. Sitting staring at the wall for two hours, again, unable to move.

Despair

Horrible negative emotions virtually all day.

Awake and tired nights, distress.

I can’t think of anything to look forward to because I don’t know when we will be allowed to do anything.

Just go for a drive, go to the forest.

Just go somewhere together, far from all this.

We are not allowed.

The police could enter our homes at any point and arrest us if we say the “wrong” thing online. That has happened.

This doesn’t feel human.

I don’t smile.

I don’t laugh.

I worked out the other day and I felt nothing, no pain.

Nothing would register as pain.

I couldn’t feel anything.

I feel far away from myself.

Sometimes I forget how long the day has been going for.

Does it matter?

You’re not allowed to leave, even if family members are terminally ill. They could die before we are let out of Melbourne. We got told it isn’t a good enough reason to be let out.

You aren’t allowed more than five kilometers from your house.

You aren’t allowed to buy a takeaway coffee and sit under a tree or on the ground anywhere that isn’t your house.

This isn’t human.

This isn’t human.

This isn’t human.

This isn’t human.

There is no empathy here.

No price is too high.

Suicide is not too great a price to pay.

Self-harm is not too great a price to pay.

Structural brain changes in large portions of the population is not too high a price to pay.

Do you know what prolonged social isolation does to the brain?

We are made to feel it does not matter because all we are, are numbers.

We are not people; we are the masses without a say

Without a time period to look forward to when we can hug again

I am sharing my experience because you should know the truth.

Sincerely,

A faceless number in Melbourne.

And we’re the ones who don’t care about human lives. Screw these bastards.

Over at Stanford, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya put it this way. “To get zero COVID, I don’t know if it’s even technically feasible.” We know that we’re going to have to destroy our society in order to get it. Essentially, it’s so high a cost that it’s not worth it. Oh, we’re just doing it until there’s a vaccine. But, in just half a year of doing it, the consequences have been, to quote Dr. Bhattacharya again, “catastrophic.” Sunetra Gupta, of Oxford, whom I mentioned before, who has been called the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist, says, “It’s a good thing for young and healthy people to be exposed.” She says, “This is how we have always managed viruses. Why is this so different? If we keep introducing restrictions and lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine, it will be the young that suffer the most, particularly those from more deprived backgrounds. We can’t keep doing this. It would be an injustice.” One Yale professor came back with, “Well, no serious scientist is calling for lockdowns everywhere all the time.” Some of them are, so that’s not even true. Some of them are. But all these other scientists want are just sudden lockdowns here, there, and everywhere, then partial resumptions, then lockdowns, all the while with the arts completely shut down. Oh yeah, that’s a whole lot different. We cannot run a society like this. And without the arts, as Professor Gupta put it, “What are we alive for in the first place?” What kind of a life does this portend? Everything that makes life worth living.

Now, we hear this a lot. If you knew someone who died of it, maybe you’d take this virus seriously. Well, how about this? I’ll take the virus seriously, whatever that means, if you take seriously or even mention even once, the seventeen areas of noncovid life, where your supposedly anticovid strategy has left wreckage everywhere. How about that? Is that a deal? Or how about this one? All the people who have died from covid, all those people had families and we should honor them, respect it. Of course no one’s denying that. But, how about the 1.4 million people who according to the New York Times will die of tuberculosis because of the lockdown, over and above the number of tuberculosis deaths we would have had otherwise? Do those people have families? We don’t have to think about that because they don’t exist, because don’t forget, public health just means the monomaniacal fixation on one virus. Tuberculosis, sorry. Didn’t make the cut. Those people’s families don’t matter; they’re not even going to be mentioned. How about the extra 385,000 malaria deaths, the extra half a million HIV deaths? Do those people have families? Can we not be narcissists for five seconds and consider that maybe other people matter too, not just your friends, but other people and their friends? How about that for a change? A hundred and thirty million people at risk of starvation from the lockdowns and we’re even having this debate anymore?

But Woods, you’ll say, you’ve got to listen to the science. “Listen to the science” has become the rallying cry of the most irrational, anecdote-driven, fact-free believers in voodoo I have encountered in my lifetime.

I had Martin Kulldorff on my podcast, the Tom Woods Show. I actually bought the domain Tomspodcast.com, get there very easily. He is an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and he told me that it may be that a lot of scientists think lockdowns are the way to go. He said, But I basically talk to infectious disease epidemiologists and among that group, from what I would see, a majority of us are against the lockdowns, have been from the beginning, and we favor a totally different strategy of what we call focused protection of vulnerable groups. But yeah, the infectious disease epidemiologists, he said, we’re not calling for lockdowns.

Huh, isn’t that funny. We don’t really hear from these people very much, do we? By some odd coincidence, we don’t hear from them.

Can you believe the people who shout at you for jogging without a mask or who hurriedly cross the street when they see you so that they can maintain social distance? You don’t get covid by a chance passing on the street. Those people don’t get to lecture you about science. If they themselves were less ignorant of the science, they’d be embarrassed by their irrational behavior.

The “listen to the science” people warned us about opening schools. The results have been fine. Even The Atlantic just ran an article, like within the past twenty-four hours, saying, Hmm, the crazy warnings over the summer seem to have been overblown. Well, there’s an understatement. At the universities, we’ve had so far seventy thousand so-called cases, three hospitalizations and zero deaths.

Then there’s the general craziness. In the county where the city of Gainesville, Florida, is, they established a one-person-per-one-thousand-square-feet rule for private businesses. And at a meeting the county commission chair was asked to justify this. Now, did he justify this on the basis of Well, science tells us that…You already know the answer. This is all voodoo. None of it has to do with science. His answer was, Well we put that in there “because it’s easy math for everybody to do.”

If I were one of these “listen to the science” people, I would be mortified right now. I mean, I feel like I am listening to the actual science—not the voodoo practitioners, but the actual science. Lockdowns aren’t science, by the way. There’s no book that they’re following that tells them lockdowns are the way to go. So, when we get told, Well the reason that lockdowns didn’t work is that you didn’t do it right—this is based on literally nothing.

And I asked, again, Professor Kulldorff about this. He said, there’s essentially no chance of eradicating a virus in this way. What you can do is cause a huge number of ancillary problems that will be worse, but you won’t eradicate it. Now they can get away with that because we just don’t mention those ancillary problems. We shouldn’t even call them ancillary. If I show you charts of different American states or different countries, and we look at cases or deaths or whatever, you will not be able to tell me which ones locked down, when they locked down, how hard they locked down, when they lifted the lockdown, whether they had a mask mandate, when they imposed the mask mandate, and when and if they lifted the mask mandate. You have absolutely no way of knowing that. Now, if these things were as powerful as we’re told, there darn well better be some clear and obvious way of distinguishing one jurisdiction from another, and there is not. Therefore, it is voodoo. And I think the more we use the word “voodoo,” the better.

I have an article linked on a special page I put together that goes through and justifies this and looks and says, Look, obviously the lockdowns do not solve the problem. So, you can find that on my website, TomWoods.com/covid and you’ll find some other very interesting things there as well, but in the interest of time, I’ll refer you to that there. Same with mask mandates. Is it possible that certain types of masks in certain types of situations when worn correctly could have some minor effect? Sure it is. But the religious fervor behind masks, which clearly cannot be justified, because we’re being told if we had worn masks sooner or if we just wear masks for six weeks this will all stop or whatever. Again, go to TomWoods.com/covid, I’ve got the charts up there, for place after place after place after place and on. In each chart, it’s indicated exactly when the mask mandate went into effect, and you ask yourself: If I hadn’t told you where on that chart the mask mandate had gone into effect, would you have been able to tell? Would you have had any idea? So, if they’re that effective, they’re so effective that the director of the CDC says they’re better than a vaccine, you would think we’d be able to see it on the charts. Can’t see it at all, nothing. Oh, it would be worse if we didn’t…Come on. We should see something. Nothing.

There’s a guy on Twitter, Eric Topol, who is one of the big the-world-is-ending apocalyptic people on the virus, and he told us the reason Japan did well is their government shipped masks to the people. Okay. If you needed any more evidence this guy’s a BS artist, there you go. Because number one, yeah, they sent enough masks to last people one day. Secondly, the masks were all the wrong size. It’s the government, after all. They’re all child sized; nobody can fit them. So, everybody in Japan laughed and joked about these masks and nobody wore them, but this know-nothing idiot is on Twitter lecturing us about this. He doesn’t know a thing. Again, look at the charts for the Philippines, the most mask compliant country in the world. Hawaii doesn’t have a neighbor for two thousand miles and they wore masks religiously. Didn’t do a thing, in terms of cases.

What exactly would the graphs have to look like in order for the lockdowners to say, Maybe none of this does any good. What would they have to look like? I think they’d have to look exactly the way they look now. Meanwhile, in the Sunbelt (I live in Florida), the spike there fizzled out on its own, everywhere, despite different policies. We were told, I saw on Twitter, we were going to have half a million deaths, we’re going to have dozens of New Yorks if they don’t lock down. We didn’t lock down; we didn’t come anywhere near that. In Florida, the only thing that happened in some places was that some bars closed, but what really happened was the bars pretended to be restaurants and they kept going and that was it. And I guess the virus was tricked by the bars pretending to be restaurants. What kind of BS is this? California, where they had this massive lockdown, their curve looks exactly like Florida’s.

And a friend told me [that] at his work they’re scared of an applicant from Florida and they said, We got to be careful, they do things differently there. Their curves are the same. Paul Krugman, when Governor DeSantis said he was opening up Florida, Paul Krugman said, “Oh, that’s very unwise. They’re sill having over 100 deaths per day in Florida.” No, they’re not, you ignorant moron. We’re not having a hundred deaths per day. They’re reporting a hundred deaths per day. Now, reporting date is very different from actual date of death. So, for example, I just looked at October 1. October 1, there were I guess 130 deaths reported. Sixty-five of them were in September, fifty-four were in August, another eleven were in July. There are no hundred deaths occurring per day, and with hospitalizations plunging, it’s not like three months from now when we recount today it will turn out to be a hundred. No. So, he doesn’t even know that or maybe he does and he’s just being…I don’t know.

And now we’ve learned from the New York Times, as I mentioned before, that up to 90 percent of these tests that are coming back positive could be in people who are not contagious and therefore are being ordered to isolate for no reason. Because the PCR tests that they’re using are being calibrated in a way that they’re super sensitive in the United States. So, in Europe they’re using about let’s say thirty cycles. In the US, it’s thirty-seven to forty. In Arizona, it’s forty, at forty they’re detecting nothing. That is completely pointless and most of what’s going on in Arizona is at forty. So, in Washington, DC, a fellow named Phil Kerpen from American Commitment asked them, What’s the cycle threshold that you’re using for these tests? And DC Health got back to him. DC Health “does not have information about cycle thresholds.” What kind of a joke is that? So, the tests could be completely meaningless and we haven’t even looked into it.

Now finally (I am going a little bit over and I hope the Mises people will let me do it, but I’ll make it up to you somehow, I promise), an immunologist, like somebody who is an expert on immunology like Dr. Fauci, is not taught how to balance public health concerns. People say, Oh, just listen to the experts, and, You won’t listen to the experts. Well, I feel like I am listening to the experts, but there are some questions that no expert can answer or that some experts aren’t trained to answer. There’s no class that an immunologist takes that teaches, well, if you lock everybody in their houses, there could be other effects of this that…He doesn’t learn anything like that. And here’s how you balance it: well, if you do this, there’ll be this many of that. He doesn’t learn anything like that. So, it’s just, again, it’s rank superstition, like this is some kind of priesthood. It’s rank superstition to think that Dr. Fauci could view this so holistically as to have the overall answer.

We have the answer. What is worth doing and what isn’t? We could all drive our cars at five miles an hour and save a lot of lives. We don’t think that’s worth doing. We don’t wait for Dr. Fauci to tell us what the speed limit should be. We understand the absurdity of that. And here’s what Dr. Bhattacharya said. I love this guy. He’s from Stanford. He is the consummate professional. He’s not like me, gets really worked up, and that makes him all the more effective, because he’s slicing and dicing with his calmly delivered sentences. So, here’s what he said about Dr. Fauci, and it’s about time this crazy priesthood was taken down a peg: “Dr. Fauci’s been involved in infectious disease control for a very long time. He’s a preeminent scientist for a good reason; he’s an expert. But, in early February, March, we sort of put him on a pedestal, to essentially give his knowledge about a whole range of things, some of which were in his control and knowledge set, some of which were not. And I saw him a few months ago where he very humbly said, ‘Look, I’m giving you my expertise as an infectious disease expert on how to manage this disease. I’m not looking at the broader policy context.’”

Exactly my point. Dr. Bhattacharya again: “We think about science as giving us all the answers, but that’s a mistake. What science does is tell us if we do A, we might get B. It’s up to nonscientists to make a decision. Do we want to get B if we know the costs of getting B are C, D and E? Do we really want zero COVID?” Well again, only a blockhead would think that’s a scientific question. That’s a philosophical question. And again, this is where he says, “If you get zero COVID, we know that we’re going to have to destroy our society in order to get it. We’ll have to get rid of all our freedoms, we’ll have to make sure that very few people interact with each other. It’s so high in cost that it’s not worth it. Science can tell us, here’s how you can minimize the probability of getting COVID, but it’s up to nonscientists to decide whether it’s worth it. You can’t put one person on a pedestal and ask him to make that decision for society. I love that I live in a democratic society where those kinds of decisions aren’t up to experts. It’s up to people deciding together through electoral processes what we value.” That’s Bhattacharya.

So, of course, no expert can tell you if the costs are worth the benefits because no expert can know your value scale. So, when people say we need to listen to the experts as they urge us to dismantle everything that makes a society function and brings people joy, they have no idea what they’re talking about. This is a philosophical question, not one that a scientific source would have the standing to answer. Unfortunately, for some people, science is not an ongoing search for the truth and whose findings can help us make good decisions. It’s a kind of priesthood, and whatever scientists tell us about anything, no matter how far removed from their areas of expertise, these people will obey, and the dangers of that should be obvious. Not only do we have a priesthood that isn’t even thinking about tradeoffs or collateral damage from their covid monomania, but we also have tens of millions of devoted followers who will help enforce whatever lunacy the priesthood proposes. And your hopes, dreams, and livelihood will be placed on that alter, of that you can be sure.

Now, what should have been done instead? Well, here I refer you to Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff and Gupta, who have a recent statement explaining that so-called focused protection makes much more sense and is certainly feasible. That is to say, you give young people their lives back. Have the arts be resumed immediately. And again, Dr. Gupta said, why are we even living? What is the point of living? If living is simply having a pulse, I could do that in a windowless room eating cans of navy beans for seventy-five years. Is that a human life? These are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves.

Finally, how about Sweden? You’re not supposed to mention Sweden. Now, I could mention Japan; they had one of the highest covid infection rates in the world, the world’s oldest population, yet one of the lowest death rates and they did that with very halfhearted measures and no mass testing. So, there are a million explanations. They had to explain this away. But the key example was Sweden. Now what they used to say to us was, You can’t use the example of Sweden because Sweden has a high death rate. Sweden had five thousand deaths out of a country of 10 million. About two-thirds to three-quarters of those were in long-term care facilities, and they did a horrendous job there and they admit that. But, look at the rest of them. So, that means that they actually have a very small number in the general society. The question of how did people do in nursing homes when they’re completely isolated from society, is now in a way a commentary on how the strategy works for society at large. And now that Sweden’s example is looking really good because their curve looks like this. I mean they basically have no…They’ve resumed normal life. Just look at pictures from Stockholm. It lives right down here. Whereas if you look at Spain, it’s like this and France it’s like this. Sweden is just like that.

So now we don’t mention Sweden and what we say is, Oh, well, the reason Sweden did so well…so now notice it switched. First it was, Sweden, they’re dying everywhere. Now it’s, The reason Sweden did so well…They can’t just stop and say, Maybe I don’t have all the answers. The reason they did so well is people voluntarily complied with these measures and they wouldn’t do that in the US because you’re all a bunch of stupid hicks and whatever. Okay. All you have to do is look at pictures from Stockholm over the summer and you decide if that’s true or not, but the key thing is, they never closed schools for ages 1 to 15; they never closed down businesses and they had no mask mandate. How do you account for this? And you don’t get an answer. You do not get an answer.

It seems to me the only answer, at this point, is the one that was obvious from the beginning. Let people decide how they want to live, what risks they’re willing to take and what life means to them. Governor DeSantis, when he had his press conference, reopening Florida, said, You know, we shouldn’t assume we know what everybody wants, because I know a lot of older folks who when they get visited by their relatives wearing masks, they say, please take off your mask, I want to see your smile. And who are we to say no? Or, You should see your grandchildren only over Zoom forever? Or, You should be isolated in a nursing home forever with no human contact? Or, You can see people through a window if you like. We’re really not going to ultimately say. You decide what’s best for you, because we all take different risks that we’re willing to tolerate.

Martin Kulldorff at Harvard Medical School says, “The experts are afraid to speak out.” You have a lot of blah-blah-blah people who are not entitled to an opinion. He says the experts, the infectious disease epidemiologists, are afraid to speak out. Nice society you’ve given us, hysterics, where the actual experts qualified in this field are afraid to speak out, a society of fear. Nice going. Now, incidentally, my view is there are people who have lost their livelihoods, their lives, things that give them meeting, and all you have to do is speak out. Speak out. Enough is enough. By now, we’ve all gotten the message that you’re selfish if you want to do the kinds of things that once gave your life meaning. For these people, life is about nothing but the avoidance of death and you can’t have anything back until they say so. How did we let this happen? They wouldn’t dare have told us this back when it was fifteen days to flatten the curve. No way. Nope, it’s, You’ve got to have virtual events over Zoom, and no hugs and no weddings and ten people at your father’s funeral, and all these other grotesque demands that we’ve gone along with.

What metrics are they using to tell us when we can have things back? Not the ones they told us at the beginning. We’ve met all those and we still can’t have any back. Well, maybe you can have it in 2021. Fauci says spring of 2022, if everybody gets vaccinated. Okay. So, part of the natural order is that parents make sacrifices for their children, not the other way around. If vulnerable people want to isolate themselves, and I can understand why they would, then they should do that. But, as I am going through middle age it would never occur to me to make those demands of young people, never. Because I would think that was selfish, selfish of me that when I was young I got to experience all these things, all these irreplaceably beautiful moments of youth, but you can’t have them, to keep me safe. No, I’ll stay safe by following precautions and limiting my contacts, but you go out and enjoy the one life you get. That’s what a good and decent human being says. That’s what an unselfish person says.

The CDC is now saying we should go have a virtual Thanksgiving. Nope, not doing that. Not doing that. I’m going to go see people and hug them on Thanksgiving like a human and that is what we should do.

A lot of older people I talk to say, We don’t want out children’s lives ruined. We don’t want our grandchildren’s lives ruined. We don’t want you to do this for us. Enough is enough at this point. The doomers keep having this crazy comic book view of the virus. When Wisconsin’s bars were allowed to open, that was supposed to lead to a million deaths. It didn’t. The Sunbelt spike was supposed to kill everybody. It didn’t. Those spikes were long over; they were brought up and down without lockdowns. South Dakota never closed at all. They’re doing fine. But then they had that Sturgis motorcycle rally and we got told, The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally led to 260,000 cases. It was a superspreader event. Well then Slate, you know Slate, the enemy of mankind, Slate, the website? They ran an article saying, Look, let’s be honest. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally did not lead to 260,000 cases. You’re only saying that because you want it to have led to 260,000 cases, but this is BS. Now, Slate is not known for standing up for Trump-loving biker dudes. So, the only reason they would run an article like that is that it’s true. The virus does what it will do, regardless of what our priesthood with their white coats and clipboards tries to do.

There’s a sickness out there, all right, but I’m not talking about covid-19. I’m talking about the irrational fact-free response. We should demand our lives back, take our lives back. This is not selfish. It is selfish to be ignoring all the collateral damage that’s being done by this policy. You get one life, you want to live it, that’s normal. What’s selfish and abnormal is the presumption that other people are entitled to your life or to take an arbitrary number of years away from your life. If they want to live as prisoners in their own homes and experience life over Zoom, they can be our guests. The rest of us—I think I can speak for all of us in this room—intend to live. Thank you.

[From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on October 9, 2020.]