You know, as in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
On the medical, I don’t know anything at all. I don’t know how one gets the Corona Virus, prevents it or cures it. An expertise far from my own about which I have nothing to say.
On the statistical side, I do know quite a bit, and importantly I have dealt with growth rates and trends for the whole of my professional life. And to be quite frank, from the start the numbers and the growth rates have looked benign, and once I had seen the figures for how many typically die from flu every year to provide a perspective, this had never seemed even remotely like a return to the Black Death and the Great Plague. It still might be, of course, but so far the data, despite all the scare mongering we’ve been treated to, has looked entirely like a beat up. Don’t say it can’t happen or won’t happen, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.
The political, however, is where I earned my living for many years and over which I never gave away my watching brief. Here’s the one absolute absolute I have come away from politics with:
Everyone has an agenda which they never resile from ever.
Therefore, once you know their agenda, you can be pretty sure you know how they will react to pretty well everything. Other people put it as, “never let a crisis go to waste”. They don’t have to create the event, but everyone will use circumstances to create conditions that bring about the outcomes they have always been trying to put in place.
We on the conservative side of politics are looking for opportunities to increase personal freedom and a higher standard of living for as many people as possible. That is the agenda and wherever I have worked, that has been the end I have worked towards achieving.
On the other side, on the “progressive” side of the fence, among the totalitarian fascists who dominate the politics of the left, the central aim in everything they do has been to accumulate personal power. Lots of useful idiots among them, who really wish to be nice, but at the top, among the leadership, it is power alone. There is plenty of pretence that they want to do things for you, but that is how they get you to follow along, provide support and become enemies of the only people who actually want to achieve the ends you actually want.
If you need a market economy to provide these outcomes, but it does not provide their leaders with personal power, then they will support socialism which ALWAYS leads to poverty.
You want free and open speech, which allows people to expose their lies, then they will shut down the ability to say what you wish, and in the meantime, lie at every opportunity that suits them.
You want the freedom to do what you want as you want without the government coming along to tell you to do something else instead, they will fabricate reasons why you should follow their orders instead, and tell you it’s for your own good as well.
So here we have been plunged into a panic because of fears of a pandemic that we are told will kill many thousands who might otherwise have lived on. They grab hold of the moment, exaggerate every claim and then scare everyone into adopting a socialist authoritarian agenda in which they now get everyone used to following orders and their directions.
Unless you are repulsed by the left and its tactics, but also understand what is going on, you can and will lose the lot.
Law of Markets 