By Randall Bock at Brownstone dot org.

Washington is locked in another shutdown standoff over two Democrat demands Republicans will not accept: continued Affordable Care Act subsidies and (separately but related) federal healthcare benefits for illegal immigrants. Those fights are real, but they miss the larger cost driver. ACA subsidies alone amount to only about half of what the nation would save if we returned to pre-1990 levels of mental health insurance coverage.

What changed wasn't compassion; it was policy. Mental health parity, passed in 1996 as the Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA), and expanded in 2008 as the (ponderously politically prosaic) Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA), compels insurers to cover mental and substance-use disorders as they do heart disease or diabetes.

But pause on that word, parity. We never needed a law to force hospitals to treat heart attacks, strokes, brain bleeds, broken bones, or pneumonia. Those are acute, visible, life-threatening conditions. No insurer needs moral guidance to approve care for someone bloody or beaten on the pavement. PARITY became reality with (first academia's, then government's) redefining struggle as disease; deciding that anxiety, ADHD, addiction, or vague "mood disorders" must be treated (and reimbursed) like myocardial infarction.

Even acknowledging addiction can ruin lives, the way Washington chooses to "fix" things rarely resembles careful repair, but rather a combination of how Mr. Bean might "fix" an item: heavy-handedly, and misapplied - and a gambler might "fix" a race, so the right insiders walk away with the winnings. Government itself has no profit motive, but its operatives do: through campaign donations, consulting contracts, kickbacks, and bureaucratic expansion.

"Parity" sounds humane. In practice, it has medicalized ordinary hardship, incentivized lifelong dependency, and built an industry that never has to cure anything. Who wouldn't want schizophrenia treated seriously? But the mandate sprawled far beyond severe illness. ADHD, anxiety, autism, addiction - once handled by family, faith, or personal resilience (hand-in-hand with mental health institutions, and more severe social stigmas and legal codes) - became permanent billable conditions.

Proportional with youth, it may be harder to imagine now, but before parity and the therapy economy, Americans endured grief, fear, war, and uncertainty without a medical file to climb into. Families were intact. Churches were full. Children more often grew up with both parents. There was silence and stoicism- but also resilience. We did not treat every sadness or quirk as a lifetime disorder requiring weekly appointments.

The result: an estimated $250 billion in added annual costs over 1990 baselines. The ACA didn't create this; it entrenched it behind federal transfers. We now have a system too expensive to sustain and too sacred to reform - "affordable" only by branding.

The Diagnosis Boom

Parity turned ordinary struggles into billable codes. Consider a familiar pattern: a worried mother, a restless child, a school evaluation - and suddenly ADHD, amphetamines, therapy sessions, an IEP, maybe SSI checks. Relief, but also dependency - paid by taxpayers at every level.

Autism followed the same path, as delineated in "Unraveling Autism's Surge." Diagnoses in California climbed from a few hundred in the 1980s to over 200,000 today - quadrupling since 2011. This isn't just "awareness." Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools receive an extra $13,000 per child with an autism label on top of baseline spending. National special-education costs hit $39 billion in 2020. SSI payments for autism rose 154% between 2004 and 2014.

Addiction was recast, too. In my "Methadone Maintenance Ignited America's Opioid Crisis," I describe the methadone model: medicalize, stabilize, monetize. Addiction became a chronic illness, not a detour; "reco...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org.

I welcome Eyal Shahar's call for a re-review of Covid vaccine papers. In fact, I started long before Eyal blew the whistle - even before the vaccines appeared.

At the end of the terrible year 2020, a highly influential paper appeared in Science. It made headlines in major media outlets around the world. The paper, titled "Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19," was soon used by governments across the globe to justify their increasingly authoritarian policies.

It attracted my attention because the last author was Czech mathematician Jan Kulveit. Together with my two colleagues, Ondřej Vencálek and Jakub Dostál, we wrote the following response:

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" goes a famous saying usually attributed to George Box. Today, he would perhaps say that all models are wrong, and some are even dangerous. This, in our opinion, is the case for the study "Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19" that appeared in Science and received widespread attention around the world.

The study aims at understanding the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors analyze data on the total case counts and death counts from 41 (mostly European) countries between January and the end of May 2020. They produce an estimate of the effects of 8 different NPIs (such as limiting gatherings of people, closing schools, etc.) which were implemented in many countries during the studied period. The effect of each NPI is quantified by the reduction in the infection reproduction number R at the time of the NPI imposition in the respective country.

The results have been widely welcomed because they seem to show that all of the NPIs generally work, and the effect sizes seem to agree with the common sense (e.g. the more you restrict gatherings, the greater reduction of R you obtain). Governments across the world will be very happy to hear that the restrictions they imposed were justified. But were they?

In fact, we do not know, and this study does not help us to find out. We argue that there is a fatal flaw in the model which renders it useless. Looking at the only equation in the body of the paper (see the "Short model description" section), we see that the authors assume the underlying (unobservable) basic reproduction number R0,c to be constant in time for each country. This basic reproduction number is then multiplied by the effects of the NPIs and this is fitted to data. Thus, the model assumes that any change in the dynamic of the epidemic is due to the NPIs. This is deceptive because it is circular. If you want to quantify the effects of an intervention, you cannot assume that all the observed effects are due to the very intervention.

Also, this assumption of constant R0,c suggests why the authors chose to stop modeling once any NPI is lifted. The NPIs are usually lifted as the epidemic dwindles. Thus, the NPIs are present when R is high, and they are absent when R is low. With data from a longer time interval (including the summer period of low prevalence and relaxed NPIs), the simple model the authors used would learn a negative effect - that NPIs speed up the epidemic. This was clearly undesirable, so the authors chose not to use the data from the summer to fit the model. Such modeling strategy is highly questionable.

To make our point completely clear, we performed the following experiment. We took the original dataset and invented a new NPI that never existed. Let us say that from the imposition of this new NPI on, each citizen was required to wear a T-shirt with a "Stop-Covid" inscription, until this NPI was lifted.

We drew a random date uniformly from the period over which a particular country was modeled, and "imposed" this T-shirt NPI on the data (see reference [3] for the original dataset with the T-shirt NPI added). We did not change the numbers of cases and ...

By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org.

Question: What does a business do when nobody wants its product or services?

Answer: It asks for the federal government to bail it out and pay for a product nobody wants.

If this sounds silly to you, consider what's going on with America's soybean farmers who lost a quarter of their market when China decided to switch sourcing to Brazil and Argentina in the last couple of months. As a farmer myself, my heart breaks for the plummeting prices and the prospect of losing $200 per acre on the 2025 crop.

But on the other side of my breaking heart is a desire to hear any soybean farmer say, "I'm going to grow something profitable." You'd think in a capitalistic society someone raising soybeans would recognize simple principles in supply and demand. You can't keep supplying when demand wanes and expect a sugar daddy to subsidize your bank account.

What kind of economic gymnastics makes soybean farmers think they deserve taxpayer subsidies for a commodity in oversupply? Where is the courageous soybean farmer who dares to pivot to something else? Or who dares to suggest the farmer can solve this conundrum without government interference?

I'm well aware that the current crisis is China's retaliation for President Donald Trump's tariff campaign. Farmers can rightly say, "We didn't see this coming and planted based on credible market expectations and we were blindsided." But how many times has this cycle, or something like it, repeated itself in the last 50 years? How many of these debacles does it take to convince someone that a fundamental change is necessary?

But it's crickets in the soybean industry. "Build us biodiesel facilities. Find other markets. Give us billions in subsidies." The refrain is loud - and painful to hear. Farmers have historically been some of the most can-do resilient people in society. But right now these soybean farmers sound like a bunch of whining babies.

How did we get here? How did we turn the rugged American farmer into a government dependent? In short, the farm bill and farm programs supposedly instituted to protect farmers from price fluctuations. The result is such that market intervention has led crop farmers growing the six special-interest commodities to stop thinking like businesspeople and instead think like entitled dependents.

The six crops are soybeans, corn, sugar cane, wheat, rice, and cotton. Nothing else gets subsidy anointing from the federal temple like these six commodities. The result is an unholy legacy jerking farmers from one promised salvation to another, none of which actually ends in a better trajectory for primary producers.

When I talk with these farmers about doing something different, such as converting their cropland to perennial prairie polycultures producing grass-finished and fattened beef with management-intensive bio-mimicry, their eyes glaze over as if I've invited them to join me on an exploratory rocket ship to Pluto. For the average person, appreciating the damage from farm programs is difficult.

When decisions run through a matrix of paperwork and farm program payments, it jaundices every option. The idea of getting along on your own without a government paycheck, without a program security blanket, is so foreign that it can't find a home in the farm's business plan. Worse than the financial dependency these programs create is the emotional straitjacket it wraps around farmers.

Right now, the United States has the smallest beef herd since 1950 and prices are unprecedentedly high. Today, cows are like four-legged gold bars. The beef herd reduction began in earnest during the drought in southern tier states during the 2021-2023 seasons. I met Mississippi farmers who went out to check their cows, only to find one or two with broken legs after stepping into wide cracks in the soil. Unbelievable. Tragic.

Farmers liquidated their herds during that time. Unlike soybeans, you can't just plant more cows when the rains return. And return...

By Eric Hussey at Brownstone dot org.

A local headline brought a tear to my eye recently. The warehouse that had been the home of Tormino's Sash and Glass for decades - a couple of generations - burned in a big fire. Destroyed.

The warehouse was no longer in use, had a chainlink fence around it to keep intruders out, and still, the thought is that some variety of homeless people probably are responsible for the fire. The building was scheduled to be demolished, so the major issue with the fire was keeping other adjacent structures safe. But, still, it was Tormino's, for goodness' sake. And now it's gone. Visibly gone; gone for real. The old Tormino's is really, really gone.

I have my own set of fix-it skills. However, I work inside all day with people who come to my office, so I don't end up at the hardware store a lot. Well…what guy can stay away from a good hardware store for more than a couple of weeks - am I right?

But that's the point of this: You won't find an episode of This Old House with me figuring out how to fix things. I still love hardware stores.

The absolute nadir of my tool experience was when the local elementary school reported that our middle daughter seemed to have some sort of developmental issue because she couldn't tell some teacher the name of the tool in the drawing the teacher showed her - a hammer. The real problem is that I hadn't had to find a hammer and pound something together in the first 5 years of her life. Maybe that's an indicator that I was spending too much time in my office?

In those early family years, if I needed to fix something and didn't have the parts, I usually went to the local Ace Hardware. It was old Ace, not new Ace. I would walk in, looking every bit the college-educated-but-clueless, tool-bereft young homeowner who was now expected to just know how to fix things. The "nice" woman at the desk right next to the door would take one look at me and ask, "Why are you here?" It was probably closer to "Whaddya need?" But the tenor and voicing of the words clearly asked why I thought I had a right to be there.

I would show her the part that needed replacing, and she would just say, "Go talk to Bob. He's the one in the overalls." Bob was tall and remarkably thin, and wore some Mr. Greenjeans (but blue-) jean overalls. I would give him the part. He would assess it in his fingers, then walk over to what had to be 300 small, cryptically-marked drawers on the top shelf. He'd pull open one drawer, reach in without looking, pull out a part, and say, "That should do it." And, it always did it.

Those owners sold to a new generation. My last purchase from that Ace was a grill at a store-closing closeout price. I liked the price, but it was like watching a friend move away to a new town.

Next up, of course, were the big-box stores; stores 40 times the size of the old Ace with good, hard workers who know their area of the store. But none of them wear coveralls. A few of them assess with their fingers. And even fewer silently lead you somewhere, reach for one thing, give it to you while saying "This should do it," and then walk off - the walkoff not of arrogance or disdain, but the walkoff of absolute time-tested confidence. Knowledge. Practical knowledge.

Currently, if we can't get it at the new Ace, the big-box store is next, or we go to Amazon, look at a picture, and hope for the best.

Which brings me back to the loss of Tormino's Sash and Glass. It was started by lifetime local resident John Tormino in 1950 with a $200 loan and a wood-frame storm door he hammered together on the sidewalk outside his shop. In two years, he was in a real building with a reputation for having anything different and hard to find in the windows and doors.

My personal experience with Tormino's begins with a broken handle for a slider door. The old Ace was gone, and it was obvious I needed to replace the slider handle - no quick fix. I took the broken handle to the big box and got the clueless response of someone ...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.

In a recent appearance on France Inter's morning show - France's rough equivalent to CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper or MSNBC's Morning Joe - American progressive thinker Yascha Mounk found himself in the awkward spot of fact-checking two prominent guests over wild distortions of US conservative figure Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.

Fellow panelist Amy Greene, a Franco-American tied to the unabashedly pro-Macron Institut Montaigne think tank, wrongly pinned racial slurs like "chink" on Kirk, referring to Mounk mangling Cenk Uygur's name on The Young Turks podcast. Meanwhile, Le Monde reporter Ivanne Trippenbach twisted his words into a claim that Black women lacked the "brainpower" for certain jobs. Mounk set the record straight, and the exchange exploded online, spotlighting what he dubs "elite misinformation" in French media.

It's telling that Mounk pushed back so sharply, given his steady diet of the New York Times and Washington Post and his appearances in the US on the side of quite brazen censors such as former Stanford Internet Observatory Renee Di Resta. But the moment on France Inter hit close to home: it gave Mounk a glimpse of what America might look like if official voices drown out everything else.

Sure, US legacy media peddles its share of polished, ideology-fueled lies, but France's version feels more brazen, less veiled. The gap boils down to counterforces. Here in the US, hundreds of podcasts outdraw legacy outlets, relentlessly dismantling the spin.

In France? Not so much, despite courageous resistance from a few players. The void finds its origin in three phenomena: a repressive legal framework rooted in a Jacobin obsession with a monolithic "general will;" a media landscape strangled by state and oligarchic monopolies; and a subtle cultural trap where upstarts unwittingly adopt the establishment's script.

As Mounk's exchange so vividly illustrates, this void in French media resilience carries profound stakes for America. Not every American shares Mounk's instinctive recoil from official overreach; indeed, many are drawn to the Jacobin model precisely because it offers psychological solace - a tidy illusion of harmony enforced from above. It's no mere coincidence that the flagship magazine of the rising ideological wing within the Democratic Party, championed by figures like Zohran Mamdani, bears the name Jacobin.

We might even frame the 2024 presidential election as a seismic fracture in the American psyche: a raw collision between those embracing and those rejecting what commentator Auron McIntyre has termed the "Total State" - an all-encompassing apparatus of control.

In this transatlantic drama, France emerges as the true frontline, more so than the UK or Germany, for it is here that the eternal clash between the dead hand of officialdom and the vital pulse of life has raged longest within the national consciousness. This makes France the prime target for the EU's bureaucratic behemoths, like the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA) and the misnamed European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which will pour their energies into dismantling an already frail ecosystem of independent media and publishers. Should that delicate balance rupture in France, the psychological conquest of Europe by a Chinese-style authoritarianism becomes not just plausible, but inevitable.

This piece addresses the intertwined threats that are playing in the French speech and media landscape - legal, economic, and cultural - while charting a path forward. A MAGA-driven US could take advantage of a weak extreme center power in France to experiment with free speech diplomacy there.

Back from the brink, the US can reestablish itself as the leader of the free world by sending a lifeline to embattled free media in Europe, exporting America's podcast insurgency, challenging concentrated power, and inspiring format-breaking innovation to nurture a French media scene where unfiltered tru...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

Some psychiatrists are highly skilled manipulators and therefore dangerous for their patients, as I shall explain below. This applies to Awais Aftab from Cleveland, Ohio.

According to Robert Whitaker, Aftab has staked out a position as being open-minded to critiques of psychiatry, which is a public stance that makes him particularly valuable to his profession. He can serve as a defender of psychiatry against critiques that are truly threatening, and his criticisms will be seen as coming from someone who is open-minded about psychiatry's flaws. Whitaker demonstrated that Aftab "is seeking to protect psychiatry's narrative of progress - a narrative that arises from psychiatry's guild interests, and not a faithful record of its own research literature."

In July 2025, JAMA Psychiatry published a grossly misleading garbage in, garbage out review. The authors listed more drug company payments to themselves than references to scientific papers, which were 47. They mobilised a rapid media campaign, with the Science Media Centre, issuing expert commentary to "reassure both patients and prescribers" that most withdrawal symptoms after stopping antidepressants were "not clinically significant."

Two days after the review came out, Aftab tried to defend it on his blog and to cast doubt on a much better review that told a story of serious drug harm. He calls his blog "Psychiatry at the Margins," which it isn't, as he is a mainstream psychiatrist. He presents himself as a clinician, educator, scholar, and writer.

I consider this overblown grandiosity and would not call him a scholar. I demonstrated that his article was full of serious errors, unwarranted denigration of much better research, with no arguments why he considered the much better review "very methodologically-problematic" with "obviously highly-inflated" numbers. This is typical of Aftab. He always gives himself a free ride, whereby he avoids opening a debate. He also praised another grossly flawed review.

In an interview four months earlier, Aftab had said that "antidepressants are not addictive, because people don't get high." If true, this would be great news for smokers. As they don't get high by smoking, nicotine is not addictive, and they could easily stop smoking, right?

Aftab also noted that about half of depressed people who try one or several antidepressants ultimately respond well, which is also totally wrong and likely comes from the STAR*D trial, which is a gigantic $35 million fraud financed by the US National Institute of Mental Health. And he opined that a withdrawal trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine was "rigorous and high-quality." It surely wasn't, which Maryanne Demasi and I documented in our systematic review of withdrawal studies.

When psychiatry professor Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues recently exposed the hoax about depression being caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, Aftab called her a "contrarian." Aftab, a biological psychiatrist, involuntarily revealed that biological psychiatry is a pseudoscience with no clothes. He hid behind pompous mumbo jumbo devoid of any meaning.

Moncrieff exposed his tricks in her article, "Wishful thinking dressed up in scientific terminology: a reply to Awais Aftab." Joanna writes that "What Aftab presents as alternative ways of understanding the relationship between serotonin and depression are not even testable theories, although the sprinkling of technical jargon ('signalling,' 'dysfunctions') makes them sound impressive…Aftab is putting forward unsubstantiated speculations and suggesting these are a good enough basis to accept the idea that depression is a neurobiological condition."

Aftab's manipulations are what child and adolescent psychiatrist Sami Timimi calls scientism (beliefs masquerading as science). Practitioners of alternative medicine argue in the same way as Aftab does and sprinkle their nonsense with scientific words and phrases.

Ps...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

Cigarettes kill nearly half a million Americans each year. Everyone knows it, including the Food and Drug Administration. Yet while the most lethal nicotine product remains on sale in every gas station, the FDA continues to block or delay far safer alternatives.

Nicotine pouches - small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip - deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn't be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved.

Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This "Swedish Experience" shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily - no prohibition required.

In the United States, however, the FDA's tobacco division has turned this logic on its head. Since Congress gave it sweeping authority in 2009, the agency has demanded that every new product undergo a Premarket Tobacco Product Application, or PMTA, proving it is "appropriate for the protection of public health." That sounds reasonable until you see how the process works.

Manufacturers must spend millions on speculative modeling about how their products might affect every segment of society - smokers, nonsmokers, youth, and future generations - before they can even reach the market. Unsurprisingly, almost all PMTAs have been denied or shelved. Reduced-risk products sit in limbo while Marlboros and Newports remain untouched.

Only this January did the agency relent slightly, authorizing 20 ZYN nicotine-pouch products made by Swedish Match, now owned by Philip Morris. The FDA admitted the obvious: "The data show that these specific products are appropriate for the protection of public health." The toxic-chemical levels were far lower than in cigarettes, and adult smokers were more likely to switch than teens were to start.

The decision should have been a turning point. Instead, it exposed the double standard. Other pouch makers - especially smaller firms from Sweden and the US, such as NOAT - remain locked out of the legal market even when their products meet the same technical standards.

The FDA's inaction has created a black market dominated by unregulated imports, many from China. According to my own research, roughly 85 percent of pouches now sold in convenience stores are technically illegal.

The agency claims that this heavy-handed approach protects kids. But youth pouch use in the US remains very low - about 1.5 percent of high-school students according to the latest National Youth Tobacco Survey - while nearly 30 million American adults still smoke. Denying safer products to millions of addicted adults because a tiny fraction of teens might experiment is the opposite of public-health logic.

There's a better path. The FDA should base its decisions on science, not fear. If a product dramatically reduces exposure to harmful chemicals, meets strict packaging and marketing standards, and enforces Tobacco 21 age verification, it should be allowed on the market. Population-level effects can be monitored afterward through real-world data on switching and youth use. That's how drug and vaccine regulation already works.

Sweden's evidence shows the results of a pragmatic approach: a near-smoke-free society achieved through consumer choice, not coercion. The FDA's own approval of ZYN proves that such products can meet its legal standard for protecting public health. The next step is consistency - apply the same rules to everyone.

Combustion, not nicotine, is the killer. Until the FDA acts on that simple truth, it will keep protecting the cigarette industry it was supposed to regulate.

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

The US childhood vaccination programme is huge, 68 vaccine doses targeting 18 different diseases versus only 17 vaccine doses for 10 diseases in Denmark.

It is unknown if the net effect of so many vaccinations is beneficial, and in August 2025, two physicians launched a federal lawsuit against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for failing to study the cumulative effects of its childhood vaccine schedule. They noted that "America administers more vaccines than any nation on earth while producing the sickest children in the developed world."

Two researchers who have compared countries found a dose-response relationship: Nations that require more vaccines for their infants had higher infant mortality, neonatal mortality, and under age five mortality.

Paediatric chronic disease prevalence in the US has risen to nearly 30% in the last 20 years, and vaccination schedules are among the possible causal factors that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, has declared he will investigate. A CDC workgroup will examine if there are any differences in efficacy or safety between the US and Danish schedules. They will also look at the the timing, order, and ingredients, e.g. the amount of aluminium, which is pertinent, as aluminium in vaccines is harmful.

I am aware of only one study in the whole world that used birth cohorts and compared the occurrence of chronic diseases in a vaccinated group with that in an unvaccinated group and that took account of confounders. It was carried out at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit but was never published because the researchers were warned that it could cost them their jobs. The study was completed in 2020, and its results came to light on 9 September 2025 because it was introduced into the Congressional Record during a Senate hearing on "The Corruption of Science."

For over two decades, the Institute of Medicine had urged the CDC to conduct such a study using its Vaccine Safety Datalink, but the CDC never did.

A ground rule in evidence-based medicine is that we should use the best available evidence when we make decisions. As the Henry Ford study is the only one that compared unvaccinated with vaccinated kids for development of chronic diseases and that took account of confounders, it is very important that we examine this study carefully for its validity.

The Henry Ford Study

When I read the unpublished manuscript, I found that it was above average quality. The authors were genuinely surprised by their results and did sensitivity analyses to test their robustness. They provided a very interesting discussion about issues that might explain their findings, which they put in context. As they had expected to find that vaccination reduces the risk of developing chronic diseases, I see them as being more pro-vaccine than anti-vaccine. For example, they wrote in the Introduction:

"Common parental concerns relate to the growth of the vaccine schedule, administering multiple vaccines contemporaneously, and the potential for long-term adverse health outcomes from vaccination. Research addressing these vaccine safety concerns can assist clinicians in discussions with their patients and serve to reassure parents of the overall safety of vaccination…Addressing this significant data gap could allay parental concerns and bolster vaccine confidence."

A professor of biostatistics from Pennsylvania, Jeffrey S. Morris, often comments on my tweets about vaccines, and he provided several interesting comments about the study related to my tweets about it. I therefore contacted him and we corresponded about the issues.

Morris and I agree that scientific debate is vital for the progress of science, and I hope that an account of our differing views about the study will be of interest.

The primary outcome of the study was a chronic health composite outcome which included conditions identified by the Child and Adolescent Health Me...

By Mollie Engelhart at Brownstone dot org.

I am a mother. I have never been vaccinated myself. I believe deeply in informed consent. And I want to say clearly that I am hopeful about Bobby's leadership at HHS. I want to believe that he can bring real transparency and accountability to a government that has too often cozied up to the corporations it is supposed to regulate.

But when I read the headlines about Trump's "landmark" deal with Pfizer, I don't feel hopeful. I feel misled.

We are told that Pfizer has committed $70 billion to research, development, and production here in the United States. That sounds impressive, like a historic victory for the American people. But the truth is, Pfizer already spends billions every year on research and development. That is simply the business they are in. Without that constant pipeline, they do not survive.

So what is really new here? Nothing at all. It is the same budget they were already going to spend, repackaged and sold as a bold new commitment. The difference now is that Pfizer gets something in return: tariff relief, political cover, and a government-backed direct-to-consumer program called TrumpRx.

That is what makes this deal so frustrating. Pfizer is not changing its behavior. They are not suddenly sacrificing profits or doing more for patients. They are being rewarded for business as usual, only now with added advantages that strengthen their market position even more. And we are being asked to celebrate it as if it is some great victory for ordinary families.

Every producer wants to cut out the middleman. I know this from my own life. As a meat producer, I do not want to pay one. As a vegetable producer, I do not want to pay one. As a content creator, I do not want to pay one. Nobody does. And now Pfizer, of all companies, is getting the official blessing of the US government to do exactly that.

This is the same Pfizer that misled the public during Covid. That is not a rumor, it is documented. Whistleblowers from trial sites described falsified records, patients who were not properly followed up after adverse events, and unqualified staff handling sensitive data. State attorneys general have accused Pfizer of downplaying serious risks, including heart inflammation in young men and pregnancy complications in women.

Kansas has even claimed the company hid internal studies that showed risks while telling the public something different. And the most central promise of all, that the vaccines would stop transmission, simply was not true, even though the marketing never caught up to that reality.

Meanwhile, Pfizer made billions from a product that the government helped mandate, all while enjoying liability protection. So I cannot celebrate when the same company announces what it calls a "new commitment." It feels like smoke and mirrors.

And then there is the larger picture. The United States is the biggest consumer of pharmaceuticals in the world. No other country takes more pills, shots, or prescriptions. Yet our health outcomes are the worst among wealthy nations. We spend the most money, we take the most drugs, and we die younger. Our life expectancy is the lowest in the developed world.

Our rates of chronic illness, diabetes, obesity, and preventable death are higher than our peers. How can that be? How can the country that consumes the most medicine also be the sickest?

That contradiction tells me something important. The problem is not that we lack access to drugs. The problem is that we have built a culture that relies on them for everything. Every ache, every fear, every deviation from perfect health is met with another prescription. And the more drugs we consume, the worse our outcomes become.

That is why this deal troubles me so deeply. Instead of asking why Americans are drowning in pharmaceuticals, our leaders are handing the biggest player in the game even more power. Instead of creating a system that helps families thrive without being tethered to pills and injecti...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

What is the state, from whence does it come, and who controls it? One might suppose these questions have obvious answers. In reality the answer is elusive, not easily identified even by those who are part of the system.

Trump found this out in his first term. He naturally assumed that the president would be in charge, at least as regards the executive branch. He found out otherwise when the agencies worked closely with the media to undermine him at every step. After a four-year hiatus, he came back with a real determination to be the president.

It's easier said than done. Cabinet-level appointees frequently complain in private that they face intractable bureaucracies with all institutional knowledge. They often feel like stand-ins or mannequins. Trump is the unusual president who has even attempted to be in charge. Most are just happy for the emoluments of office and the plaudits that come with it.

In any case, anyone who reaches the heights in any state apparatus discovers that it is something different from anything described in the textbooks.

Plato conceived of the state as organic to life itself, mirroring the structure of the human soul. The polity was divided between the rulers (philosopher-kings), the guardians (warriors), and the producers (workers). The state exists to achieve justice, where each class performs its designated role harmoniously.

Aristotle offered a more realistic view. While the state is organic, it is not soulful. It has definite functions to promote the well-being of all through laws and education, balancing the interests of different classes. Aristotle favored a mixed government to prevent tyranny and promote stability.

Moving forward to the Enlightenment period, theories of the state in the West evolved with the advance of technology and economics. Thomas Hobbes saw the state as essential for stopping civil war between factions. Without it, life would be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. To be sure, he was writing in the midst of the English Civil War.

John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government also saw the state as essential but extremely limited. Its job was to protect property and essential rights. It could also be overthrown under conditions of tyranny. The issue was personal to him as a victim of the trauma of war, revolution, and censorship.

Locke was the author of the template of what later became the Declaration of Independence. Here we find the view that the state is the "necessary evil," a perspective largely accepted as true by the US Founding Fathers.

Soon after, the Hegelian view was born within the Platonic tradition. G.W.F. Hegel valorized the state as god marching on earth, the gathering force of social firmament to bend history to the inevitable conquest of rightful victors. This view was picked up on the right (national socialism) and left (international socialism) to infuse other conceptions of the state with an air of inevitability.

All this talk of the organic and essential character of the state struck a more radical tradition of thought as hopelessly naive. Franz Oppenheimer wrote that the state is an inorganic invading force, a conquering force, and always unwelcome, an institution exogenous to society itself.

This view was pushed by Albert Jay Nock and later Murray Rothbard, both of whom saw the state as inherently exploitative. The solution was simple: get rid of it once and for all, but not in the way Marx imagined. The result of the absence of the state would not be utopia but something closer to what Locke imagined: a well-functioning and peaceful society organized based on ownership and voluntary cooperation.

A deeply informed historical perspective on the state is offered by Bertrand de Jouvenel. In his view, the state is organized out of the firmament of society itself as natural elites gain the confidence of the public in matters of settling disputes. The elites constitute themselves as arbiters and cultural fig...