By David Stockman at Brownstone dot org.

It was pretty obvious even before February 28th that the US economy was grinding to a halt, even as inflation was already working up a head of steam. But then came war.

We are going to get a globe-shaking economic conflagration erupting from the void that was the Persian Gulf commodity fountain. That includes between 20% and 50% of all the basic commodities that drive global GDP, including crude oil, LPGs, LNG, ammonia, urea, sulfur, helium, and sundry more.

Accordingly, the global share of crucial industrial commodities that now stand in harm's way. This includes both those directly transiting the Strait of Hormuz and also the share of supply from the wider Middle Eastern region that is also exposed to the current Iranian War disruptions but is delivered by pipeline, train, or alternative waterways like the Red Sea/Suez Canal route.

This ballooning dislocation of daily global commodity flows will have a double whammy effect: It will both cause production and output to fall immediately in response to soaring input costs or limited availability—even as it encourages the central banks to "help" by printing more inflationary money.

This all adds up to a bout of classic stagflation, but it is not going to be merely the mildly painful type that unfolded during the 1970s. After all, despite a 120% rise in the price level during the decade, it wasn't a total wipeout when measured from the vantage point of real median family income.

As it happened, the 1970s stagflation came on the heels of what had been an actual Golden Age by the standards of history between 1954 and 1969. During that period, real median family incomes rose from $39,700 to $66,870 or by a robust 3.53% per annum.

Of course, that uphill march of Main Street prosperity slowed sharply during the inflationary 1970s, but the blue line in the chart below did at least keep drifting higher. So between 1969 and 1980, real median family incomes grew by a not very impressive 0.61% per annum, but the direction of travel was still higher.

But here's the thing. The US economy of the 1970s was able to cope with the pressures of high inflation, oil, and other commodity shocks and the stop-and-go disruptions of a Federal Reserve that had been newly released from the disciplinary effects of the Bretton Woods gold standard. In large part that was because the aggregate level of debt on the US economy was relatively modest.

Total public and private debt in 1970 stood at $1.5 trillion, representing just 147% of GDP, as shown in the graph below. Moreover, the latter was the long-time national leverage ratio (total debt divided by national income) through historic times of thick and thin, going all the way back to 1870.

Moreover, even after the large government deficits of the 1970s and a surge of inflation-driven private borrowing during the decade, total US debt stood at $4.6 trillion by 1980. That was just 162% of GDP.

In a word, the US economy during this decade of stagflation was battered by unprecedented peacetime inflation, but it was not yet smothered by crushing debt. As shown by the graph, the soaring national leverage ratio did not really leap skyward until after the mid-1980s, when Alan Greenspan took the helm at the Fed and launched the US (and the world) into a four-decade spree of money-printing and what amounts to Keynesian central banking.

As a consequence, total public and private debt is in a wholly different zip code today. Debt outstanding now totals nearly $108 trillion and weighs in at 343% of national income (GDP). That is to say, as we head into the next stagflationary era, the US economy will be carrying two turns of extra debt relative to income than was the case in 1970.

That does make a difference. The national leverage ratio during the 1970s averaged about 153% of GDP, meaning that had it been maintained since then total debt outstanding would now be $48 trillion. As it is, however, the actual leverage ratio currentl...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed deep failures in global health governance. That much is now widely acknowledged, even by institutions that initially resisted self-examination. For example, the recent Lancet Commission on Covid-19 substituted advocacy for analysis, evaded institutional accountability, and ultimately clarified little about why global pandemic governance failed.

What remains unsettled—and largely undiscussed in public—is what those failures imply for the future of international health cooperation, and especially for the role of the World Health Organization.

The International Health Reform Project (IHRP) was convened to confront that question directly. The IHRP is an independent international group, though its work is closely linked to Brownstone through the participation of three of its Fellows who wrote this article, two of whom served as co-chairs.

Its work is unusually detailed, wide-ranging, and blunt. It does not argue that the pandemic was inevitable, nor that failure was merely the product of bad luck or limited information. Instead, it documents how institutional incentives, governance structures, and political pressures shaped decisions in ways that repeatedly undermined transparency, proportionality, and scientific rigor.

The Panel's findings matter well beyond debates about the past. They arrive at a moment when the United States has withdrawn from the WHO, when the Organization is seeking expanded authority through amended International Health Regulations and a new pandemic agreement, and when governments around the world are quietly reassessing whether the current model of global health governance is fit for purpose.

The question now is not simply whether the WHO failed, but what should follow from that failure—especially for the United States and its allies.

I. What the IHRP Found: Failure Was Structural, Not Accidental

The IHRP report reaches a clear conclusion: the problems revealed during Covid-19 were not isolated mistakes, but the predictable outcome of institutional design choices made over decades.

Several findings are central.

First, the WHO failed in its core pandemic function. The Organization was created to detect, assess, and coordinate responses to transnational infectious disease threats. Yet during the early stages of Covid-19 it was slow to challenge incomplete or misleading information, reluctant to escalate warnings in the face of political pressure, and inconsistent in its guidance once the emergency was declared. These failures had real consequences, shaping national responses during the narrow window when early action mattered most.

Second, politicization was not an aberration but a recurring constraint. The Panel documents how deference to powerful member states, especially where transparency was most critical, distorted risk communication and delayed independent investigation. This was not simply a failure of leadership, but a consequence of governance rules that place political consensus above timely error correction.

Third, the Organization entered the pandemic already institutionally overstretched. Over time, the WHO's mandate expanded far beyond communicable disease control into a wide array of social, behavioral, and environmental domains, often with limited connection to pandemic preparedness. The result was an organization attempting to function simultaneously as a technical agency, a development actor, a norm-setting body, and a political convenor—without the clarity or discipline required for crisis response.

Fourth, post-pandemic reforms did not address these underlying weaknesses. Instead of a rigorous institutional autopsy, the response to failure was to seek expanded authority: broader emergency powers, new compliance expectations for states, and additional permanent structures. The Panel is explicit that expanding scope without correcting governance failures risks entrenching the very dynamics that contributed to poor perfor...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

Hard times. Emerging from an apparently engineered pandemic, now in another war for ephemeral reasons, a resultant economic crisis that is exacerbating unmanageable debt, we find ethnic cleansing and inter-ethnic hatred are increasingly back in vogue.

It's easy to imagine a nefarious program is being orchestrated by a nasty and entrenched elite, aiming to plunder and enslave the rest of us. Such an idea is clearly not baseless, but nonetheless completely misleading in the solutions it suggests. 'If only we could jail them, or have a Nuremberg Two, things would be better…'

However, Nuremberg One did not stop ethnic cleansing, targeting of religious groups, wars and mass death based on straight-out lies, or mass medical coercion for power and money. A couple of obvious reasons stand out for this.

Firstly, high-level societal corruption is so deep and pervasive that it simply cannot be rooted out by force or law–the judges and armies and arms manufacturers are likely to be part of this behemoth already and have no interest in self-harm, while politicians are simply paid by them.

Secondly, if those deepest in this cesspit of child sacrifice and share market-dictated slaughter were taken out of the picture, some of us would simply replace them. We know this because none of what we are seeing now is new. Ask any late Roman, Chinese peasant, or victim of the Inquisition. We need to be honest with ourselves regarding human behavior if we are going to change direction.

There was, arguably, a period after World War Two when the West had a bit of a reset and the direction did seem better. Eisenhower was ignored, and so were the obvious risks of growing inequality as software entrepreneurs and financial houses accumulated riches greater than whole nations. Faced with a choice of recognizing the obvious or believing the public relations they funded, the propaganda proved more popular. We all, as a society, opted for a future rooted more in feudal inequality than egalitarianism. We regressed, because it is always easier than standing tall.

So, here we are, back again, deep in the mire. To address it, we should first recognize the enormity of what is going on. We have allowed a corporate-authoritarian behemoth to arise, a monster of our own dereliction. We removed the brakes on greed and human stupidity, giving a free hand to a few to accumulate enormous wealth and power and, most importantly, to dispense with empathy. We empowered people shallow enough to believe in their own superiority, even omnipotence, by ignoring the wisdom of thousands of years of humanity.

We are all capable of becoming similarly corrupted, if we receive an opportunity and elect to succumb to it. There is nothing special about leaders of the big financial houses, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the redactions of the Epstein files, nor the peons of old wealthy families that helped stoke, and profited from, former wars. They are all expressions of what the rest of us can become, given the resources and a willingness to empty ourselves of a more meaningful but harder existence.

Therefore, we should not blame a 'they' or a 'them.' It is our own tolerance of the worst of human nature that gets us into trouble. Obsessing with specific people – railing against 'elites' – will at best result in their replacement.

Alternatively, we can start thinking through the codes of conduct that are necessary in any society, and in ourselves, to stop people going that way. Stop enabling the worst of human greed and self-delusion that drives sponsored politicians to advocate for war, unknown insiders to trade shares on human lives, and oligarchs to dream of corralling whole populations into their digital prison and plying them with pharmaceuticals. We need to recognize the system we all built, within which they operate.

Human nature is driven by greed. We know greed is bad, yet it is not unrelated to protecting and benefiting on...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

President Biden celebrated the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by telling reporters on the White House South Lawn, "America is a nation that can be defined in a single word….Asufutimaehaefutbuhwuhsh." That proved to be a fitting foreshadowing for a tenure that has been defined by directionless verbosity, unintelligible standards, and the determined advancement of partisan dogma.

On Tuesday, Justice Jackson issued the lone dissent in an opinion overturning Colorado's ban on "conversion therapy." The state law was broad enough to apply to any discussions acknowledging biological realities with gender-confused patients or contradicting the precept that the LGBTQIA+ socialization process is a cure without trade-offs.

The near-unanimous court ruled that the First Amendment barred this "egregious form of content discrimination," which banned therapists from voicing "perspectives the State disfavors when speaking with consenting clients."

Justice Jackson, however, described the defense of free speech as "puzzling," which is unsurprising given her comprehension issues on the bench. In dissent, she embraced the State's power to quash any professional speech that deviates from "current beliefs about the safety and efficacy of various medical treatments." As Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledges in the opinion for the Court, that principle would allow the government to apply those malleable standards to "teaching or protesting," but Jackson welcomes that threat.

Justice Jackson does not sidestep the issue; she embraces the muzzling in the name of "scientific consensus," which she never considers could be incorrect. As support, she cites the American Psychological Association and the medical bureaucracy's treatment of "conversion" as an "unattainable goal." (Jackson notably omits that the former president of the American Psychological Association argued that therapy to change sexual orientation is legitimate for those who consented).

According to Jackson, the suppression of liberty is justified because "scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the anticipated harms from conversion therapy" should be avoided. Notwithstanding the widespread dissent on the issue, these were the same groups that embraced lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masking, and rioting in the Covid response. Their purported "consensus" was concocted through vast censorship efforts and smear campaigns.

Businesses shuttered, schools closed, and churches were banned as the facade of expertise became a bludgeon for ideological tyranny. The ostensible "consensus" maintained protections for riots, liquor stores, and abortion services, later culminating in the reshaping of our election process. And Justice Jackson wouldn't have it any other way.

Her long-standing antipathy to free speech is ironic given her use of its liberty. She speaks 50 percent more than any of her colleagues and more than Justices Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas combined.

That allows her to make sweeping claims (such as comparing banning transgender mutilation surgeries to prohibitions on interracial marriage), and it provides a corpus of material to understand her opposition to the First Amendment.

In oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, which considered an injunction prohibiting the Biden administration from colluding to censor its critics, Jackson stated that her "biggest concern" was that the plaintiffs' efforts may result in the "First Amendment hamstringing the Government," apparently unaware that this is its very purpose.

More recently, in a hearing on Trump v. Slaughter, Jackson spoke longingly for bureaucratic supremacy, arguing that "experts" like "doctors and the economists and the Ph.D.s" should be immune from presidential control. That was in line with her tenure as a District Court Judge, during which she overturned four executive orders that sought to rein in the power of the nearly three million federal e...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

The polarised debate on the World Health Organization (WHO) has been based more on mud-slinging and all-or-nothing dogma than scientific evidence and empirical data. However, with trust plummeting in public health and the WHO's funding rapidly falling as it scrambles for more to fund what it claims are ever-increasing threats, change is needed.

The International Health Reform Project (IHRP) formed with the intent of returning this debate to a rational framework. It did not begin as an anti-institutional campaign but as a professional reckoning. Its origins lie in a shared unease among physicians, public health practitioners, economists, and former senior international officials who watched the Covid-19 response unfold with growing alarm. Their concern was not with public health itself, but with the direction it appeared to be taking. The two of us, long engaged in global health policy and governance respectively, are co-chairs of a diverse group of ten experts who have spent the past 18 months thinking through this problem from evidence and orthodoxy rather than soundbites. The project delivered its first reports in March.

For decades, the post-war health architecture led by the WHO rested on principles such as proportionality, transparency, subsidiarity, and the primacy of human welfare. Covid exposed strains in that architecture. Emergency powers expanded, dissent narrowed, and policy debate became increasingly constrained. Measures once shunned for their inevitable harms and ethical concerns—lockdowns, prolonged school closures, border restrictions, universal mask and vaccine mandates—became normalised across very different societies with little regard for age-specific risk or local context. Balancing costs and benefits of interventions—the basis of public health policy development—became anathema in professional discourse.

Several IHRP members with long experience in low- and middle-income countries were particularly sensitive to the harmful consequences of the Covid public health response. Disruptions to agriculture and food distribution increased hunger and malnutrition. Routine immunisation programmes were set back. Extended school closures affected tens of millions of children, locking in intergenerational poverty and exposing millions of children to added risks of child labour, child marriage, and trafficking. Poverty reduction efforts suffered reversals and economic losses and national debt will stymie future healthcare programmes.

Those raising such concerns were often dismissed as reckless or ideological. Yet, the questions were rooted in core public health principles: What are the costs as well as the benefits of intervention? What trade-offs are justified? Who decides, on what evidence, and with what accountability? Why were these basic principles of public health abandoned?

During this period, Brownstone Institute emerged as a forum for open debate, building on discussions associated with the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of the vulnerable rather than broad society-wide shutdowns. At the same time, the UK-based initiative Action on World Health was exploring the need for a systematic review of the performance of the WHO and the wider international health architecture. Conversations among participants in these efforts helped shape the idea of an independent expert panel to examine global health governance more broadly.

From the outset, IHRP sought to offer constructive reform rather than reactive protest. Its founders were clinicians, economists, and former multilateral officials committed to public health and international cooperation. Their aim was and remains to ensure that future health crises are addressed effectively and with proportionality, transparency, and respect for human dignity.

In this sense, IHRP arose not from hostility to public health, but from fidelity to its core principles.

Rebuilding International Health Governance ...

By Lucia Sinatra at Brownstone dot org.

You've probably seen the headlines: University College London (UCL) settled a massive lawsuit for £21 million with college students who got an inferior education due to Covid-19 pandemic closures. That's roughly $26 million in US dollars with each student of the 6,000+ students represented getting about £3,270 (around $4,100). Meanwhile, in the US, Penn State—which had our largest settlement to date at $17 million—paid out just $236 per student. So why are British students receiving roughly 17 times more money than American students when learning disruptions were far more severe and longer-lasting in the US?

The answer lies in fundamental differences in how the UK and US law treat students. Put simply: UK students got Zoom learning and were compensated for overpaying. US students got Zoom learning with no legal pathway to get their partial refund.

The British students have a secret weapon that US students just don't have; the Consumer Rights Act 2015. It explicitly treats students as consumers and universities as businesses providing a service. Under this law, if you pay for a premium service but receive a basic service, you're entitled to a price reduction—period. The law says services must be performed with "reasonable care and skill," and if they are not, consumers are eligible to get their money back for the difference in value.

Importantly, the Consumer Rights Act overrides vague clauses that allow claims for "We can't be held responsible if something extraordinary happens" to escape responsibility. This is precisely what happened in US cases; the universities used "reservation of rights" language buried in student handbooks and government lockdown orders as valid defenses. Whereas in the UK, consumer protection law says: nice try, but students are consumers, and you still owe them a refund.

The UK students made valid legal claims, the UK courts agreed, and the rest is precedent.

In the US, over 300 lawsuits were filed against 70+ US colleges and universities. Students alleged breach of contract and unjust enrichment—basically arguing they were promised in-person education, didn't get it, and deserved a partial refund.

Only it is not that simple to get in the US.

While the US has consumer protection laws—both at the federal level (the FTC Act) and state level (UDAP laws in all states), they don't specifically apply to education the way the UK's Consumer Rights Act does.

Some college students did try including consumer protection claims in their lawsuits—particularly in California, which has strong consumer protection statutes. USC's lawsuit, for example, included violations of California's Business & Professions Code. But these claims were always secondary to the breach of contract arguments. Why? Because successful student claims under US consumer protection laws simply don't exist.

US lawsuits did not and will likely never result in UK-level settlements because judges refuse to assess educational quality, and they recognize "It is not our fault" defenses. US courts are extremely reluctant to assess the quality of education to determine if students got what they paid for academically. In other words, they don't want to be in the business of deciding whether your online chemistry class was as good as your in-person class. US courts also give enormous weight to "It is not our fault" defenses. Universities argued that the pandemic was extraordinary, and given that the government advised us to close, you can't hold us responsible for converting to an online learning model.

So where do US college students stand? Many of the early cases got dismissed outright with courts ruling that the students had no case. Others are still dragging on many years after they were filed, and some have settled.

As of today, about 30+ universities have settled—mostly to avoid the cost of continuing litigation but lest you think that these settlements caused a dent in the budgets of US colleges and univer...

By Wendy McElroy at Brownstone dot org.

On February 5, 2026, in the Canadian Parliament, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis tabled Bill C-260, which prohibits civil servants or others with authority from recommending assisted-suicide to anyone who has not asked about it.

Genuis cited "examples such as Canadian Armed Forces veteran David Baltzer…who was offered MAiD by Veterans Affairs Canada, as well as Nicholas Bergeron, a 46-year-old man from Quebec who was not interested in a medically facilitated death, but was 'repeatedly' pushed towards the option by a social worker."

I can verify this government policy personally since a family member was encouraged without prompting to attend a seminar on how and why to kill himself.

Introduced in 2016, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is a federal program that can differ slightly from province to province. The core and constant concept: at the request of an eligible individual, the government administers death either by euthanasia through a lethal injection delivered by a clinician or by assisted suicide through self-administered medication that is facilitated by a clinician. An estimated 99% of MAiD cases involve euthanasia, not assisted suicide.

For one thing, the populous province of Quebec prohibits self-administration; in other provinces, health regions and care facilities perform only euthanasia or lean strongly in this direction. Perhaps government chose the acronym MAiD because Medical Euthanasia sounds jarring.

MAiD sets the extremely dangerous precedent of granting government the authority to kill an innocent person. The standard rebuttal to this argument is that the innocent person must request the "service" of suicide.

MAiD is not a uniquely Canadian issue. State-assisted suicide has spread quickly across the Western world. Currently (February 2026), over a dozen American states have legalized it in some form. In the UK, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill is at the Committee Stage in Parliament where it reportedly has 1,227 proposed amendments.

Some regions in Australia are also drawing up programs. The list of nations offering State-assisted suicide or euthanasia scrolls on and on, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Austria, New Zealand…The same concerns and debates surrounding MAiD bear directly on these other programs, especially as MAiD is often referenced as a model or as a cautionary tale.

I view MAiD as a cautionary tale.

Medical personnel may have religious or other ethical objections to administering MAiD. Perhaps they view euthanasia as a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, which states, "First, Do No Harm." For many, these 4 words form the backbone of medical ethics. Canada does not force doctors or nurse practitioners to administer MAiD, but the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP) explains that "holding a conscientious objection to MAiD does not negate these obligations.

Rather, it activates alternative duties to discuss the objection with the patient and to refer or transfer the care of the patient to a non-objecting clinician or other effective information-providing and access-facilitating resource." This forces the practitioners to participate in the MAiD system to which they may strenuously object. Equally, some taxpayers may consider MAiD to be a form of murder that is covered by tax-funded health care. They may be as repulsed by having to pay for MAiD as much as many pro-life advocates detest having to finance abortions.

All assisted-suicide nations will confront certain practical questions; for example, all programs need to answer "what constitutes consent, and how is it documented?"

A sketch of how these general practical problems surfaced in Canada gives insight.

The original 2016 legislation (Bill C-14) provided safeguards to ensure applicants were eligible for MAiD. An amendment in 2021 (Bill C-7) established a two-track system of qualifications: Track 1 and Track 2. What is now called T...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

Are doctors being crushed by busywork, so they don't get much time to actually help people? If you read no further, that's the crux of my argument.

Friends ask if I have a family doctor. I admit that Dr. C. has been my doctor for two decades. He inherited me after my old school doc retired. While they think I'm lucky, frankly he's a peripheral person in my life.

Over 20 years I've seen him maybe once a year in very short consultations, (usually for an X-ray requisition to see if I broke something after falling off my bike). In each visit I have noticed a certain tendency: that he wants to give me a lot more than I'm into. He wonders about my cholesterol or my blood sugars, a colon test, a prostate check, or a flu shot. I'm polite. Each time I say, I'll look into those things and get back to him.

I never do. Why? Because I've already looked into those things and there's basically nothing of interest there. I'm a healthy, fit, 60ish guy who has spent 30 years studying the value of medical technologies, pharmaceuticals, and screening tests and the preventative prizes he's offering are theoretically fine, but in my view of things they are little more than meddling ways to turn healthy people into patients. Sure, call me a skeptic but this sort of busywork is unlikely to contribute to the length and quality of my life. I've read most of the big studies of the major classes of pharmaceuticals and parsed the evidence on medical screening, enough to have written books on this stuff. I'm okay to refuse more medicine than I need.

Like most doctors, however, he's just being proactive, seeking out signs of disease before it might hurt me. I get that. But it has me thinking: where does he find time to help people who are actually sick?

Here's the blunt truth for health policymakers and others overzealous about prevention: if our doctors are overly occupied delivering low-value prevention in healthy people, they're not going to be there for the genuinely sick. That's not callousness. It's basic resource allocation informed by evidence about benefits, harms, and opportunity costs.

Large trials and systematic reviews have repeatedly shown that most screening tests and preventive prescriptions yield marginal benefits for otherwise healthy individuals, while often introducing real harms. Screening that seems sensible on paper can lead to false positives, cascades of further testing, overdiagnosis, anxiety, and procedures that don't improve — and sometimes worsen — the quality or length of our lives. Every drug comes with harm of some kind. Taking your chances with those harms if you are seriously in need, sure. But what if you're already otherwise healthy?

Drugs prescribed for healthy people frequently have tiny benefits. Lower your cholesterol? Sure, if you think a 2% reduction in the risk of a heart attack for swallowing a daily pill for 10 years (and the possible increased risk of muscle weakening that comes with it) is worth it. An osteoporosis drug that produces a 1% reduction in the risk of a hip fracture? Then there is the problem with overdrugging older people, a particularly common form of cruelty in our elderly which results in a high rate of hospitalizations and deaths. Millions of otherwise healthy people get labeled "at risk," exposed to drug adverse effects, and end up wasting our doctors' time (and our health care dollars) that could be devoted to acute problems.

Like most doctors, Dr. C defaults to "prevention" because it's neat, feels proactive, and aligns with performance metrics and billing incentives working in a system that rewards doing more rather than doing what's most necessary. But is his time being stolen away from more urgent cases: the frail patient with multiple things going wrong at the same time, the person with new, unexplained symptoms, or the caregiver needing complex coordination for Mom who is failing fast? For those moments when we need experienced clinical judgment...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.

Some books explain events, and others explain the world in which events become possible. Jacob Siegel's The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control (Henry Holt, March 2026) belongs firmly to the second category. A former US Army infantry and intelligence officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Siegel is not a theorist who stumbled upon power. He watched it operate, up close, against living populations.

That experience planted the seed for his landmark 2023 essay in Tablet magazine, "A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century," which was immediately recognized by some of the sharpest minds of our moment — N.S. Lyons, Matthew Crawford, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, among others — as something rare: a genuinely illuminating text. The book that has grown from it is not merely an expansion. It is the definitive account of how liberal democracy, understood as government by consent, was quietly displaced by what Siegel calls the information state.

What is the information state? It is a regime that governs not through legislature or courts or votes, but through the invisible digital architecture that now mediates nearly every dimension of public life. Siegel's definition is evolutive: "a state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals" is replaced by "a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms."

The Foucauldian resonance is deliberate and precise. This is governmentality in the strict sense, a rationality of rule that targets conduct rather than territory, that operates through security mechanisms and the management of populations rather than through the old instruments of force and law, blurring the distinction between the two. Its goal, Siegel insists, was never simply to censor, never merely to oppress. It was to rule. The kind of brazen censorship we observed during the Biden era and that is so tempting to our warring rulers again is not a bug; it is a feature of the new normal.

What gives Siegel's thesis its particular force is the paradox at its center. The great ills the information state claims to remedy — disinformation above all — are self-referential products of the surveillance-and-attention-based internet upon which the state now depends for its very operation. The machine generates the pathology it then offers to cure. As Siegel puts it with characteristic precision, the politicians loudest in condemning platforms like Facebook or Twitter do not take the obvious step of seeking to make them less powerful.

Their aim is not to reform or rebuild the repressive infrastructure of the internet, only to make it serve their own interests. Anyone who has read Jacques Ellul will recognize the pattern immediately. In an endless vicious circle, "Technique" keeps expanding to solve the problems created by its own prior expansion. What had appeared in the 1990s as the emancipatory promise of limitless digital communication had quietly become, by 2016, the medium through which a new class of rulers managed the informational environment of their subjects.

The book's historical architecture is ambitious, and it is here that Siegel distinguishes himself most sharply from mere polemicists without ever sounding conspiratorial. He traces the genealogy of the information State across five acts, beginning far earlier than most observers imagine. The technocratic seed was planted by Francis Bacon's Promethean dream of extending human dominion over nature, a vision that married scientific empiricism to political will, and that dismissed classical contemplation as, in Bacon's own phrase, "the boyhood of knowledge."

From Bacon, the thread runs to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's most trusted minister and weapon against the Nobility of the sword, who married humanist dreams of universal libraries to the accounting practices of Europe's merchant houses and pioneered, in ...

By International Health Reform Project at Brownstone dot org.

[This report of the International Health Reform Project is more than a year in preparation. The full policy report and technical reports are embedded below this foreword and executive summary. The policy report is also available from Amazon in physical and digital forms. The IHRP is sponsored by Brownstone Institute, which had no involvement in forming contents and conclusions.]

International cooperation on health is a widely accepted global good. Capacity building and development assistance reduce historic health inequalities and, as a result, strengthen economies. Management of cross-border infectious disease threats is best done through joint surveillance, data sharing, and response.

Collaboration on norms and standards provides efficiencies and facilitates trade in health products. However, the interaction between disease, the environment, and human populations is complex, and threats are heterogenous in their effects and gravity. Collaboration must therefore take such variability into account, with decision-making ultimately based around those affected.

Experience has demonstrated that international health cooperation can, when poorly governed, undermine trust, distort priorities, and produce significant unintended harm. Recent trends of centralized decision-making, emergency exceptionalism, and donor-driven agendas, exemplified during the Covid-19 response, displaced proportionality, local context, and established public-health ethics. These failures revealed structural weaknesses rather than temporary lapses.

At the same time, cooperation in public health also requires an understanding of the sovereignty and equality of individuals, and of the states that represent them – an understanding that underpins the United Nations itself. Thus, any institution tasked with managing health cooperation must be based on this understanding and be fully subject to the states it is intended to serve.

It should surprise no one that, after nearly 80 years of existence in a greatly changed world, the World Health Organization (WHO) is perceived by many to have drifted from its original model. Fundamental shifts in its funding base, and now the exit of its largest state funder, present both an opportunity and an urgency to reassess the optimal way in which states should work together to serve the health needs of their populations, applying the fundamental principles on which public health should be based to a greatly changed and evolving world.

WHO and the state of international health cooperation

The WHO constitution, signed in 1946 by 51 states then comprising the United Nations, had little input from most current African and Asian states. Its governing body, the World Health Assembly, gradually expanded as states broke from colonialism or foreign mandates to achieve sovereignty.

Defining health in its constitution as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity," the WHO took on a broad mandate including support for these less-resourced states, coordinating cross-border outbreak management, disease elimination, and the setting of international normative standards. It was hoped that the improvements in health and longevity that economic development had brought to wealthier countries could be accelerated in the lower income countries, reducing the inequalities resulting from colonialism and neglect.

The WHO's 150 country offices have formed a framework to strengthen local capacity and health systems. The organization is well known for successes such as smallpox eradication and early focus on the major drivers of well-being and longevity such as improved sanitation, nutrition, and access to basic healthcare. Major programmes in tuberculosis, malaria, vaccination, and child health have set standards for disease management and reduced overall disease burdens. A global decline in infectious disease mortality, con...