Power & Market

There is an alarming degree of uniformity between the governments of many western countries when it comes to instituting tyrannical measures like mandatory medical injections at workplaces and vaccine passports. In doing so, they have departed from liberal values and principles, by no longer recognizing or respecting private spheres, personal goals, or individual freedom and rights. They have also ignored the fact that living in a liberal democratic society means the state is limited to a reasonable level of activity or interference that is neither detrimental nor destructive to various types of freedoms, including negative, positive, individual, subjective, and objective freedom.

At this point, it is clear that vaccine passports and mandates have nothing to do with safeguarding public health or mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, they are purely coercive measures designed to punish disobedience by taking away one’s ability to provide for his family, shape his future, engage in activities that bring him happiness, and live his life in ways that allow him to flourish and advance his well-being. That is to say, they are effectively capable of destroying people’s dreams, goals, self-respect, self-esteem, self-development, aspirations, etc. They are also damaging for public health and the common good, as a society cannot provide a safe, secure and healthy environment for its citizens without an adequate number of people to provide key social services, including police forces, health care workers, fire fighters, sanitation workers, and teachers.

Recent data from Israel, the UK, and other nations with high vaccination rates suggest that the COVID-19 injections are of very limited effectiveness in terms of preventing the spread of the virus, and it is unclear how long any personal protection that they might provide actually lasts. In the case of Israel, the poor performance of the COVID-19 injections has resulted in a third injection being pushed on people that were previously thought to be fully vaccinated (i.e., two shots). Consequently, the Israeli Health Ministry recently reported that, in less than one year, “nearly 90% of people over the age of 60 had their third shot, compared with around 70% of people ages 40-49 and fewer than 50% of people ages 20-29.” Israel managed to achieve such high inoculation rates for third doses despite the fact that Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are still in the process of conducting or setting up clinical trials to test the effects of COVID-19 booster shots on people.

The COVID-19 injections did not follow the proper evaluation and approval processes for creating an effective vaccine, which typically takes between 10 to 15 years. Nonetheless, anyone that has dared to question the unknown future risks of these new vaccines, criticize vaccine passports and mandates, or point out inconvenient details like the fact that fully vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the virus to others, has been publicly shamed and labelled as “unscientific,” “anti-vaxxer,” “selfish,” and “conspiracy theorists.” No one has been spared from the attacks of vaccine zealots, including professors, politicians, scientists, lawyers, nurses and doctors. Essentially, divergent views, ideas, approaches and perspectives, which are crucial for the progress and evolution of science, have been ridiculed or strongly rejected in the mainstream narrative. In fact, this has been true of virtually anyone that supports informed choice over obedience, and freedom over submission.

Totalitarian governments of the pandemic, unelected health experts and biased news reporters have been incessantly glorifying the vaccine mandates, often with religious undertones. In the United States, this has led to the emergence of a “false prophet” in the form of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose dictates are widely treated with a deference that resembles a “divine pattern” by devoted adherents in a number of countries. Unfortunately, the faithful followers of this “false prophet” fail to understand that “prophecies are entirely beyond the scope of scientific method.”1 They also might not realize that science is concerned with objective facts and true images of the real world, while simultaneously opposing fear, hate, subjective opinions, coercion, faith and revelation. In fact, adherents of true scientific approaches renounce faith, revelation, and divine patterns on the basis that science explores the unknown “to establish what is,” rather than to “dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”2 They are of the opinion that “no science can tell anyone what one wants, what one should uphold, what one should grind into the dust.”3 Accordingly, any true scientist would regard vaccine mandates as wholly unscientific.

The development of science throughout history has frequently featured significant disagreements between scientists on a wide range of issues, including concepts, priorities, principles, methodologies, procedures, points of view, explanations, theories, assumptions, approaches, and goals. Such disagreements and doubts have often led to the refutation and abandonment of theories, assumptions, principles, methods, and goals in favor of new ones that emerged. Ultimately, this process has resulted in the expansion of knowledge and realization of progress. That means, in science, progress and “advances consist in finding out” where people had been wrong.4

True scientists are fully aware of what they do not know, and are prone to exercising caution until they acquire more knowledge. They do not hide information and empirical evidence in order to defend certain ideas, or specific products. On the contrary, they would be more than happy “to prove” that their “anticipations were false” and overthrow them.5 It is not the “possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.”6 True scientists would avoid “rash and premature prejudices” and developments.7 Meanwhile, the treatment of the COVID-19 injections by Dr. Fauci and his followers could be described as idolization, which halts the road to scientific progress. In fact, this sort of idolization is an abuse of science, in that it is the “wrong view of science” that “betrays itself in the craving to be right.”8 Many current western political leaders support the tyranny of abused science, which has played a crucial role in justifying their recently acquired totalitarian powers.

It would appear that the tyrannical leaders of the pandemic and their anointed “false prophets” regard the masses with disdain, believing that they do not possess intelligence or the ability to think critically. Much like “the eugenicists” that came before them, the current crop of unfit tyrannical rulers and “false prophets” have managed to “delude themselves in assuming that they themselves will be called to decide what qualities are to be conserved in the human stock. They are too dull to take into account the possibility that other people might make the choice according to their own value judgments.”9 They have not only concluded that people do not know what is best for themselves, their actions are destroying the progress made over the course of the entire history of Occidental civilization by eliminating various guarantees and protections of freedom, including the constitutions or charters of rights of individual countries, international laws and agreements like the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the labor protections established and defended by trade unions.

People should be weary of the “false prophets” and totalitarian governments of the pandemic, as the “return to the closed society which they advocate is the return to the cage, and to the beasts.”10 Instead of unquestioningly accepting the fictitious oracles of these “false prophets,” individuals should find ways to once again become the makers of their own fates, if they are to breathe and think freely. Prior to the normalization of the present environment of fear, hate, discrimination and division, it would have been unimaginable that the leader of any western country would attempt to suspend so many types of freedom and mandate medical procedures for the entire population, essentially transforming the country into a laboratory. Doing so would have run the risk of landing them in a prison or an insane asylum. The mere existence of this type authority proves that “the forces which generated” Fascism and Nazism are not “dead.”11 Moreover, everybody around the world needs to be cognizant of the fact that if such a ruling party ever managed to gain the full backing of the police and military forces, then “the glorification of violence,” or the violent oppression and liquidation of dissenters, which characterized “the policy of Russian Sovietism, of Italian Fascism and of German Nazism” will become inescapable.12 Accordingly, it might be fitting that any politician who advocates for the destructive, uncivilized, and inhuman policies associated with totalitarian regimes might be called a Bolshevist, Nazi or “fascist psychopath.”

• 1. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. (1945: repr. London: Routledge, 2002).
• 2. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 539.
• 3. Joseph Schumpeter, ‘Gustav von Schmoller and the Problems of Today.’ (1926; repr. Journal of Contextual Economics 138: 261 – 304. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), p. 263.
• 4. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy, vol. 17 of The Complete Works of F.A. Hayek (1960; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• 5. Karl Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (1935; repr. London: Routledge, 1992), p.278-279.
• 6. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.281.
• 7. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.278-279.
• 8. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.281.
   
• 9. Mises, Socialism, p. 582.
• 10. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
• 11. Mises, Socialism, p. 578.
• 12. Mises, Socialism, p. 480, 572.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Earlier this month, the conservative magazine known as The Spectator published an article with the absurd title “The Libertarian Case for Vaccine Passports.” The online version now bears the title “Vaccine Passports Are a Ticket to Freedom,” but the physical print version is perhaps more descriptive of what the author is trying to do.

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The author, a former Conservative politician named Matthew Parris, apparently believes that the forever lockdowns are an inescapable feature of reality, and that the only way around them is for the regime to enact a vaccine passport scheme. For Parris, covid lockdowns are just a force of nature, like gravity. Now, if only we could find a way to get around these nature-imposed lockdowns!

By now the flaw in Parris’s logic should be clear. There is nothing natural or inescapable about lockdowns. They are an invention of the state. They are so unnatural, in fact, that they require the use of the state’s police powers to enforce them. They require policemen, handcuffs, courts, prisons, and fines to ensure they are followed. Those who ignore this supposed “force of nature”—and these scofflaws are many—must be punished.

All of this escapes Parris’s notice, however.

For example, his article begins this way:

In principle I’m in favour of vaccination passports, and don’t understand how—again in principle—anyone could be against the theory….

In other words, Parris’s position—in his mind, at least—is so correct and so commonsensical that he can’t even comprehend how someone would disagree with him.

This, of course, is always a highly suspect way to begin an article. Any intellectually serious political commentator, if he tries a bit, can at least imagine why others might disagree with him. After decades in government, however, Parris is so enamored of the idea that the regime ought to control your every move that any another option is apparently beyond the pale of rational thinking.

Parris goes on:

To me it seems not just sensible and fair but obvious that access to jobs or spaces where there is an enhanced risk of viral transmission might be restricted to people who could demonstrate a high degree of immunity.

There is absolutely nothing libertarian about delaying the lifting of lockdown for everybody, just because it wouldn’t be safe for somebody.

Again, note the core assumption: the regime must tell you where you are allowed to go and what you are allowed to do. It is those dastardly libertarians who are the ones "delaying the lifting of lockdowns." For Parris, politicians have been working hard to find a way that society can be set free. These noble policymakers discovered vaccine passports. At long last, people can be allowed to leave their homes. But those libertarians now stand in the way!

Unlike those libertarians, Parris assures us he is in favor of people leaving their homes and visiting each other in public gathering places. It’s just that his hands were tied before. There were no options available to him other than keeping you locked up. Now, dear taxpayer, won’t you let Parris and his friends set you free? They want you to be free. It’s just that there’s nothing they can do until you embrace vaccine passports!

If you’re noticing that Parris sounds a bit like an abusive husband, you wouldn’t be far off. Just as an abuser tells his wife, “See what you made me do!” after he punches her in the face for burning the toast, we see a similar attitude from the vaccine passport crowd: “You see what you’re making me do? I want to let you out of your house, but you refuse to submit to our oh-so-libertarian passport system!”

Yet Parris is not alone in this sort of thinking. Many others continue to advocate for vaccine passports as some sort of profreedom scheme. Passports are being framed as an “easing of restrictions.”

But, as epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff and Stanford physician Jay Bhattacharya pointed out this month in the Wall Street Journal, there is nothing in the passport scheme that is geared toward lessening regime control of our daily lives. On the contrary, it is all about extending and increasing regime power. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya write:

The idea is simple: Once you’ve received your shots, you get a document or phone app, which you flash to gain entry to previously locked-down venues—restaurants, theaters, sports arenas, offices, schools.

It sounds like a way of easing coercive lockdown restrictions, but it’s the opposite. To see why, consider dining. Restaurants in most parts of the U.S. have already reopened, at limited capacity in some places. A vaccine passport would prohibit entry by potential customers who haven’t received their shots….

Planes and trains, which have continued to operate throughout the pandemic, would suddenly be off-limits to the unvaccinated….

The vaccine passport should therefore be understood not as an easing of restrictions but as a coercive scheme to encourage vaccination….

Naturally, the regime claims this is all “required” by “science,” but

[t]he idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune. The young are at low risk, and children—for whom no vaccine has been approved anyway—are at far less risk of death than from the flu. If authorities mandate vaccination of those who don’t need it, the public will start questioning vaccines in general.

“Science” mandates nothing as a matter of public policy. Rather, it is policymakers—backed by the violent power of the state—who impose mandates. These are policy choices, not forces of nature. Moreover, as Kulldorff and Bhattacharya note, these aren’t even prudent policy choices, and are based on questionable conclusions wrought from scientific data. The authors continue:

Most of those endorsing the idea belong to the laptop class—privileged professionals who worked safely and comfortably at home during the epidemic. Millions of Americans did essential jobs at their usual workplaces and became immune the hard way. Now they would be forced to risk adverse reactions from a vaccine they don’t need. Passports would entice young, low-risk professionals, in the West and the developing world, to get the vaccine before older, higher-risk but less affluent members of society. Many unnecessary deaths would result.

But we know how the regime will justify mandatory vaccine policies to themselves should some be injured by adverse reactions. "We had no choice!" the politicians will insist. "Science forced our hand!" This is a convenient way for politicians to weasel out of responsibility for forcing much of the population—much of it a low-risk population—into submitting to certain state-mandated medical procedures. But lest we take too cynical a view, it's entirely possible these people are true believers. Like Parris, the policymakers forcing these policies on citizens and taxpayers might not be able to comprehend any other course of action. This level of moral certitude is a certain privilege of the ruling class, and it certainly has nothing to do with "science."

There is a decision that no person, nor foreign government, can make for Venezuelans: decide how Venezuela will be after Chavismo. We think and are always asserting that our fellow Venezuelans have to reject any “kind of socialism," because if the society accepts a return to the practices and policies that were in place before the Chavez era, they will be condemned to repeat history.

The truth is that there is not a nonsocialist or nonmercantilist option in the political arena. Indeed, some self-proclaimed “classical liberal,” “right-wing,” or “conservative” options are just mercantilists, liberal socialists, or social democrats trying to disguise their real nature. This is hopeless for our relatives, friends, and anybody who still lives in Venezuela, hopes to continue living there, or who must remain and is faced with deciding whom to support. Worst of all, the only thing that is true of all those options is that to support any of them is to support the imminent repetition of the corruption, cronyism, and bad policies of the past.

Neither a quick and painless international military operation nor a long, painful, and corrupt “democratic” negotiation to overthrow Maduro will be enough if people allow Juan Guaido and his comrades to apply the socialist agenda called “Plan País.” Keeping the status quo—a central bank, a minimum wage and other laws that increase the cost of starting a business, economic controls, barriers to international trade, state ownership of the commanding heights, and a high level of fiscal independence from the government—will not solve the problem forever.

We understand that eradicating tyranny would solve, in the short run, great problems for other countries, such as a massive and increasing migration, and for Venezuela, such as access to basic goods and services. Nevertheless, these solutions would just be short lived. Many of those more than 10 million Venezuelans living in other countries would not return, and all the economic, social, and political problems would arise in the middle to long run in a scenario like this. Why? Because, as in the past, the system that Guaido and his comrades propose will collapse at any moment and a new and stronger "kind of Chavismo" will grip the country once again and jeopardize freedom and stability in the region.

The GDP per capita has been widely criticized as an index of quality of living. Notwithstanding, we will use it to support our argument that the social democratic era paved the road to harder socialism like Chavismo with its policies. The following graph shows the average income per capita of Venezuelans:

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After a great and sustained period of economic growth (1950–57), Venezuelans enjoyed an average income of $8,400 (in 2011 US dollars). Immediately after the social democracy started, Venezuelans suffered a decrement in their incomes, and by 1963 they had incomes similar to 1953 levels. Nevertheless, from 1964 incomes started to increase, achieving their highest level in 1980, of around $10,500. After that year, incomes started to plummet, reaching around $6,400 in 1998, when Chavez won his first election. Strictly speaking, Venezuela passed the 1957 threshold during just fifteen of the forty years of the social democratic era. The maximum incomes represented 124 percent of the 1957 incomes, but the social democracy era closed with an average income of just 76 percent of 1957 levels, which is almost the same income that Venezuelans had in 1951. Then, Venezuelans suffered a sustained and continuous impoverishment process, one of the reasons they trusted the radical and harder socialist promises of Chavez.

From this graph, we can extract many undesirable truths. For example, not even with Maduro did the average incomes decrease as much as they did during the social democratic era. We are not saying that Chavismo has been better than social democracy (in fact, to us Chavismo is its offspring). We want to remark the unfeasibility of the “Plan País,” which is just an extension of a failed plan called “El Gran Viraje” (the great turn) that was in place from 1989 to 1993; even in that period the failure of such Keynesian policies is evident.  Chavismo and social democracy have relied on oil prices, and you can see high instability and volatility in the graph for that reason. Plan País would be funded and supported with oil and international debt. Despite the fact that poverty was increasing before Chavez, there was not the great problem of scarcity and the humanitarian crisis that we see today. People should understand that these problems are the symptoms and what we have to eliminate is the bacteria that causes them. That is socialism.

Despite smears and scare tactics from the Virginia law enforcement and the corporate press, thousands of protestors have landed in the capital of Old Dominion in response to an anti-gun agenda being pushed by the new solid-blue state government. While large protests aren’t particularly unique in American politics, this particular event has captured the media’s imaginations in no small part due to the fact it consists of their favorite sort of villain: largely white, Trump-supporting, armed men. They can’t help but salivate at the idea of it descending into the tragic chaos that occurred in Charlottesville in 2017.

To a certain degree, the showdown in Virginia is really only superficially about guns. It also represents the valid anxiety that has arisen as the state’s rural population finds itself increasingly powerless in the face of rapidly expanding political power wielded by high-population centers.

Of course, it’s not surprising that the same commentators that often condemn—foolishly—economic gentrification, openly cheer political changes that threaten the way of life of families that have lived in an area for, in some cases, hundreds of years.

In a rare instance of usefulness, David Frum tweeted out today this chart illustrating the political trends in the state:

What the gun rally in Richmond is about. pic.twitter.com/WCpl0OjAIO

— David Frum (@davidfrum) January 20, 2020

So what we see playing out in Virginia is, as Jeff Deist has frequently noted, the question of what happens to politically vanquished people.

Of course, to the Frums the answer is obvious. If your side doesn’t have the ballots, it’s time to submit or pay the price.

Message of the day in Richmond. One side has more ballots. The other side only bullets. And as Lincoln wrote: "Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost." https://t.co/6gr0VzY39E

— David Frum (@davidfrum) January 20, 2020

Of course, Frum’s evoking the only American president to wage war against an American nation makes sense given his long and bloodstained support for centralized power and the American empire. To others who do not share his cavalier dismissal of life and liberty, the question deserves more serious analysis than simply asking, What Would Abe Do?

In Virginia, we see two major contributing factors to its new progressive domination.

One, a massive influx in non-native-born Virginians due to the massive growth of the North Virginia economy. While it’s worth noting that much of this growth is the direct byproduct of the growing federal leviathan—both in terms of direct state employment and companies that relocate there to ensure better access to the dollars that come with it—the state connection here isn’t particularly important to the larger trend. After all, we see similar trends in non-beltway adjacent red states such as Texas, Florida, and Tennessee, where companies are relocating for better tax environments.

Two, the high-growth urban areas have also made Virginia one of the most schooled states in the country. The state is now sixth in the country in terms of percentage of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher. While an educated population would once be considered a strength, the devolution of higher education means that such rankings now have some correlation with Americans favorable to the political left.

It is not a coincidence, for example, that Millennials are the most schooled generation America has seen—and also the ones most open to socialism. Further, when it comes to cultural issues—such as political correctness, abortion, or acceptance of drag queen story time—it is white college-educated Americans, not immigrants, who are the most out of line with rural Americans.

While Virginia’s unique history, as the native country of most of the most famous American founding fathers, along with being the former capital of the Confederacy, adds a level of symbolic significance that may escalate these tensions superficially, the divide on display today is likely to be repeated as otherwise-red states continue to see their cities grow.

It is not difficult to imagine, for example, the Atlanta metro area amassing large enough of a voting population to cancel out the votes of the rest of the state. In New York, we already see how a political majority in the city dictates the politics for everyone else.

What’s the solution, then? Well if the goal is having governments reflect the ideology of its residents—the true aim of democratic political self-determination—then the goal should be to add and alter states as need be. Allow northern Virginia to serve the interests of its solid blue base. Allow southern Virginia to defend the rights and cultural norms of southern Virginians.

The alternative is to continue our current democratic imperialism—which runs the risk of escalating to the point where today’s protesters show why it is so important to stand up for their right to bear arms.