Is the Senate Filibuster a ‘Jim Crow Relic’?

topicsideas

During his July eulogy for Rep. John Lewis (D–Ga.), a leading figure in the civil rights movement, former President Barack Obama expressed support for eliminating the Senate filibuster, which he called a “Jim Crow relic.” That position contradicted the one Obama took as a senator in a chamber controlled by Republicans, and his historical framing was more than a little misleading.

In its current form, the filibuster prevents a vote on legislation without 60 votes to cut off debate. The maneuver, which was accidentally authorized by a rule change the Senate approved in 1806, was first used in 1837 during the controversy over the Second Bank of the United States. It has been deployed many times since for reasons having nothing to do with government-enforced white supremacy.

Segregationists did use the filibuster to oppose civil rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s. But just as the principle of federalism does not qualify as a “Jim Crow relic” simply because segregationists invoked it, the filibuster is not inherently a tool of oppression simply because they found it useful. Like other restraints on the majority’s will—including those mandated by the Constitution, such as requiring bicameral approval of legislation and the president’s assent in the absence of a congressional supermajority—the filibuster is an ideologically neutral obstacle that makes it harder to pass laws.

When they are in the majority, senators may complain that the filibuster is undemocratic. But the same could be said of many constitutional provisions that prevent a legislative majority from doing whatever it wants, including the restrictions imposed by the Bill of Rights, not to mention the basic principle that Congress may exercise only those powers it has been explicitly granted.

Senators have used the filibuster for causes as varied as resisting U.S. involvement in World War I, protesting a presidential policy of “targeted killing” by drone, and opposing the extension of federal tax cuts. Both Democrats and Republicans have used or threatened filibusters to block the nominations of judges whose records they found alarming.

That last option was largely foreclosed in 2013, when a Democrat-controlled Senate, frustrated by Republican opposition to Obama’s judicial picks, approved a rule that allowed a simple majority to end debate on almost all presidential nominations. An exception for Supreme Court justices was eliminated four years later, after Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2014 and Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.), who had opposed new filibuster limits as a threat to venerable Senate norms when George W. Bush was president and Republicans ran the Senate, switched positions in 2013. So did Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), who as the majority whip during the Bush administration threatened to make the rule change that Reid was then resisting.

McConnell warned Democrats they would regret their shortsighted move. And presumably they did once McConnell, converting again, greased the skids for Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and the president began reshaping the federal judiciary. As the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy noted in 2013, “Serious political movements shouldn’t try to knock down all the barriers to power whenever they temporarily enjoy it, because nothing is permanent in politics save the drive for more federal power, and the weapons you forge may someday be detonated by the other side.”

When politicians are in the mood to defend filibusters (i.e., when their party is not in charge of the Senate), they often say the tactic helps ensure that the minority’s views receive adequate consideration as legislation is crafted. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, used to think so. But as he contemplated a victory over Trump that looked increasingly likely this summer, he decided it might be time to remove this impediment to presidential agendas. “It’s going to depend on how obstreperous [Republicans] become,” he said.

These filibuster flip-flops could be seen as evidence that the time-honored tradition is nothing more than a tricky maneuver that members of both major parties praise when it’s convenient and condemn when it’s not. But the relevant question is whether that tricky maneuver, on balance, gives us better or worse government. When you think about the gratuitous, pernicious, and blatantly unconstitutional legislation that Congress manages to pass even when the filibuster option is available, it is hard to imagine that eliminating this obstacle would improve the situation.

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Is the Senate Filibuster a ‘Jim Crow Relic’?

topicsideas

During his July eulogy for Rep. John Lewis (D–Ga.), a leading figure in the civil rights movement, former President Barack Obama expressed support for eliminating the Senate filibuster, which he called a “Jim Crow relic.” That position contradicted the one Obama took as a senator in a chamber controlled by Republicans, and his historical framing was more than a little misleading.

In its current form, the filibuster prevents a vote on legislation without 60 votes to cut off debate. The maneuver, which was accidentally authorized by a rule change the Senate approved in 1806, was first used in 1837 during the controversy over the Second Bank of the United States. It has been deployed many times since for reasons having nothing to do with government-enforced white supremacy.

Segregationists did use the filibuster to oppose civil rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s. But just as the principle of federalism does not qualify as a “Jim Crow relic” simply because segregationists invoked it, the filibuster is not inherently a tool of oppression simply because they found it useful. Like other restraints on the majority’s will—including those mandated by the Constitution, such as requiring bicameral approval of legislation and the president’s assent in the absence of a congressional supermajority—the filibuster is an ideologically neutral obstacle that makes it harder to pass laws.

When they are in the majority, senators may complain that the filibuster is undemocratic. But the same could be said of many constitutional provisions that prevent a legislative majority from doing whatever it wants, including the restrictions imposed by the Bill of Rights, not to mention the basic principle that Congress may exercise only those powers it has been explicitly granted.

Senators have used the filibuster for causes as varied as resisting U.S. involvement in World War I, protesting a presidential policy of “targeted killing” by drone, and opposing the extension of federal tax cuts. Both Democrats and Republicans have used or threatened filibusters to block the nominations of judges whose records they found alarming.

That last option was largely foreclosed in 2013, when a Democrat-controlled Senate, frustrated by Republican opposition to Obama’s judicial picks, approved a rule that allowed a simple majority to end debate on almost all presidential nominations. An exception for Supreme Court justices was eliminated four years later, after Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2014 and Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.), who had opposed new filibuster limits as a threat to venerable Senate norms when George W. Bush was president and Republicans ran the Senate, switched positions in 2013. So did Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), who as the majority whip during the Bush administration threatened to make the rule change that Reid was then resisting.

McConnell warned Democrats they would regret their shortsighted move. And presumably they did once McConnell, converting again, greased the skids for Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and the president began reshaping the federal judiciary. As the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy noted in 2013, “Serious political movements shouldn’t try to knock down all the barriers to power whenever they temporarily enjoy it, because nothing is permanent in politics save the drive for more federal power, and the weapons you forge may someday be detonated by the other side.”

When politicians are in the mood to defend filibusters (i.e., when their party is not in charge of the Senate), they often say the tactic helps ensure that the minority’s views receive adequate consideration as legislation is crafted. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, used to think so. But as he contemplated a victory over Trump that looked increasingly likely this summer, he decided it might be time to remove this impediment to presidential agendas. “It’s going to depend on how obstreperous [Republicans] become,” he said.

These filibuster flip-flops could be seen as evidence that the time-honored tradition is nothing more than a tricky maneuver that members of both major parties praise when it’s convenient and condemn when it’s not. But the relevant question is whether that tricky maneuver, on balance, gives us better or worse government. When you think about the gratuitous, pernicious, and blatantly unconstitutional legislation that Congress manages to pass even when the filibuster option is available, it is hard to imagine that eliminating this obstacle would improve the situation.

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Two Important New Books on Knowledge, Bias, and Paternalism

Too Much Information

Traditional paternalists argue that they know what’s good for you regardless of your own preferences. Prohibition advocates, for example, claimed that people must be forced to stay away from “Demon Rum” no matter how much they like to drink, or how carefully they weigh the costs and benefits of doing so. Over the last twenty years, however, intellectually sophisticated paternalists have largely shifted to a different rationale for restricting freedom of choice: “libertarian paternalism.”

Unlike old-fashioned paternalists, advocates of LP argue that choice must sometimes be restricted in order to enable people to better pursue their own “true” preferences—to do what they themselves would want to do, but for the pernicious influence of ignorance and cognitive biases. LP enthusiasts also contend that policymakers can simultaneously improve decision-making and minimize coercion by using carefully calibrated “nudges” rather than the crude blunderbuss tactics of “hard” paternalists. For their part, critics claim that the behaviorial research underlying LP isn’t as robust as advocates assert, and that the new paternalistic policies have many of the same flaws as the old.

Two recently published books suggest that there may be more room for common ground between defenders and critics of LP than previously assumed.  The first is Too Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know by Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, one of the leading advocates of LP. The second, Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy, by economists Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman (RW), perhaps the leading academic critics of LP.  Sunstein and RW are longtime adversaries in the academic debate over paternalism. But these two books have so much in common that readers unfamiliar with the authors’ history might assume they are all on the same side.

I. Escaping Paternalism

Rizzo and Whitman’s book is by far the most thorough and insightful critique of “libertarian paternalism” published so far. The first half of the book criticizes paternalists’ arguments that individuals acting in the market and civil society are prone to systematic cognitive errors that justify policymakers in intervening to ensure that their actions better align with their “true” preferences. The second half  assumes that these cognitive problems are real, but offers a wide-ranging critique of paternalistic claims that government regulators are likely to improve the situation rather than make it worse.

In the first part of their book, RW offer a helpful critique of the standard neoclassical economic conception of rationality (or at least more extreme versions thereof) underpinning many paternalist arguments. For example, they dispute the notion that it is necessarily irrational if a person lacks complete and consistent preferences that cover all possible choices that might come before her.  In many cases, developing a complete set of preferences and ensuring that they are all consistent just isn’t worth the cost of doing so, in terms of time and effort.

Similarly, contrary to the assumptions of many scholars and others, there is nothing inherently irrational about “time discounting”—valuing present benefits more than similar future ones. People choose a dollar today over two dollars a year from now are not necessarily irrational, despite moral strictures to the contrary. Thus, we should be skeptical of claims that such preferences justify imposing forced savings of various kinds, as many paternalists argue.

Instead of what they criticize as a narrow “puppet” view of rational behavior, RW advocate a theory of “inclusive rationality,” which takes a much broader view of what qualifies as rational decision-making. Many supposedly irrational behaviors may actually be reasonable under the circumstances, or indications of “nonstandard” preferences. An obese person with an unhealthy diet could be irrational. But he might simply set a high value on eating his favorite foods and avoiding the discomfort of going on a diet—enough to outweigh the potential benefits of improving his health.

RW also summarize evidence indicating that many standard cognitive errors often cited as justification for paternalistic policies are overblown. For example, as the work of  Charles Plott and Kathryn Zeiler indicates, the “endowment effect” (supposedly irrational preference for things you already own over assets of similar value that you might acquire in the future) is actually mostly a combination of flaws in experimental design and largely rational reasons for preferring the bird in hand over one in the bush, in some circumstances.

While there are many good points in the first half of the book, I agree with some of economist Bryan Caplan’s criticisms of it. As Caplan (who is otherwise highly sympathetic to RW) explains, their concept of  “inclusive rationality” at times seems so broad that they seem unwilling to describe virtually any behavior as irrational. RW rightly point out that it can be difficult to separate out rational behavior from the irrational type, because “there is often no clear dividing line” between the two. But that doesn’t mean there are not at least some clear cases of the latter.

That said, even if the first half of Escaping Paternalism isn’t fully persuasive, it offers strong arguments that the cognitive defects identified by paternalists are greatly overstated.

The second half of the book is even stronger. Even if there are more cases of genuine irrationality than RW are willing to admit, it explains why paternalistic policies are likely to do more harm than good. In Chapter 7, RW explain how paternalistic policymakers often lack the relevant knowledge needed to make their interventions effective. For example, they routinely lack information on what people’s “true” preferences actually are, the size of the cognitive biases they seek to correct, and the way those biases vary in heterogenous populations. If, for example, only a subset of the population eats too much unhealthy food out of cognitive bias, while others engage in self-control or have true preferences that value eating their favorite foods over maximizing health, a tax on fatty foods that applies equally to everyone can easily do more harm than good, based on “libertarian” paternalists’ own criteria.

Advocates of the new paternalism often implicitly assume that policymakers are highly knowledgeable and free of bias. In reality, as RW explain, cognitive biases and ignorance are likely to be even more severe among both voters and politicians than among participants in private sector transactions. Voters have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant” and to indulge partisan and ideological biases; the low likelihood of any individual vote changing the outcome of an election makes it rational for voters to make little effort to seek out information or correct biases. Politicians have similar biases, and of course must cater to ignorant and biased voters to win elections.

Proposals to get around these problems by empowering bureaucratic experts  have flaws of their own. Experts are unlikely to be free of biases of their own. And they too have little incentive to carefully gauge their interventions to the “true” preferences of the public they are trying to help.

There is much more to RW’s book—so much so that I can’t possibly summarize more than a fraction of it in a review. Almost every page and chapter has valuable insights.  I differ with the authors on some points, especially in the first half of the book. But if you only read one book on “libertarian paternalist” policies, this should be it.

II. Too Much Information

Cass Sunstein is one of the leading advocates of “libertarian paternalism,” and his earlier works come in for a lot of criticism in RW’s book. He is perhaps most famous for advocating “nudges” as a form of paternalistic policy less heavy-handed and coercive than traditional paternalism. One might therefore expect Sunstein to be particularly supportive of paternalistic policies that seek to influence behavior simply by requiring revelation of information. Such  policies are usually considered less coercive and intrusive than direct mandates. For example, instead of banning or taxing unhealthy food, the government can mandate disclosure of calorie counts or potential risks associated with consuming too much food of a particular type.

Interestingly, however, Sunstein’s new book takes exactly the opposite tack from what one might expect. The first half outlines the many dangers of excessive information disclosure requirements intended to inform consumers of various potential risks. The second advocates a major rollback of mandated information-gathering for use by the government itself.

Disclosure of additional information may seem like an unalloyed good. Surely, having more knowledge is always better than less. But, as Sunstein points out, mandated disclosure has real costs. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

Reading disclosures may take up time and effort that are better used elsewhere. In addition, people often actively dislike getting information that they find annoying or unpleasant. Looking at the calorie count for your hamburger may detract from your enjoyment of the meal, for example.

Such “hedonic taxes,” as Sunstein calls them, are especially serious for the many people who don’t change their behavior as a result of getting the information in question. You may like your favorite food so much, that you will continue to eat it in the same copious quantities regardless of the calorie count. Even when behavior does change in response to new information, Sunstein  explains that it is still far from clear that the costs of disclosure outweigh the benefits.

In addition, mandated disclosure might actually divert attention away from other, more important information, and thus actually reduce the quality of consumer decision-making rather than improve it. Human attention is a scarce good, and regulators who divert it onto their preferred warnings might simultaneously be diverting it away from other, more important considerations.

In criticizing mandated disclosure laws, Sunstein often sounds a lot like Rizzo and Whitman. For example, he too emphasizes the importance of policymakers’ inability to discern “true” preferences, and the importance of heterogeneity of preferences. Both books also point out that private precautions (in this case private disclosure and information gathering) often obviate the need for paternalistic policies.

Sunstein does not advocate anything approaching complete abolition of mandatory disclosure laws. But he does suggest imposing tight limits on them, most notably by limiting them to disclosure of especially important information about potential risks. He also recognizes that, in many cases, we need much more evidence before we can assume that many currently popular mandatory disclosure laws are justified.

The second half of Too Much Information tackles the costs of mandated disclosure of information to the government. Every year, businesses, civil society organizations, and individuals fill out millions of pages of information forms to satisfy the demands of regulators, tax collectors, and other government agencies. Sunstein cites data indicating that federal-government paperwork alone imposes 9.78 billion hours of work on Americans every year. He estimates the economic costs of this burden as at least $200 billion per year, and possibly much higher.

In addition, having to do paperwork imposes significant psychological pain, as for most people it is one of the least-favorite ways of spending time. This point is backed by scientific research, but also by common sense. Just think of how much you enjoy filling out tax forms and other bureaucratic documents! In many instances, paperwork burdens deter people from socially valuable activities such starting new businesses. In that way, paperwork “sludge,” as Sunstein refers to it, harms society as a whole, not just those most directly affected.

As Sunstein recognizes, there may be instances where sludge is a feature rather than a bug, as when we might want to deter frivolous applications for various government benefits (in order to ensure those who apply are genuinely needy). Sunstein suggests the same may be true for certain transactions that we might want to prevent people from undertaking impulsively, such as getting married, having an abortion, acquiring a gun  RW would probably argue  that such policies rely on the dubious assumption that those who want to marry or get a gun quickly are acting on irrational impulses as opposed to appropriate concerns for their security, or justifiable enthusiasm for starting married life as fast as possible. For his part, Sunstein persuasively argues that “sludge” is usually a poor way to sift applicants.

He concludes that “there is a strong argument for a behaviorally informed deregulatory effort aimed at paperwork burdens.” Moreover, that effort should include “radical simplification of existing requirements and (even better) use of default options to to cut learning and compliance costs.” Most of this would likely be warmly endorsed by RW and other critics of libertarian paternalism! I would be happy to see it happen, myself.

While RW sometimes take their critique of paternalism and regulation too far, Sunstein doesn’t always push his far enough. Though he effective describes many weaknesses of information mandates, he only briefly acknowledges the possibility that many such mandates might actually have pernicious purposes, rather than benevolent ones. In reality, government-mandated labeling requirements and information campaigns have a long history of spreading misinformation (as in the case of mandated labeling of GMO foods, which in reality are no more dangerous than “natural” ones), and targeting unpopular groups (such as in the case of warnings against the supposed dangers of gay and lesbian sexual activity). Such practices are predictable responses to the perverse incentives often facing government agencies.

In advocating deregulation of paperwork burdens, Sunstein may be overly optimistic in assuming that large-scale reduction in “sludge” is feasible without major rollbacks of the substantive regulations those paperwork requirements are intended to enforce. In a world where federal and state governments impose extensive regulation on almost every type of human activity, it is virtually inevitable that regulatory bureaucracies will need to collect vast amounts of information in order to determine whether people are complying with their dictates or not. Similarly, the hyper-complicated federal tax code inevitably requires extensive disclosure of financial information to the IRS.

Sunstein is probably right that procedural reforms can nonetheless reduce the paperwork burden significantly. But I am skeptical that real-world governments will have the incentive to adopt such reforms, or that real-world voters will become knowledgeable enough enough of the issue to force them to do so. Moreover, reduction of paperwork burdens in a large and complex state apparatus, may itself require extensive monitoring and paperwork, just to keep track of all the paperwork mandates the reform initiative is supposed to keep under control!

Despite such caveats, Sunstein’s book is an invaluable font of information about the many burdens of disclosing too much information. He packs a great deal of useful arguments and data into less than 200 pages of text. The book is itself a model of the kind of streamlining of disclosure that the author argues for.

Between them, Escaping Paternalism and Too Much Information offer a wide-ranging critique of much of the regulatory apparatus of the modern state. Their many similarities suggest a degree of potential convergence in the previously highly polarized debate over knowledge, paternalism, and cognitive error.

 

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Two Important New Books on Knowledge, Bias, and Paternalism

Too Much Information

Traditional paternalists argue that they know what’s good for you regardless of your own preferences. Prohibition advocates, for example, claimed that people must be forced to stay away from “Demon Rum” no matter how much they like to drink, or how carefully they weigh the costs and benefits of doing so. Over the last twenty years, however, intellectually sophisticated paternalists have largely shifted to a different rationale for restricting freedom of choice: “libertarian paternalism.”

Unlike old-fashioned paternalists, advocates of LP argue that choice must sometimes be restricted in order to enable people to better pursue their own “true” preferences—to do what they themselves would want to do, but for the pernicious influence of ignorance and cognitive biases. LP enthusiasts also contend that policymakers can simultaneously improve decision-making and minimize coercion by using carefully calibrated “nudges” rather than the crude blunderbuss tactics of “hard” paternalists. For their part, critics claim that the behaviorial research underlying LP isn’t as robust as advocates assert, and that the new paternalistic policies have many of the same flaws as the old.

Two recently published books suggest that there may be more room for common ground between defenders and critics of LP than previously assumed.  The first is Too Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know by Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, one of the leading advocates of LP. The second, Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy, by economists Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman (RW), perhaps the leading academic critics of LP.  Sunstein and RW are longtime adversaries in the academic debate over paternalism. But these two books have so much in common that readers unfamiliar with the authors’ history might assume they are all on the same side.

I. Escaping Paternalism

Rizzo and Whitman’s book is by far the most thorough and insightful critique of “libertarian paternalism” published so far. The first half of the book criticizes paternalists’ arguments that individuals acting in the market and civil society are prone to systematic cognitive errors that justify policymakers in intervening to ensure that their actions better align with their “true” preferences. The second half  assumes that these cognitive problems are real, but offers a wide-ranging critique of paternalistic claims that government regulators are likely to improve the situation rather than make it worse.

In the first part of their book, RW offer a helpful critique of the standard neoclassical economic conception of rationality (or at least more extreme versions thereof) underpinning many paternalist arguments. For example, they dispute the notion that it is necessarily irrational if a person lacks complete and consistent preferences that cover all possible choices that might come before her.  In many cases, developing a complete set of preferences and ensuring that they are all consistent just isn’t worth the cost of doing so, in terms of time and effort.

Similarly, contrary to the assumptions of many scholars and others, there is nothing inherently irrational about “time discounting”—valuing present benefits more than similar future ones. People choose a dollar today over two dollars a year from now are not necessarily irrational, despite moral strictures to the contrary. Thus, we should be skeptical of claims that such preferences justify imposing forced savings of various kinds, as many paternalists argue.

Instead of what they criticize as a narrow “puppet” view of rational behavior, RW advocate a theory of “inclusive rationality,” which takes a much broader view of what qualifies as rational decision-making. Many supposedly irrational behaviors may actually be reasonable under the circumstances, or indications of “nonstandard” preferences. An obese person with an unhealthy diet could be irrational. But he might simply set a high value on eating his favorite foods and avoiding the discomfort of going on a diet—enough to outweigh the potential benefits of improving his health.

RW also summarize evidence indicating that many standard cognitive errors often cited as justification for paternalistic policies are overblown. For example, as the work of  Charles Plott and Kathryn Zeiler indicates, the “endowment effect” (supposedly irrational preference for things you already own over assets of similar value that you might acquire in the future) is actually mostly a combination of flaws in experimental design and largely rational reasons for preferring the bird in hand over one in the bush, in some circumstances.

While there are many good points in the first half of the book, I agree with some of economist Bryan Caplan’s criticisms of it. As Caplan (who is otherwise highly sympathetic to RW) explains, their concept of  “inclusive rationality” at times seems so broad that they seem unwilling to describe virtually any behavior as irrational. RW rightly point out that it can be difficult to separate out rational behavior from the irrational type, because “there is often no clear dividing line” between the two. But that doesn’t mean there are not at least some clear cases of the latter.

That said, even if the first half of Escaping Paternalism isn’t fully persuasive, it offers strong arguments that the cognitive defects identified by paternalists are greatly overstated.

The second half of the book is even stronger. Even if there are more cases of genuine irrationality than RW are willing to admit, it explains why paternalistic policies are likely to do more harm than good. In Chapter 7, RW explain how paternalistic policymakers often lack the relevant knowledge needed to make their interventions effective. For example, they routinely lack information on what people’s “true” preferences actually are, the size of the cognitive biases they seek to correct, and the way those biases vary in heterogenous populations. If, for example, only a subset of the population eats too much unhealthy food out of cognitive bias, while others engage in self-control or have true preferences that value eating their favorite foods over maximizing health, a tax on fatty foods that applies equally to everyone can easily do more harm than good, based on “libertarian” paternalists’ own criteria.

Advocates of the new paternalism often implicitly assume that policymakers are highly knowledgeable and free of bias. In reality, as RW explain, cognitive biases and ignorance are likely to be even more severe among both voters and politicians than among participants in private sector transactions. Voters have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant” and to indulge partisan and ideological biases; the low likelihood of any individual vote changing the outcome of an election makes it rational for voters to make little effort to seek out information or correct biases. Politicians have similar biases, and of course must cater to ignorant and biased voters to win elections.

Proposals to get around these problems by empowering bureaucratic experts  have flaws of their own. Experts are unlikely to be free of biases of their own. And they too have little incentive to carefully gauge their interventions to the “true” preferences of the public they are trying to help.

There is much more to RW’s book—so much so that I can’t possibly summarize more than a fraction of it in a review. Almost every page and chapter has valuable insights.  I differ with the authors on some points, especially in the first half of the book. But if you only read one book on “libertarian paternalist” policies, this should be it.

II. Too Much Information

Cass Sunstein is one of the leading advocates of “libertarian paternalism,” and his earlier works come in for a lot of criticism in RW’s book. He is perhaps most famous for advocating “nudges” as a form of paternalistic policy less heavy-handed and coercive than traditional paternalism. One might therefore expect Sunstein to be particularly supportive of paternalistic policies that seek to influence behavior simply by requiring revelation of information. Such  policies are usually considered less coercive and intrusive than direct mandates. For example, instead of banning or taxing unhealthy food, the government can mandate disclosure of calorie counts or potential risks associated with consuming too much food of a particular type.

Interestingly, however, Sunstein’s new book takes exactly the opposite tack from what one might expect. The first half outlines the many dangers of excessive information disclosure requirements intended to inform consumers of various potential risks. The second advocates a major rollback of mandated information-gathering for use by the government itself.

Disclosure of additional information may seem like an unalloyed good. Surely, having more knowledge is always better than less. But, as Sunstein points out, mandated disclosure has real costs. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

Reading disclosures may take up time and effort that are better used elsewhere. In addition, people often actively dislike getting information that they find annoying or unpleasant. Looking at the calorie count for your hamburger may detract from your enjoyment of the meal, for example.

Such “hedonic taxes,” as Sunstein calls them, are especially serious for the many people who don’t change their behavior as a result of getting the information in question. You may like your favorite food so much, that you will continue to eat it in the same copious quantities regardless of the calorie count. Even when behavior does change in response to new information, Sunstein  explains that it is still far from clear that the costs of disclosure outweigh the benefits.

In addition, mandated disclosure might actually divert attention away from other, more important information, and thus actually reduce the quality of consumer decision-making rather than improve it. Human attention is a scarce good, and regulators who divert it onto their preferred warnings might simultaneously be diverting it away from other, more important considerations.

In criticizing mandated disclosure laws, Sunstein often sounds a lot like Rizzo and Whitman. For example, he too emphasizes the importance of policymakers’ inability to discern “true” preferences, and the importance of heterogeneity of preferences. Both books also point out that private precautions (in this case private disclosure and information gathering) often obviate the need for paternalistic policies.

Sunstein does not advocate anything approaching complete abolition of mandatory disclosure laws. But he does suggest imposing tight limits on them, most notably by limiting them to disclosure of especially important information about potential risks. He also recognizes that, in many cases, we need much more evidence before we can assume that many currently popular mandatory disclosure laws are justified.

The second half of Too Much Information tackles the costs of mandated disclosure of information to the government. Every year, businesses, civil society organizations, and individuals fill out millions of pages of information forms to satisfy the demands of regulators, tax collectors, and other government agencies. Sunstein cites data indicating that federal-government paperwork alone imposes 9.78 billion hours of work on Americans every year. He estimates the economic costs of this burden as at least $200 billion per year, and possibly much higher.

In addition, having to do paperwork imposes significant psychological pain, as for most people it is one of the least-favorite ways of spending time. This point is backed by scientific research, but also by common sense. Just think of how much you enjoy filling out tax forms and other bureaucratic documents! In many instances, paperwork burdens deter people from socially valuable activities such starting new businesses. In that way, paperwork “sludge,” as Sunstein refers to it, harms society as a whole, not just those most directly affected.

As Sunstein recognizes, there may be instances where sludge is a feature rather than a bug, as when we might want to deter frivolous applications for various government benefits (in order to ensure those who apply are genuinely needy). Sunstein suggests the same may be true for certain transactions that we might want to prevent people from undertaking impulsively, such as getting married, having an abortion, acquiring a gun  RW would probably argue  that such policies rely on the dubious assumption that those who want to marry or get a gun quickly are acting on irrational impulses as opposed to appropriate concerns for their security, or justifiable enthusiasm for starting married life as fast as possible. For his part, Sunstein persuasively argues that “sludge” is usually a poor way to sift applicants.

He concludes that “there is a strong argument for a behaviorally informed deregulatory effort aimed at paperwork burdens.” Moreover, that effort should include “radical simplification of existing requirements and (even better) use of default options to to cut learning and compliance costs.” Most of this would likely be warmly endorsed by RW and other critics of libertarian paternalism! I would be happy to see it happen, myself.

While RW sometimes take their critique of paternalism and regulation too far, Sunstein doesn’t always push his far enough. Though he effective describes many weaknesses of information mandates, he only briefly acknowledges the possibility that many such mandates might actually have pernicious purposes, rather than benevolent ones. In reality, government-mandated labeling requirements and information campaigns have a long history of spreading misinformation (as in the case of mandated labeling of GMO foods, which in reality are no more dangerous than “natural” ones), and targeting unpopular groups (such as in the case of warnings against the supposed dangers of gay and lesbian sexual activity). Such practices are predictable responses to the perverse incentives often facing government agencies.

In advocating deregulation of paperwork burdens, Sunstein may be overly optimistic in assuming that large-scale reduction in “sludge” is feasible without major rollbacks of the substantive regulations those paperwork requirements are intended to enforce. In a world where federal and state governments impose extensive regulation on almost every type of human activity, it is virtually inevitable that regulatory bureaucracies will need to collect vast amounts of information in order to determine whether people are complying with their dictates or not. Similarly, the hyper-complicated federal tax code inevitably requires extensive disclosure of financial information to the IRS.

Sunstein is probably right that procedural reforms can nonetheless reduce the paperwork burden significantly. But I am skeptical that real-world governments will have the incentive to adopt such reforms, or that real-world voters will become knowledgeable enough enough of the issue to force them to do so. Moreover, reduction of paperwork burdens in a large and complex state apparatus, may itself require extensive monitoring and paperwork, just to keep track of all the paperwork mandates the reform initiative is supposed to keep under control!

Despite such caveats, Sunstein’s book is an invaluable font of information about the many burdens of disclosing too much information. He packs a great deal of useful arguments and data into less than 200 pages of text. The book is itself a model of the kind of streamlining of disclosure that the author argues for.

Between them, Escaping Paternalism and Too Much Information offer a wide-ranging critique of much of the regulatory apparatus of the modern state. Their many similarities suggest a degree of potential convergence in the previously highly polarized debate over knowledge, paternalism, and cognitive error.

 

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Paul Craig Roberts: Life Within The Matrix Is Our Future

Paul Craig Roberts: Life Within The Matrix Is Our Future

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 23:30

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

The question each of us needs to ask ourselves, and one another, is why do we get so much misinformation about Covid from public health authorities, political authorities, and press prostitutes?  We get a lot of misinformation from health practioners, because they get the bogus information from health authorities and from researchers associated with Big Pharma.  But why do health authorities themselves lie to us?

Take the issue of masks.  The masks being worn by the vast majority of the world population, including health care providers, cannot prevent the inhalation and exhalation of bacteria and viruses.  If a person wearing one of these masks is sick with a cold, flu, or Covid, the mask can prevent the person from sneezing and coughing on others, countertops, and fresh produce.  But the masks cannot prevent the wearer from breathing in and exhaling out Covid, which is airborn and aerosol spread.  The only people who should be wearing one of these masks are people who are out in public areas coughing and sneezing among other people.  To avoid the spread of the virus, infected people should stay at home.

If the masks people are wearing protected against bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, there would be no point in N95 and higher rated masks.  Medical authorities know this, so why are people told, indeed forced, to wear ineffectual masks?

This is an especially troubling question when experts unaffiliated with Big Pharma tell us that wearing a mask is dangerous as it reduces oxygen intake and increases CO 2 intake. This expert tells us that wearing a mask causes brain damage that cannot be reversed. Why do health authorities want to stunt children’s development and increase dementia among the elderly? This doctor tells us that mask wearing is increasing bacterial pneumonias.

Public health authorities know that the Covid death rate is greatly exaggerated.  Hospitals are economically incentivized to report all deaths as Covid deaths. The CDC itself let the cat out of the bag when it reported that among the 200,000 US Covid deaths, only 9,000 were due to Covid alone.  All others had in addition to Covid 2.6 fatal comorbidities. Deaths are concentrated in an elderly population with comorbidities, and those infected, if they were and it wasn’t a false positive, could as easily have died from seasonal flu.

Perhaps without meaning to, the World Health Organization (WHO) seems to have confirmed that Covid is no more dangerous than flu.

So, why do public health authorities withhold this information from political authorities and the public, and why do reporters not ferret it out?  The information exists.  It just isn’t reported.

Public heath authorities also know that the number of Covid cases is vastly overstated, because the PCR test produces more false positives than correct positives.

An international group of lawyers has concluded based on evidence provided in expert testimony that the Covid Pandemic is an orchestration that has served powerful interests at the expense of the public’s health. The doctors acknowledge that Covid itself is real, but the pandemic that has been built around it is not.

It is possible that the courts are as corrupted as the media and democratic institutions, and that nothing will come of the lawyers’ efforts.  Nevertheless, neither Americans nor other peoples need to cling to their gullibility and behave as sheep programmed by “authorities” who are serving every interest but public health.

As I have reported in previous columns, Covid is being used to serve many interests. 

Among them, Covid is being used to complete the universal Police State by digitizing money.  Once electronic money takes the place of currency, checks, and coins, your financial privacy and your control over your money and wealth will disappear. The government will know every payment you make and receive, and your access to your own income and wealth can be curtailed at the whim of the government and those who control the digitized monetary system. There will be no way that you can accumulate cash reserves as protection against your dispossession.

Private cryptocurrencies will be destroyed, and a black market fueled by gold and silver coins can be prevented by seizing gold and silver holdings.  The Great Liberal Hero Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to take gold out of Americans’ hands with the technology of the 1930s.  Today it would be a cinch.

Authorities have many Americans terrified of Covid infection.  People scared out of their minds can’t wait for the unneeded and insufficiently tested vaccine. The HCQ/zinc cure works, but continues to be demonized by public health authorities in order to keep the market primed for a vaccine that contains elements we know not what.

Over the course of our history we Americans have been deceived about many things for the sake of political agendas.  The length of the list depends on how far you want to go back.  Let’s just start with the 20 years of the 21st century—September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and the Talliban, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the endless lies about Gadaffi and Libya, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Russiagate, Impeachgate, Russian bounties to the Tallian to kill American soldiers, the lies about China, Somalia, and now the Covid Deception.

Are Americans capable of learning?  How many lies do they have to be told before they begin to wonder?  It is not entirely their fault.  The explanations given them are controlled and aligned with their innate biases.  Super patriots, for example, love to have enemies to denounce, and you can hear rightwing talk radio denouncing China, Russia, and Iran daily.  The left loves to hear confirmation of their belief in the evil that is America.  The left has glorified in the rioting, looting, and destruction that resulted from press prostitutes withholding the fact that George Floyd died from an overdose of fentanyl.

The younger generations have never been taught how to think.  Instead, they are taught what to think.  You see the result in the majority white presence in Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Throughout the Western world facts have given way to emotions. The concept of independent truth itself has been lost.  Truth is whatever serves the agenda. You can see this in Assange’s trial underway in a British court. The Judge and prosecutor have no interest in any evidence, only in delivering the result demanded by the agenda.

Science itself is imperiled as there are only race and gender truths.  Media serves money and ideologies.  Universities and public schools are a great danger to the societies that host them.

Public discourse and debate no longer exist.  Among Americans, violence is rising as the preferred way to settle disagreements.

Truth-tellers, at first ostracized and shoved aside are now being criminalized with the help of the media.  The bought-and-paid-for Western media no longer expects to be free and will take no risk in behalf of the First Amendmant.  The Western media are helping to destroy the last Western journalist – Julian Assange.

Without a media there is no accountable government and no democracy. Voting becomes impotent as in Stalinist Russia.  Voting is used to give legitimacy to whatever government those who rule have decided upon.

Donald Trump will be the last American president who tried to put the people’s interest above those of the ruling elites.  Henceforth, all presidential candidates will understand that their political success depends only on being the best puppet for the Establishment.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3k6gGDL Tyler Durden

Sign Of The Top? Porn Star Pitches ‘Trading Seminar’ – “It’s The Right Time To Get Into Stocks”

Sign Of The Top? Porn Star Pitches ‘Trading Seminar’ – “It’s The Right Time To Get Into Stocks”

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 23:10

It seems barely a week goes by that some new celebrity isn’t trying to cash in on the day-trading craze that’s recruited millions of retail traders into the market.

Since the market melted down in March, millions of first-time traders guided by the principle that stocks only go up and every dip is merely an opportunity to buy more have downloaded Robinhood.

Many have dived headlong into trading single stocks, futures and options, (only to be hit by last-minute calls to up their margin requirements or risk liquidation). Sometimes, these types of mistakes can be fatal.

Like with any trend, opportunists are struggling to cash in any way they can. And in the rush to appeal to the millennial cohort, these entrepreneurs are recruiting influencers/celebrities to pitch their trading courses purporting to show traders how to make millions trading penny stocks, or the latest trading ‘strategies’ that will ensure a massive speculative windfall.

Which is why we can’t help but comment on a recent post from porn star (excuse us, ex-porn star) Lana Rhoades, who apparently took to her Instagram account this week to pitch a series of trading classes from @Truetradinggroup.

“Don’t miss the seminar guys, it’s the right time to get into stocks,” Rhoades concludes.

In addition to still being one of the most searched stars on PornHub despite ‘retiring’ from porn a few years back, Rhoades’ popularity saw a bump this month thanks to an appearance on the popular Barstool Sports podcast “Call her Daddy”.

Of course, unlike Barstool’s Dave Portnoy, Rhoades’ approach to cashing in on the day trading frenzy will see her get paid no matter what.

Others joked that the venture was bound to end badly.

In contrast, another ex-porn star, Mia Khalifa, sent a viral tweet about the market back in March.

It might be time for her to give her manager a call and see what “collab” opportunities might be available.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3k7lOYs Tyler Durden

What’s Behind The WHO’s Lockdown Mixed-Messaging

What’s Behind The WHO’s Lockdown Mixed-Messaging

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 22:50

Authored by Stacey Rudin via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Last week, in a major departure from months of pro-lockdown messaging, Britain’s envoy to the WHO Dr. David Nabarro called for world leaders to stop locking down their countries and economies as a “primary method” of controlling COVID19.

“I want to say it again: we in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr. Nabarro told The Spectator.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.” Dr. Nabarro’s position aligns with the Great Barrington Declaration, of which he spoke favorably, in which 30,000 scientists and public health experts have joined in advocating an immediate return to normal life for those at low risk. Nabarro and the thousands of signees of the Declaration opine that this approach will minimize overall mortality and lessen the disproportionate burden of lockdowns on the working class and underprivileged.

The day after Nabarro made his remarks, WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus flatly contradicted him, declaring that lifting lockdowns would be a recipe for “unnecessary infections, suffering and death.” Tedros claims that herd immunity can only be “safely” achieved through vaccination, a conclusion premised upon the frightening assumption that the development of a safe and effective vaccine is guaranteed, and the dubious premise that natural infections can be held back “as long as it takes” to prepare and distribute the vaccine. However, according to Tedros, there is no other way:

“allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical. It’s not an option.”

It’s difficult to reconcile this stance with the data from states and nations which did not lock down for COVID19. For example, Swedish all-cause mortality is on average for 2020 — incredibly, the nation had higher per-capita mortality just five years ago, in a year in which there was no pandemic. This undeniable, easily-verifiable fact is shocking in light of the decimation of world economies on the premise of “stopping” a “highly deadly” pathogen. Far from “unethical,” allowing the virus to “run free” produced a much better result than tight lockdowns such as those imposed in Argentina and Peru — yet Tedros is ignoring this. The question is: why?

The China-Paved Path to WHO Director-General

In 2017, Nabarro and Tedros competed for the WHO Director-General role. For the first time, the position was filled by a direct vote of the member-states, and not by the WHO executive board. Tedros’s candidacy was mired in several scandals. Ethiopians and concerned global citizens pleaded with the countries voting in the election to reject Tedros because he was a representative of a repressive political regime who had helped to build and maintain a surveillance state with a total lack of government transparency. Critics pointed out that Tedros was “comfortable with the secrecy of autocratic states”— a characteristic that could wreak havoc on the world if he assumed a position of power within the WHO.

Tedros also received criticism for his role in covering up cholera epidemics while he was Ethiopia’s Health Minister from 2005 until 2012. Tedros summarily dismissed the complaint, raised by one of Nabarro’s advisers, likening it to James B. Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server just days before the 2016 presidential election. He also attributed racial and elitist motives to his accuser, claiming “Dr. Nabarro’s backers have a ‘typical colonial mind-set aimed at winning at any cost and discrediting a candidate from a developing country.’”

However, the undisputed facts depict a Health Minister who is doing one of two things: grossly neglecting cholera testing, or intentionally prioritizing his nation’s economy over protecting people from cholera. Tedros claimed that outbreaks of what he called “acute watery diarrhea” in 2006, 2009, and 2011 were not cholera, although he could not produce a test ruling out the deadly pathogen, and neighboring Somalia and Kenya disclosed cholera as the cause of their own simultaneous outbreaks. Tedros claimed that testing in his country was “too difficult,” but this was belied by the fact that outside experts were able to test and find the cholera bacteria in stool samples. Testing for cholera bacteria is simple and takes less than two days. It is hard to fathom why outside experts and other countries would be able to test while the Ethiopian government could not.

Cholera can kill a person in as little as five hours. News of cholera outbreaks can have a quick and devastating impact on a country’s economy, so African nations sometimes fail to declare cholera emergencies even when they know for a fact that they have one. During the 2006 outbreak, for example, Ethiopia “did not share the results of lab tests since [the outbreak started]” because “it can mean some serious economic losses, especially in terms of international trade and tourism,” said Kebba O. Jaiteh, emergency officer in Ethiopia with the WHO.

During earlier outbreaks of cholera in Ethiopia (or “acute watery diarrhea,” depending on who you believe), The Guardian and The Washington Post investigated and reported that Ethiopian officials “were pressuring aid agencies to avoid using the word ‘cholera’ and not to report the number of people affected.” Research by Human Rights Watch found that the Ethiopian government “was pressuring its health workers to avoid any mention of cholera, which could damage the country’s image and deter tourists.” Despite this accumulation of evidence, Tedros stood by his denial, preventing aid from being delivered to Ethiopia: the UN cannot act without permission and a declaration of an outbreak.

Vaccines are also unavailable when a country fails to declare a cholera outbreak, so Tedros refused his countrymen this option even when their neighbors in Somalia and Kenya received it. This seems to have escaped the notice of Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, who praised Tedros’s “commitment” to human health and vaccination: “Tedros’s commitment to immunization is clear . . . His work with Gavi as Ethiopia’s health minister helped boost the proportion of children reached by vaccines from less than half to more than two-thirds.” Other defenders of Tedros included former CDC director Tom Frieden, who was appointed by Barack Obama to head the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Frieden praised Tedros as “an excellent choice to lead the WHO,” and today vocally agrees with Tedros on lockdowns, masks, and social distancing.

Tedros’s strongest and most important backer throughout these controversies was not an individual, but a government: China. As an opinion writer in the Indian press described it, “China propped Tedros.” American apathy in the public health arena had allowed China to “colonize” global health:

“One reason that Tedros has gotten away with so much brazen cronyism is that America pays little to no attention to global public health, save pouring in money as a sugar daddy . . . China started a scheme for global health colonisation and won because America didn’t think it was important enough. The Chinese leveraged their investments across Africa to force the African Union to back Tedros, [and] also got Pakistan to withdraw its candidate who was opposing him, sources say . . . India’s diplomatic credentials helped in covering up Tedros’ shady past and the fact his main backer was a Communist dictatorship.”

“I’ve Got Your Back, and You’ve Got Mine”: Tedros Backs the Chinese COVID19 “Supression” Strategy

Fast-forward to the COVID19 epidemic. In early 2020, Tedros went to great lengths to congratulate China on its response to the “novel coronavirus.” On January 30, the WHO issued a statement effusively praising China’s response, highlighting the Chinese government’s “commitment to transparency” and efforts to “investigate” and “contain” the outbreak. The statement declares that China’s novel “lockdown” strategy — wherein dictator Xi Jinping welded people inside their apartments in the name of “disease control” — are “good not only for that country but also for the rest of the world.” Tedros followed this up with a tweet: “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.” During this time period, hundreds of thousands of social media posts later traced to China praised the lockdown, and criticized and ridiculed world leaders who failed to follow suit.

The WHO’s resounding praise of China continued into February 2020, when it convened a “Global Research and Innovation Forum” on the novel coronavirus to study “the origin of the virus, natural history, transmission, diagnosis, infection prevention and control,” among other things. On February 24, the group’s Joint Mission held a press conference to report on its findings, during which it declared, “there is no question that China’s bold approach to the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of what was a rapidly-escalating and continues to be deadly epidemic.” The stated basis for this unequivocal declaration on the effectiveness of lockdowns was as follows:

“And there’s a couple of other graphics . . . here’s the outbreak that happened in the whole country on the bottom. Here’s what the outbreak looked like outside of Hubei. Here are the areas of Hubei outside of Wuhan. And then the last one is Wuhan. And you can see this is a much flatter curve than the others. And that’s what happens when you have an aggressive action that changes the shape that you would expect from an infectious disease outbreak.

This is extremely important for China, but it’s extremely important for the rest of the world, where this virus you’ve seen in the last few days is taking advantage to explode in certain settings. And it wasn’t easy because what I didn’t mention on this slide is every one of these lines represent a huge decision by policy makers and politicians in this country and leaders to actually change the shape with big measures such as, you know, the suspension of travel, the stay-at-home advisories, and other incredibly difficult measures; to make decisions about, but also to get a population to follow. And that’s why, again, the role of the individual here in China is so important as well.”

The Joint Mission’s conclusion that China’s actions “worked” is a perfect depiction of the classic logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc: Latin for “it happened after, so it was caused by.” While it is indeed possible that a “more flat” curve in Wuhan could be attributed to government mandates, there are equal or greater possibilities: one, that testing protocols differed; two, that China simply witnessed the natural course of this “novel” pathogen. The latter is particularly likely since there was no baseline with which to compare the proffered epicurves.

It should be obvious that the mere issuance of government mandates does not automatically mean they were effective — this is particularly true here, since the global scientific community had previously considered and rejected large-scale quarantines as a method for controlling epidemics. Respiratory viruses never spread evenly throughout countries, provinces, or states, so it was nothing short of reckless to conclude that the noted variance in spread — which again, could be nothing but a recording error due to testing aberrations — was due to anything but natural factors. It was criminal to summarily conclude on this evidence that the Chinese government’s draconian actions led to a “favorable outcome,” and then use that patentily illogical conclusion to sell lockdowns to the rest of the world. But that’s just what the WHO did.

“China didn’t approach this new virus with an old strategy for one disease or another disease. It developed its own approach to a new disease and extraordinarily has turned around this disease with strategies most of the world didn’t think would work . . . What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this. If you do it, you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.”

The Joint Mission repeated this assertion — “lockdowns work, they can and do save lives” — in various ways throughout its press conference, recalling to mind the words of a famous propagandist named Joseph Goebbels: “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Research shows that this illusion of truth effect “works just as strongly for known as for unknown items, suggesting that prior knowledge won’t prevent repetition from swaying our judgements of plausibility.” Our parents never heard of lockdown, and understood and accepted that humans sadly cannot “stop” a highly contagious infectious disease like the flu — even with a vaccine — yet suddenly most of the planet was behaving as if this were not only a reasonable mission, but something for which it was rational and desirable to sacrifice social lives, relationships, smiles, businesses, and educations in service of.

At the helm of the WHO, Tedros undoubtedly played a key role in the creation of this perception. Thanks to the many individual worldwide lockdown experiments, we now know that he was dead wrong: no lockdown was ever needed to “flatten the curve” — in fact, lockdowns spiked the curve. No-lockdown Sweden’s epicurve was much flatter than many areas with tight lockdowns, including New York City, Italy, and Spain. While this may be adequately explained by Hanlon’s Razor, it is very interesting that the Joint Mission took great pains to protect China’s trade and travel interests despite advocating simultaneous lockdowns for other nations:

“And this brings us to what I think is one of the most important recommendations we would make in respect to getting China fully back on its feet after this crisis. The world needs the experience and materials of China to be successful in battling this coronavirus disease. China has the most experience in the world with this disease, and it’s the only country to have turned around serious large-scale outbreaks. But if countries create barriers between themselves and China in terms of travel or trade, it is only going to compromise everyone’s ability to get this done. And those kinds of measures need to be anything that goes beyond what’s been recommended by the IHR committee, has got to be reassessed, because the risk from China is dropping, and what China has to add to the global response is rapidly rising.”

The human rights community did not share this enthusiasm for China, its draconian lockdown, or its offer to “help” other nations contend with the virus. On February 2, The Guardian published an opinion piece by a human rights advocate outlining the lockdown’s serious human rights violations and opining that the WHO broke its own commitment to “human rights and health” by praising China. The WHO’s commitment reads in part:

“Human rights are universal and inalienable. They apply equally, to all people, everywhere, without distinction. Human Rights standards — to food, health, education, to be free from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment — are also interrelated. The improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others. Likewise, the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others”

To protect these “universal and inalienable” human rights during a public health emergency, international law requires that restrictions on human rights be based on legality, necessity, proportionality and grounded in evidence. Similarly, the Siracusa Principles — in which the United Nations outlines an overarching international covenant on civil and political rights — state that restrictions on rights and freedoms in the name of public health must be strictly necessary and the least intrusive available to reach their objective:

“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

“Lockdown” goes far beyond these basic human rights boundaries. They are proven now to only damage societies — they even worsen COVID19 outcomes. When The Economist analyzed all recorded epidemics since 1960, it concluded that “democracies experience lower mortality rates for epidemic diseases than their non democratic counterparts.” This finding holds true at all levels of income.

Tedros aligned himself not with democracies and their fundamental principles but with an autocratic dictatorship, the same dictatorship that helped him assume power within the WHO. Together, using logical fallacies and pseudo-science, they betrayed international law governing human rights, the WHO’s own stated principles, and committed crimes against humanity on a massive scale. Should we continue to listen to Tedros, or should we turn to Dr. Nabarro, another qualified expert who — like the thousands who signed the Great Barrington Declaration — urges a return to democratic norms as necessary to minimize human suffering?

“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer. Just look at what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year.” — Dr. David Nabarro

It is no longer possible to ignore Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s long history with suppressive autocratic regimes, including China. Whatever the motivation behind his advocacy for continued lockdowns, the data invalidates his position unequivocally. Lockdowns do not save lives — lockdowns kill. The reign of tyranny must end, immediately and forever, with a full restoration of the rights and privileges of each individual citizen to choose what level of risk he or she will accept as a law-abiding member of a functioning, democratic society.

WHO, what, where, and why? We don’t yet have all of the answers, but we do know that the WHO director-general is on the wrong side of the lockdown debate.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31wsI2j Tyler Durden

“Attempted Robbery” – Security Guard Assigned To Ballot Box Shot In Baltimore

“Attempted Robbery” – Security Guard Assigned To Ballot Box Shot In Baltimore

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 22:30

The virus pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail or using ballet drop boxes this election season. Some of these drop boxes, especially those in Baltimore City, are guarded by a private security force, considering the liberal-run metro area is a violent mess. 

On Thursday, Baltimore City police confirmed a ballot box security guard was shot and wounded in Northeast Baltimore, reported local news WBAL-TV 11. 

City police said the incident occurred in the early morning hours on Thursday, outside the Achievement Academy in the 2200 block of Pinewood Ave. Officers found the 24-year-old security guard shot multiple times – was immediately taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Baltimore City Election Director Armstead Jones told The Baltimore Sun that the guard was contracted by a private security company operating on behalf of the Baltimore City Board of Elections to monitor the city’s ballot drop boxes.

“After looking at video surveillance footage of the parking lot, detectives learned that armed subjects approached the victim’s vehicle and tried to open the car door,” police said in a statement.

The statement continued, “the ballot box was not touched and did not appear at any time to be the focus of the gunmen.”

Election officials said the guard was in serious but stable condition: 

“Our thoughts are with the victim of this morning’s tragic shooting as well as his loved ones. We are actively cooperating with the authorities investigating this matter. Because this is an ongoing investigation…,” Maryland Elections tweeted. 

While police do not believe the attempted robbery had anything to do with the ballot box, the incident’s timing is suspicious weeks before the presidential election. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31gVEuN Tyler Durden

Pelosi, Barrett, & The False Face Of Modern Feminism

Pelosi, Barrett, & The False Face Of Modern Feminism

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 22:10

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Something truly amazing happened this week in American politics. The false narratives of modern feminism collapsed completely as Judge Amy Coney Barrett waltzed through her confirmation hearing.

But to make my point I first have to deal with Speaker of the House Nasty Nancy Pelosi’s appearance on CNN.

While Barrett was dealing with the dementia of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pelosi finally came face to face with strength in the unlikely form of Wolf Blitzer and lost complete control of his Situation Room.

If you watch this entire sequence carefully you’ll note that Blitzer simply held to his point that she wouldn’t answer, why not pass some stimulus bill now and get something done, even if it’s perfect?

Madame Speaker, you have a chance to alleviate suffering and you’re playing politics.

We know what the answer is, because it would allow President Trump a victory on the eve of an election. We know Pelosi is a pure political animal (and her behavior here truly sinks to that level).

But, that’s not what’s interesting, here.

It is how transparent she is mad about not automatically being allowed to control the conversation to recite her talking points. She obviously feels entitled to the power of Wolf’s platform.

Going Big, Going Home

And she was not expecting this. When confronted with it she launches a personal attack which fails completely. In politics, the first rule is, “You never attack down.”

Pelosi knows this, that’s why she uses her position as a woman to frame her attacks up against Trump the way she does, playing the girl card whenever she can. But on this issue she can’t attack Trump because Trump said…

And that’s when it all collapsed. This is THE fight of Pelosi’s career, not the impeachment. It is this stimulus bill because she’s held the entire country hostage over it to win an election after displacing and ruining the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

She lost because she attacked down, at a TV talking head no less, not a political rival. You can see it on her face, as Speaker why should she have to justify herself to someone she considers ‘the help’ like Wolf Blitzer.

I mean, for pity’s sake, who is actually lower on the DC political totem pole than Wolf Blitzer?

And Pelosi ran up against him and shattered like brittle glass.

And when I say shattered I mean atomized, not just for her but for all the crazy, out-of-control feminists she represents. Her carefully crafted facade of the strong-minded, independent woman who could stand toe-to-toe with a man evaporated in between heartbeats.

Watch the video closely. You’ll know that moment when it happens.

Easy Rider

The reason Blitzer took her down so easily is because she’s never seriously challenged. People like Pelosi can put up the false face of strength and baldly lie because they’re given all the advantages before they ever walk onto the battlefield.

Her reputation is a facade, carefully constructed by the people who control her.

She has a job to do. She’s paid extremely well to do it. But she’s overplayed her hand multiple times against Trump and lost. And it seems CNN and the people who direct it decided it was time to cut bait and leave her twisting in the wind.

The mere fact that Blitzer was told during this interview to go after her is your sign that something has fundamentally changed.

The rats are leaving the sinking ship which has steered the good ship Corn Pop into the iceberg of the silent majority that have had more than enough of their inhumanity.

Pelosi is the false face of female power, a pathetic excuse for a vaudeville whore, drunk on a fatuous ideology equal parts envy and disdain that has women bullying men into submission so they can validate their own soulless choices.

Because in her twisted mind, without her and her awesome power of government, none of us would survive in the big bad world.

And it came out in full when she had her, “You didn’t build that” moment, saying that she’s the one who feeds her constituents, implying that without her they wouldn’t eat.

“… and we feed them,” she said multiple times. Really, Nancy? Without you we’d all just starve?

Bitch, Please!

The Barrett Moment

Juxtapose that with the other remarkable event this week.

The moment when Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney Barrett after suffering through idiotic question after question from beta male and hysterical female Senators about her stance on abortion held up a blank notepad showing the world how well-prepared she was for the situation.

She projected the kind of calm patience and competence that comes from inner strength. And she did it with only her knowledge of the law, her understanding her role as a jurist and the strength of purpose that comes from being a person of deep faith.

Let’s put it this way, like Mike Pence the week before in his debate with Kamala Harris, Mrs. Barrett reflected awfully well on the man who selected her for the job, Donald Trump.

In doing so she projected the exact opposite of what Pelosi did, respect for the hierarchy and the reason it exists — to do it’s best to serve the people who created it.

Pelosi has spent the last two years trying to upend that hierarchy, to dominate Trump through lies and manipulation of rules, holding the entire country hostage to her truly reprehensible lust for power.

Mrs. Barrett, on the other hand, is supposed to be this dinosaur who will set the court back a hundred years replacing the tyrant and mid-wit Ruth Bader Ginsburg while hysterical women cosplayed outside the Capitol in Handmaid’s Tale garb.

But all she did was bring a quiet dignity back to what had become a circus in the fake world of social and television media. Wolf Blitzer did the same thing.

Devil Take the Hindmost

We’ve lost something vital in this election cycle, a sense of dignity and propriety thanks to a winner-take-all attitude that is an outgrowth of the insane power concentrated in the dystopic world of Washington D.C.

We’re not likely to get it back anytime soon.

But this week may have finally been a turning point after nearly eight months of literal insanity where people finally saw something that wasn’t a complete theater of the absurd, allowing jackals and flying monkeys to set the tone for our future.

While I have misgivings about Mrs. Barrett’s potential as the kind of Supreme Court Justice I’d prefer to see on the court there can be no doubt that she knows her way around a job interview.

And it was refreshing to she her hold her ground and not take any bait from the ridiculous lying simps and harpies grilling her.

Pelosi, on the other hand, has been in her job for so long she can’t even conceive of not being entitled to imposing her will on everyone no matter the costs. And she’s so caught up in her own personal psychodrama she forgot she still has to interview for her job every two years.

Politics is supposed to be the art of the possible, that’s usually a convenient excuse justifying surrender. Feminists thrive on male surrender.

But Feminism collapses in the face of male competency. Real female power comes from giving men a reason to fight for them, a purpose for their struggle and sacrifice. No self-respecting man would lift a finger for a witch like Pelosi.

Every man alive would walk through hell for a woman like Mrs. Barrett.

That’s what changed this week. And what’s truly sad is that we should be thankful for it.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon to join the struggle against the Witches of K Street. Install the Brave Browser to spit in the eye of Big Tech’s Entitlement to your data.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lZ2PzT Tyler Durden

Pelosi, Barrett, & The False Face Of Modern Feminism

Pelosi, Barrett, & The False Face Of Modern Feminism

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 22:10

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Something truly amazing happened this week in American politics. The false narratives of modern feminism collapsed completely as Judge Amy Coney Barrett waltzed through her confirmation hearing.

But to make my point I first have to deal with Speaker of the House Nasty Nancy Pelosi’s appearance on CNN.

While Barrett was dealing with the dementia of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pelosi finally came face to face with strength in the unlikely form of Wolf Blitzer and lost complete control of his Situation Room.

If you watch this entire sequence carefully you’ll note that Blitzer simply held to his point that she wouldn’t answer, why not pass some stimulus bill now and get something done, even if it’s perfect?

Madame Speaker, you have a chance to alleviate suffering and you’re playing politics.

We know what the answer is, because it would allow President Trump a victory on the eve of an election. We know Pelosi is a pure political animal (and her behavior here truly sinks to that level).

But, that’s not what’s interesting, here.

It is how transparent she is mad about not automatically being allowed to control the conversation to recite her talking points. She obviously feels entitled to the power of Wolf’s platform.

Going Big, Going Home

And she was not expecting this. When confronted with it she launches a personal attack which fails completely. In politics, the first rule is, “You never attack down.”

Pelosi knows this, that’s why she uses her position as a woman to frame her attacks up against Trump the way she does, playing the girl card whenever she can. But on this issue she can’t attack Trump because Trump said…

And that’s when it all collapsed. This is THE fight of Pelosi’s career, not the impeachment. It is this stimulus bill because she’s held the entire country hostage over it to win an election after displacing and ruining the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

She lost because she attacked down, at a TV talking head no less, not a political rival. You can see it on her face, as Speaker why should she have to justify herself to someone she considers ‘the help’ like Wolf Blitzer.

I mean, for pity’s sake, who is actually lower on the DC political totem pole than Wolf Blitzer?

And Pelosi ran up against him and shattered like brittle glass.

And when I say shattered I mean atomized, not just for her but for all the crazy, out-of-control feminists she represents. Her carefully crafted facade of the strong-minded, independent woman who could stand toe-to-toe with a man evaporated in between heartbeats.

Watch the video closely. You’ll know that moment when it happens.

Easy Rider

The reason Blitzer took her down so easily is because she’s never seriously challenged. People like Pelosi can put up the false face of strength and baldly lie because they’re given all the advantages before they ever walk onto the battlefield.

Her reputation is a facade, carefully constructed by the people who control her.

She has a job to do. She’s paid extremely well to do it. But she’s overplayed her hand multiple times against Trump and lost. And it seems CNN and the people who direct it decided it was time to cut bait and leave her twisting in the wind.

The mere fact that Blitzer was told during this interview to go after her is your sign that something has fundamentally changed.

The rats are leaving the sinking ship which has steered the good ship Corn Pop into the iceberg of the silent majority that have had more than enough of their inhumanity.

Pelosi is the false face of female power, a pathetic excuse for a vaudeville whore, drunk on a fatuous ideology equal parts envy and disdain that has women bullying men into submission so they can validate their own soulless choices.

Because in her twisted mind, without her and her awesome power of government, none of us would survive in the big bad world.

And it came out in full when she had her, “You didn’t build that” moment, saying that she’s the one who feeds her constituents, implying that without her they wouldn’t eat.

“… and we feed them,” she said multiple times. Really, Nancy? Without you we’d all just starve?

Bitch, Please!

The Barrett Moment

Juxtapose that with the other remarkable event this week.

The moment when Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney Barrett after suffering through idiotic question after question from beta male and hysterical female Senators about her stance on abortion held up a blank notepad showing the world how well-prepared she was for the situation.

She projected the kind of calm patience and competence that comes from inner strength. And she did it with only her knowledge of the law, her understanding her role as a jurist and the strength of purpose that comes from being a person of deep faith.

Let’s put it this way, like Mike Pence the week before in his debate with Kamala Harris, Mrs. Barrett reflected awfully well on the man who selected her for the job, Donald Trump.

In doing so she projected the exact opposite of what Pelosi did, respect for the hierarchy and the reason it exists — to do it’s best to serve the people who created it.

Pelosi has spent the last two years trying to upend that hierarchy, to dominate Trump through lies and manipulation of rules, holding the entire country hostage to her truly reprehensible lust for power.

Mrs. Barrett, on the other hand, is supposed to be this dinosaur who will set the court back a hundred years replacing the tyrant and mid-wit Ruth Bader Ginsburg while hysterical women cosplayed outside the Capitol in Handmaid’s Tale garb.

But all she did was bring a quiet dignity back to what had become a circus in the fake world of social and television media. Wolf Blitzer did the same thing.

Devil Take the Hindmost

We’ve lost something vital in this election cycle, a sense of dignity and propriety thanks to a winner-take-all attitude that is an outgrowth of the insane power concentrated in the dystopic world of Washington D.C.

We’re not likely to get it back anytime soon.

But this week may have finally been a turning point after nearly eight months of literal insanity where people finally saw something that wasn’t a complete theater of the absurd, allowing jackals and flying monkeys to set the tone for our future.

While I have misgivings about Mrs. Barrett’s potential as the kind of Supreme Court Justice I’d prefer to see on the court there can be no doubt that she knows her way around a job interview.

And it was refreshing to she her hold her ground and not take any bait from the ridiculous lying simps and harpies grilling her.

Pelosi, on the other hand, has been in her job for so long she can’t even conceive of not being entitled to imposing her will on everyone no matter the costs. And she’s so caught up in her own personal psychodrama she forgot she still has to interview for her job every two years.

Politics is supposed to be the art of the possible, that’s usually a convenient excuse justifying surrender. Feminists thrive on male surrender.

But Feminism collapses in the face of male competency. Real female power comes from giving men a reason to fight for them, a purpose for their struggle and sacrifice. No self-respecting man would lift a finger for a witch like Pelosi.

Every man alive would walk through hell for a woman like Mrs. Barrett.

That’s what changed this week. And what’s truly sad is that we should be thankful for it.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon to join the struggle against the Witches of K Street. Install the Brave Browser to spit in the eye of Big Tech’s Entitlement to your data.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lZ2PzT Tyler Durden