By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The cacophony for and against vaccines – even what is a vaccine is in broad dispute – has reached new level of deafening absurdity. There isn't just one rabbit hole but hundreds.

Compliance is tanking, which is what one would expect after brutal mandates and ubiquitous injury and death. Meanwhile, pharma bots are dominating social media to shame dissidents, while legacy media turns news pages into nonstop shot-and-pill advertising.

Everyone is left with questions about whom to trust and what is true. Several states have already seceded from the CDC's own attempt to change the childhood schedule even slightly. That's how contentious this issue has become.

My thesis: this epistemic nihilism is born of the deliberate subversion of economic signaling systems that would otherwise reveal inconvenient truths.

Let's begin with theory.

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises set aside all moral, aesthetic, and philosophical issues concerning socialism and examined how it would work as a purely economic experiment. This was a point rarely considered at all in the centuries before, even by the new leaders of the Soviet Union who had no idea what they were doing beyond nationalizing industry, blathering on about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and demonizing land owners.

Mises calmly explained that double-entry bookkeeping is the mathematical means by which society has come to evaluate the benefits and costs of resource use. This requires prices, which are indicators of relative scarcities and consumer demand. These prices form the essential building blocks of economic knowledge. They provide pointers regarding the essential questions of what to produce and in what quantity.

In order for these prices to be accurate, they must be formed in the context of real-world market trading up and down the full structure of production, from raw materials through capital goods to consumer goods. Only that process generates reliable signals from which accounting is built.

Socialism purports to replace the price system with central commands. In that case, not even the planners will have access to information about the real world around them. They will be flying blind and inevitably screw it up. They did indeed.

The implications of the argument go far beyond the debate over socialism. They reach into every sector mired in government intervention that distorts pricing signals. With every price distortion, we get further away from having accurate information about economic value and market viability in real-world settings.

It was Toby Rogers who first pointed out that this accounts for much if not all of the confusion surrounding the vaccine industry and practice. For two and a quarter centuries, this product, practice, and industry has relied fundamentally on statist means of boosting its viability at every stage: investment, production, distribution, consumption, and even liability. There is no stage of this sector that is untouched by government meddling on behalf of the industry in question.

Rogers writes:

The vaccine era — the years since the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act — exposes a failure neither [Mises or F.A. Hayek] foresaw. Let's call it the calculation problem under regulatory and epistemic capture. Socialism abolished the price outright. Capture in a mixed market economy is subtler: it leaves a price standing and corrupts it from within until it is worse than meaningless.

Mandates, government purchasing, and insurance rules guarantee sales no matter what the product actually does. School-entry laws force sales upon captive customers (e.g. children who want to go to school). Liability protection removes the price that disciplines a defective product — the damages a court would otherwise make the manufacturer pay. The buyer is compelled and the producer is protected so no meaningful price can form.

Making matters worse, price aggregates what buyers believe about the thing they buy, however regul...