Previously we discussed how voluntary transactions in a free market allow a society to progress from broke and starving (Earth’s default condition) to living a life of luxury unheard of even just a few decades ago. By allowing the “invisible hand” of the market (really just millions of people making their own decisions), resources find their optimum use and society gets wealthier.
For a real-world example, I offer the new housing complex being built across the street. For years, this site was a fenced-off, abandoned elementary school that’s only contribution to society was a human-free shelter for stray cats. Now the school is gone and construction workers are taking raw materials and turning them into the bones of houses. Soon the electricians and plumbers and roofers and flooring experts will descend and each provide their own value to the homes. Eventually people will move into the finished dwellings and add their unique contributions to the neighborhood. (Perhaps they will open a business and employ people from the area, or simply expand the area’s available options!)
Generally speaking, this is all a Very Good Thing. As society gets richer, fewer people are “stuck” trying to eek out a life with subsistence farming — allowing those people to instead work in a factory or ply their craft as a business. In this way, goods and services are available to more people. (Also creating downward price pressure, which is good for consumers!)
This is why people like me are in favor of the free market system. While not being utopian, it’s the system in which THE MOST people get THE MOST goods and services for the cheapest price — especially compared to politically driven (the “leaders” decide who gets what) or equality-based (everybody gets the exact same stuff) systems. This is how even the poorest people in America are disgustingly overweight.
But the free market system can be broken just like any other, typically by ignoring or subverting it.
"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system" — GW Bush
George Bush zapped up billions of dollars and handed them to the banks in 2008, but his abandonment of the free market (and Constitutional) system was made possible by Richard Nixon’s abandonment of the free market (and Constitutional) system, which was made possible by Woodrow Wilson’s abandonment of the free market (and Constitutional) system. But as terrible as the 2008 bailouts were, the 2023 version is much, much worse. For starters, the 2008 Congress actually had to write and pass a bill, which was then signed by the President. In 2023, Fed Chair Janet Yellen simply decrees that Silicon Valley Bank depositors will be made whole, along with other depositors in banks that would create a “systemic risk” if they failed:
As Senator Lankford notes, this only further solidifies terrible policies that are sure to backfire — while the Federal Reserve openly states that it will decide which banks are worth of “backstopping” and which will be allowed to fail.
This is a predictable consequence of ruining the value of the currency via printing. Soon, the “real” economy of voluntary goods and services is taken over by the “fake” economy of being buddies with the people who run the literal money-making machine. Why go through all the trouble of setting up a real service that does real things when you can just get your paid-off Crony in Congress to hand you a sweet government contract or grant?
Of course, another way that government ruins whatever it touches is simple incompetence. Even libertarians understand that government employees actually have a job to do. If you’re a school teacher, you teach children. If you’re a DA, you lock up people who break the law. If you’re Secretary of Transportation, you oversee the incredibly important but incredibly boring logistics surrounding our infrastructure.
When these types of people fail to perform their basic functions, government as a whole fails. In OUR world, teachers resisted going to work even after jumping the vaccination queue, and seem to be more interested in fighting the culture war than teaching when they ARE in the classroom. In Washington DC, almost 70% of cases were never prosecuted in 2022. And after a major rail disaster spewed chemicals into the air for days, our Secretary of Transportation couldn’t be bothered to visit.
But since all of these people exist outside of the free market system (instead existing in the political system), they face little consequences for their actions. Even after Mayor Pete was shamed into visiting (after Trump’s visit), he only did it to check the box and stop the political bleeding. (It didn’t go so well.)
Although the newish Press Secretary is the Queen of this tactic, more and more government officials are simply refusing to speak to the press — as if we have no business figuring out what they’re up to. Both exchanges reminded me of this meme:
Of course, after you name goes on the Persona Non Grata list, the media swings into action to defend the establishment — even if that means attacking fellow journalists revealing true but embarrassing information about said establishment. In this way, the media is just the PR arm of The Swamp, heaping praise upon its denizens while lashing out against any who threaten its existence.
Who cares about stuff like the truth when there’s political points to be scored? And since everything is political these days, the media happily runs with the new pro-war, pro-censorship narrative demanded by the “leaders”. (Remember when the big knock on Trump was that he’d get us in WWIII?)
So we have a media that covers up for the incompetence of government, while also backing up government’s claim that GOVERNMENT MUST DO MORE. And every single thing that government does is another chance for graft and corruption, or simply a money-making opportunity — even something as simple as school lunch.
Of course, at no time have we seen the devastating effects of central planning more than during the covid years. From terrible incentives to emergency powers to outright censorship, government has spent the last few years completely circumventing the free market and the ability to make an informed choice. Quite the opposite, government wanted to ignore the “risk” portion of the “risk/reward” calculation entirely. When the “experts” were forced to acknowledge the risk, it was always downplayed or stated in absolute terms — never the relative terms used to exaggerate the benefit of vaccines.
Perhaps the best example involves Andrew Cuomo and ventilators. Remember very early in the pandemic, Cuomo demanded 30,000 ventilators from the federal government. He even went on TV and basically accused Donald Trump of murdering New Yorkers because he didn’t send enough ventilators: (This is especially ironic considering NYC’s vent stockpile had previously been auctioned off.)
Of course, at the time we were already getting data showing the vast majority of people who went on ventilators never came off. (The number got as high as 90% in NYC, which had a “vent early, vent hard” strategy.)
When watching the press conference in which Cuomo told Trump to pick the 26,000 people who are going to die, I already knew that if the governor got those 30,000 ventilators, HE would be choosing the 26,000 who die. (Hint: It would be the people put on vents.)
But of course, this was never mentioned by the media. They loved that Cuomo was attacking Trump and being a “strong leader”. So even while TIME was explaining why ventilators weren’t working, the media never questioned the ventilator math and still fawned over New York’s governor — who would make the situation much worse the very next day by mandating a covid outbreak in every nursing home. (See the effects of that here!)
Murdering your own citizens is bad enough (though not bad enough to get you removed from office), and having plans that would murder more of them is worse still. In the end, we’re lucky Cuomo never got those ventilators. But what happened to the ones he DID get is the rotten cherry on this turd sundae: many were sold for scrap.
City officials auctioned off nearly $225 million worth of surplus COVID-19 medical equipment and safety gear for just $500,000 — or a paltry 0.2 cents on the dollar, according to a stunning report Tuesday.
The bargain-basement sales included nearly 3,000 mechanical ventilators that cost taxpayers $12 million but were unloaded as “non-functioning medical equipment for scrap metal” at a rock-bottom price of just $24,600 on Jan. 24, according to nonprofit news website The City.
And that’s simply one aspect of the response. How much did New York waste on “Test and Trace” programs? How much on vaccine passports? How much worse off is the state after it forcefully shut down the economy and forced citizens to flee? How much better off would the state (and the country) be if the “leaders” had simply offered advice — as is proper in science?
And the most important question — have the “leaders” learned the most important lesson of the last few years?
Voluntary transactions build a strong, stable society. Central planners take away stable planks for political reasons, replacing them with unstable edicts. And the more government does, the quicker we’ll get to the inevitable conclusion of central planning:
The fact that you have to state the obvious, as you have here, is why we are where we are. Far too few understand this, and I truly do not know why.
Well, central planning would work perfectly if we hired more bureaucrats...