Before I get into today’s issue, a note for the youngsters:
The most formative intellectual event of my life was Mises University, the Mises Institute’s week-long summer instructional program for college students that trains them in the Austrian School of Economics. This is the school (of thought; it’s not a literal school, of course) that includes such free-market heroes as Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard.
You will have the time of your life at this thing. You won’t believe how much you’ll learn, and you’ll meet lots of like-minded people your age.
As long as you can get yourself there transportation-wise, attendance costs nothing; the cost is covered by donors.
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Here’s the link to apply.
Now, on to business:
You’d think Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey — which has the worst COVID death rate of any American state — would have the decency to keep his mouth shut on the subject.
Well, you’d be wrong.
When asked about Texas’ decision to repeal its statewide mask mandate, Murphy replied that he was “stunned” and that he “couldn’t conceive of lifting a mask mandate inside.”
How about we see how both states are doing?
(Source: nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html)
Well, how about that.
California, meanwhile, has seen its numbers come way down from their peak. They are of course pretending that their lockdown did the trick. The problem is this: Nevada didn’t lock down as much and Arizona locked down even less, and yet:
(Source: nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html)
On January 20, Germany mandated medical-grade masks. That must have done it, right?
Well, as it turns out, Angela Merkel recently sought an even more barbaric lockdown, even after instituting that mandate, although thankfully she had to back down. I wonder why those medical masks didn’t solve the problem:
(Source: World Health Organization)
Today on Twitter a notorious Doomer cited east/southeast Asia’s numbers as evidence that the public-health recommendations work (but of course those countries tried all different approaches and every one worked fine, so just maybe there’s something else going on here?).
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Cambodia has not had a single death. Is that because of Cambodia’s state-of-the-art public-health establishment? Cambodia was number 83 among countries in terms of pandemic preparedness.
I did see this headline, from Reuters: “Cambodian Villagers Trust Magic Scarecrows to Ward Off Coronavirus.”
(Don’t knock it: it’s much cheaper than anything Fauci has recommended, and it seems to have worked for Cambodia.)
Overall, I do think the tide is at last turning in our direction.
(Thanks to Ian Miller for the charts.)
