Different Societies vs. a Pandemic

Libertarian, capitalist societies fight disease pandemics very differently from fascist, welfare-statist ones. In free societies, which rarely even have epidemics, private medical experts lead the way – not political semi-tyrants or government bureaucrats. These noble, profit-seeking, healthcare geniuses, in turn, tell the clamoring public what to do to evade or defeat the threatening disease by employing persuasion – not coercion.

In a liberty-based society, rather than a semi-enslaved one, private medics from top private universities, hospitals, and clinics are in the public’s face and all over the news. So too private virologists, epidemiologists, and other specialist scientists. They command the media. Mayors, governors, and presidents, in turn, take a back seat and do as they’re told.

In a proper, moral, freedom-oriented society there is non-stop attention given to admired, capitalist companies which manufacture such things as protective masks and gowns, as well as marvelous medical tests, treatments, and machines. The greatest attention of all goes to those healthcare demi-gods who invent and sell magical medicines and vaccines.

The morally-magnificent capitalist companies which employ these medical geniuses earn great profits from their heroic endeavors as they react to the potential disease disaster with great speed and competence. The general public does not begrudge them their windfall profits but rather praises them lavishly.

Meanwhile, foolish, corrupt, failed, disease-ridden, fascist, welfare-statist societies – such as those in Western Civilization in the 20^th and 21^st centuries – usually face vast shortages of all the aforementioned, vital, healthcare materials. These evil, semi-tyrannical societies then react by having the government pathetically attempt to order and force the various companies to produce the needed medical products and services.

The products and services which emerge are almost invariably shoddy and exorbitantly-priced. The masks, gowns, tests, treatments, and machines arrive too little, too late. And the situation with the all-important medicines and vaccines is far worse.

The ultimate truth is that loathsome and depraved fascist welfare state societies hugely tend to create pandemics, and then respond to them poorly, while libertarian, capitalist societies do the exact opposite.

Pandemics

What’s the best way to deal with a highly-infectious, extremely-deadly pandemic? Should society coercively quarantine the infectious and the possibly-infectious? Should society coercively close businesses and ban social gatherings? Should society provide government financial aid to the businesses closed and government medical aid to the people infected?

None of these. No matter how bad the pandemic, emergency, or natural catastrophe, government never has the right to initiate coercion. And no such criminality or tyranny is ever necessary or beneficial to society.

The correct answer to the problem of disease pandemics is: individual liberty. This is the correct answer to every social, economic, political, and public health problem – no matter how sudden or disastrous.

The free individual and society tend to be highly rational, responsible, competent, and even expert in unexpected, difficult situations. No matter what is thrown at them, free persons and voluntary social groups tend to be quite dexterous and clever.

Of course, when confronted by a formidable medical menace, like a dangerous pandemic, free individuals and societies do need to react effectively – to be reasonably prudent, wise, insightful, and slick. They also need to have fostered high-quality medical experts and institutions in advance. Then they need to assiduously follow their advice.

There’s no substitute for ingenuity. There’s rarely any unthinking, automatic, one-size-fits-all answer to a terrible pandemic. Both the individual, and society collectively, need to be intelligent and virtuous. They need to be flexible and deft about all of this. They need to take effective counter-measures to minimize sickness and consequent impoverishment.

Every free individual should call upon her hopefully-powerful education and moral code in deciding whether she wants to work or go out socializing -- or not. In the midst of a horrible pandemic, she must determine the proper conditions to meet and precautions to take before working or socializing.

Often the health situation changes quickly and radically This is one reason why the free individual – with all of her rights and choices protected – is by far the most likely to make the right decisions under difficult circumstances. The least likely is some mindless, soulless, fascist government bureaucrat. Do-gooding, welfare-statist, dictatorial, government agents -- if they get to decide – are almost guaranteed to wreck the health and wealth of all.

It also needs to be understood that in a pandemic, as otherwise, when a person knowingly or unknowingly infects another with a harmful or deadly disease, then she has committed a crime. If the disease-vector person can be accurately determined, she needs to be punished. The law should provide for justice in all such deliberate or negligent attacks which do serious damage.

It further needs to be understood that unlike in failed welfare-statist societies, government public places shouldn’t exist, except for tiny, isolated ones, for narrow, governmental purposes, such as the police, military, courts, and jails. Disease-causing government schools, roads, parks, etc. should not exist. They should all be private and capitalist. The natural responsibility and cleverness of the capitalist owners – who can readily be sued or jailed for getting people infected – will tend to slow the epidemic drastically.

Thus the best way to deal with a highly-infectious and extremely-deadly pandemic is thru social and economic liberty. Also thru the full exercise of individual freedom, responsibility, intelligence, and virtue.

The Wuhan Flu vs. Selfish and Greedy Bastards

Capitalism is desperate to solve the Wuhan Flu. Savage and brutal capitalists are out of their minds on this. The entire profit-seeking, private, medical industry is in a kind of feeding frenzy over this.

Yet these morally-magnificent thinkers and workers are doing virtually nothing. Why is that? It makes no sense.

All these spiritually-noble healthcare professionals know that there’s a fortune to be made here. Every medical entrepreneur, businessman, and capitalist on the planet knows that he can become filthy rich -- an instant billionaire, even -- if he solves this problem. Every selfish exploiter of other people's misery and every heartlessly, greedy capitalist in the world is desperate to get to work. So why don’t they?

Because the government says No. Because the do-gooding Welfare State says No. Because Big Brother says No.

So all the badly-needed Wuhan Flu test-kits, treatments, vaccines, and cures are currently going uninvented and unsupplied. Even medical materials and remedies which already exist are going largely unmanufactured. And it’s all because the tyrannical Welfare State government points its guns at the money-grubbing healthcare industry and says No. It stops cold the great humans who are entirely driven by selfishness and greed.

The baffling and hateful truth is that the illegitimate and tyrannical CDC, FDA, NIH, etc. – none of which serve a need or have any right to exist – have tied up the healthcare industry in their evil rules, regulations, red tape, and bureaucracy. New products are made snail-slow and king's ransom-expensive.

And so people are sick and dying in droves.

This is what Big Brother does. This havoc and destruction is what the Welfare State wreaks. Yes, people have to have a bit of education and virtue to see it, and figure it all out. But the nature of fascist, socialist Big Brother and the criminal, tyrannical Welfare State is obvious.

When their rights are respected and they’re allowed to operate, selfish, greedy capitalists virtually always solve the problem. They virtually always fix the mess.

This is because the money-hungry, selfish exploiters of any given situation – the savage and brutal capitalists – only think about themselves and what they can accomplish. They only care about money. They put profits before people, ignore the common good, never self-sacrifice, and exclusively go in search of filthy lucre.

Hence, these morally-magnificent beings get things done. The whole world benefits massively. These selfish and greedy bastards solve every possible socio-economic problem. No matter how bad society fouls up, they fix every conceivable mess. And these heroes of the world provide every unworthy lowlife on earth with an overflowing supply of things like gold-quality, dirt-cheap, Wuhan Flu test-kits, treatments, vaccines, and cures.

This is what happens when free enterprise and free trade are allowed to exist. This is what happens when social and economic regulations don't exist. This is what happens when the "protect the public", "serve the common good", Welfare State is held in check or terminated.

People have a right to be free. The medical industry has a right to function. The scintillating and wondrous people of selfishness and greed have a right to do their thing, seek their profits, exploit our weaknesses, parasite off our failures, make themselves grotesquely rich at our expense – and solve all of our god-damned problems!

It’s worth noting here that the selfish exploiters and greedy capitalists have a long and unbroken track record in human history. Whatever is desperately wanted and badly needed they do. They virtually always solve the problem and fix the mess. “Competence” is their middle name. “Ingenious brilliance” is their nature. If you want to be great and happy, as an individual or a society, you need to slavishly defer to them.

So long as selfish, greedy capitalists are granted their freedom, and allowed to operate as they wish and ought, they essentially always perform magnificently. Impossible problems gets solved quickly and easily. The products and services provided by the entirely selfish and monstrously greedy are notorious for having an extremely high rate of success and an extremely low level of cost.

Such is the nature of selfishness, greed, and laissez-faire capitalism.

Economic Stimulation

If the government truly wants to “stimulate” the economy it should stop interfering with it. Stop intervening in it. Stop coercing it. Bring a halt to its initiation of force, criminality, and tyranny.

There should be no more business permits. No more professional licenses. No more labor laws. No more government paperwork.

Business owners should be free to hire and fire at will, pay what they want, and make workers do as they command, without restrictions. Workers, in turn, should be free to accept, reject, and quit any job offered, and make any demands they desire. Workers should be allowed to instantly start up any “gig” job or business they wish as well.

There should be no more Welfare State nonsense and dictatorship, such as minimum wages, overtime pay, hours restrictions, paid holidays, paid sick days, maternity leave, bereavement leave, vacations, breaks, sundry benefits, or health care unless both employer and employee agree to them.

Government should stop coercively “helping” management and labor. Government should stop “benevolently” coercing all aspects of economic production and trade.

Let people live. Let people function. Let people be free. Let people be happy.

Let people enjoy economic liberty, and behave as they choose, and engage in whatever non-coercive, non-fraudulent, business activity they wish.

Government only exists to stop physical coercion and financial fraud. Government only exists to protect people and property. It should never “regulate” people and their voluntary, social behavior and peaceful, personal activity. It should never regulate economic activity or private businesses involved in producing, manufacturing, promoting, advertising, distributing, trading, buying, and selling.

All such regulation is criminal. All such regulation is tyrannical.

Production and trade are sacred and untouchable. Government has no right to interfere ever. Government has no right to intervene as an unwanted third party between two persons or companies that seek to exchange products or services. Under Natural Law and the inherent freedom of man, government has no right to prevent people from doing business as they see fit, and engaging in free enterprise and free trade as they choose.

Regulating business “to protect the public” or “for the common good” is an act of coercion and force. It’s an act of law-breaking and tyranny. And it never benefits the public or serves the common good in any rational or meaningful sense. This violation of individual rights harms and impoverishes everyone involved.

If government genuinely seeks to “stimulate” the economy it should leave it alone. Stop damaging it. Take its hands off. Call off the dogs. Lower its weapons. Laissez-faire.

Pandemic Misguidance

Despite what arrogant humans often think, microbes rule the world. Occasionally these mighty mites assert their power in spectacular form, such as Justinian’s Plague (541-42 A.D.), which killed around 25 million; the Black Death (1346-53), which killed around 120 million; the Spanish Flu (1918-20), which killed around 30 million (including 675,000 Americans); and the AIDS Epidemic (1981-2020) which killed around 36 million.

More recent microbial attacks have done less damage, due to recent medical advances, but there have been at least seven influenza outbreaks in the past century that have killed over a million. And awesomely-destructive bio-chemical weapons are a looming possibility in an era which loves to appease dictatorships.

So when deadly viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other tiny life forms press in upon mankind, this is the time for private and capitalist medical authorities to step up, take over, and help prevent a global pandemic. This is the time for real experts to assert themselves, assume rightful leadership, and advise us all what to do.

In American terms, this means The Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Mass General, Beth Israel, and the medical departments of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and The University of Chicago need to lead the way. So too the health publications The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

What is to be avoided are communist organizations like The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and The World Health Organization (WHO), which are grossly incompetent by definition. These mindless, soulless, aggravating, destructive government bureaucracies have no right to exist. In any serious emergency, or even mild medical quandary, they will only make things worse to the extent these collectivist monoliths are allowed to exert their tyrannical authority.

Unfortunately, in today’s post-1918 welfare state world, virtually every American alive turns to these illegitimate and failed communist organizations above. They mostly ignore the real authorities – the effective and competent ones. Most Americans foolishly don’t rely upon or pay heed to the private and capitalist experts and geniuses who might actually know the truth and be able to helpfully tell everybody what to do.

And yet the truth is, whenever a serious medical crisis looms – such as today’s Wuhan Flu pandemic – this is exactly the time for the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, the Lancet, and JAMA to speak up and let their knowledgeable, insightful, wise voices be heard and followed!

Intellectuals

Intellectuals rule the world. Intelligent, educated, philosophical ones dominate almost everything and everyone. Those who are practical successes, who make their ideas and themselves relatively well-known, are the commanders of the earth.

Unfortunately, they and their ideas don’t have to be factually true, morally good, or spiritually elevated. Historically, most of them aren’t. Today especially, most of them aren’t. Intellectuals generally evade, deceive, and mislead. This is particularly so in our current, irrational, illiberal, post-modernist, regressive, nihilist, early 21^st century Dark Age.

But good is somewhat stronger than evil, as even the first Zarathustrans observed. And truth is somewhat stronger than ignorance and lies. So humans naturally ascend.

But good-guy intellectuals still have to work hard and smart to defeat the bad ones. And they even have to be fairly clever and slick – because their formidable, bad-guy enemies usually are thus too.

One interesting, odd, sad, alarming truth is that the truth-telling intellectuals seem to need to be fairly popular and well-liked in order to rule. They evidently can’t just meekly and quietly discover and explain the truth. They evidently also have to pleasantly and persuasively reach out – to both their fellow intellectuals and even somewhat to the masses.

The good news, for mankind and the good people of the earth, is it seems like competent, honest, virtuous, and noble intellectuals only have to be partially popular and well-liked. They just have to have a certain Aristotelian practicality and not end up heavily hidden or hated.

The other good news is that if some heroic rebel and saintly revolutionary has been badly abused by his fellow man contemporaneously, or deems them very low and unworthy by nature, then he can take revenge on them by remaining mostly silent or obscure. Evil mankind won’t effectively hear or comprehend his insights and truths, and thus will continue to decline and suffer badly. Justice will triumph.