“If President Trump has an ounce of decency, he should promptly pardon Edward Snowden, who at a very young age, with a promising career and his whole life ahead of him, put everything on the line to protect us from the very people who are supposed to be protecting us. Let’s hope that Trump does…
“A free and open society requires the round rejection of both left and right flavors of failed twentieth-century authoritarianism, the restoration of the classical liberal ideas that transformed the world and yet were never given their due.” ~ David S. D’Amato
“The readiness with which Americans accepted one of the most distilled forms of authoritarianism in a lifetime should shake us from our slumber, prompting an energetic return to Spencer’s liberalism, the humbler liberalism of granting a presumption in favor of individual people and their dignity.” ~ David S. D’Amato
Public Choice seeks to apply our assumptions about human beings and their behavior to the state in the same way we apply those assumptions to other human institutions. It asks us not to be romantic about political power and the way it operates.
Wise and benevolent though they may regard themselves, politicians and bureaucrats cannot see where the course on which they have now set us leads. Any student of history knows that horrors have sprung from policies far less extreme and authoritarian than the lockdowns that plague millions of Americans today.
It is unconscionable—indeed, criminally irresponsible—to predicate policies as extreme and draconian as these lockdowns on such poor models and incomplete data—particularly when the very first serious seroprevalence survey we have in the country explodes the foundation of these policies.