rConstitution.us
latest boundaries about
Covid Kill Is Typical Government Action
Crony socialism, left in place, makes innovations deadly.
James Anthony
April 22, 2022
The cumulative number of excess deaths worldwide during Covid from January 1, 2020, through April 21, 2022, is estimated to be 20,730,000 [1]. This growing total will soon exceed the German Nazi government’s 1933 through 1945 kill [2] of 20,946,000 [3].
The Covid kill was wholly preventable.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus—with its unnaturally-harmful binding in humans, its unnatural breakage point enabling it to harmfully enter cells, and its unusual susceptibility to future antivirals that would protect those who deploy it—was developed by governments and cronies. This virus development was preventable [4].
Even after the virus was developed, the Covid kill still was largely preventable.
All deaths [5] due to governments disrupting normal life and normal healthcare and governments pushing demonstrably-unsafe vaccines [6] were preventable. Most deaths due to people disrupting normal life themselves were preventable—in public health, it was long an overriding principle to disrupt normal social functioning as little as possible [7].
Most of the remaining deaths, which are counted as confirmed Covid deaths and are estimated to total 6,210,000 [1], were preventable. These deaths resulted from governments and cronies downplaying immune-strengthening supplements and habits [8], and punishing the use of generic drugs for early treatment. Where governments instead left people free to use generic antivirals, case-fatality rates were only 10% as large [9].
Big governments with power over defense and research created a bioweapon and tried to cover up [10], but the general dynamic was bigger. Big governments and big innovation brought a big kill.
That’s nothing new.
Government/Banking Crash
From 1825 through 1858, a private central bank [11], Suffolk Bank, in Boston, acted as a clearinghouse that allowed every member bank to accept the money issued by any other member bank. Suffolk Bank cleared money more efficiently than the USA government did. Suffolk Bank also limited inflation.
Suffolk Bank was done in by inflationary banks, which were supported by politicians, that created an alternative clearinghouse that didn’t do as much to limit inflation. Shortly after that, the USA government, under big-government Republicans who won control of the government and were no longer restrained by the initially small-government Democrats [12], created an unconstitutional national banking system that did even less to limit inflation. In 1913, the USA government, now under a Democrat Party that itself had been taken over by big-government Progressives [13], created the unconstitutional Federal Reserve System that did still less to limit inflation [14].
In the 1920s, thanks to advancements in management and in technologies, productivity rose substantially, so prices should have naturally fallen substantially. But government people, with the new power of the Fed, had a new theory or rationalization that it was ideal to stabilize prices [15]. With no one limiting the government people, they now could do this, and they did, using the new Fed to incentivize banks to greatly inflate how much money was in use.
The Fed’s 1920s targeting of 0% inflation worked like the Fed’s current targeting of 2% inflation. What made the 1920s more dynamic than the 2010s-2020s was that total government spending as a percent of GDP was 12% instead of today’s 40% [16], and government debt as a percent of GDP was 39-32% instead of today’s 152% [17]. What the two periods have had in common is monetary inflation, which drives interest rates lower, giving a false signal to invest. This has always created malinvestment [18].
The newly-created money fuels extra investment, including investments in projects that couldn’t pay off through future sales. The future sales can’t happen because the money being invested isn’t savings that would be paid back to the people who had earned it, who would then buy the new products produced by the investments in new plants. Instead, the money being invested is created out of thin air by the banks and carried on their books. When the borrowers later pay back their loans, the banks won’t spend that money on new products, they must keep that money to make their books whole.
In the 1920s, the new Fed’s newly-enlarged money-supply inflation made many resulting investments unsustainable. Investment finally was drastically cut given the stock market crash in 1929 and slow slide to the bottom in 1932.
The new government/banking partnership crashed many people’s savings and jobs.
Deaths from heart disease, cancer, suicide, and liver cirrhosis rose significantly [19]. Fertility fell. Children experienced worsened productivity and health across their lifetimes [20].
Government/Industry Depression
Starting in the 1870s, big railroads and then big industrials formed cartels and tried to create monopolies. This failed [21].
Large size handicapped cartels and companies against more-optimally-sized smaller competitors [22], which had more-efficient management, were less burdened with large investments in faltering plants [23], and innovated better.
Reflecting on their experience of 1898-1901, National Biscuit Company managers reported to shareholders that “when this company started, it was thought that we must control competition, and that to do this we must either fight competition or buy it. The first meant a ruinous war of prices, and a greater loss of profit; the second, a constantly increasing capitalization. Experience soon proved to us that, instead of bringing success, either of these courses, if persevered, must bring disaster. This led us to reflect whether it was necessary to control competition … we soon satisfied ourselves that within the Company itself we must look for success [24].”
Unfortunately, others didn’t learn, and made mistakes that were bigger.
In 1931, at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association meeting in New York, General Electric Company President Gerard Swope introduced his plan that all companies with fifty or more employees should be organized into trade associations but this time enforced by the national government. All companies would provide workmen’s compensation, insurance, and pensions. Swope wrote, “How can coercion be ‘considerate and fair?’ Only when the fullest technical opinion within a given industry agrees that it knows the interests of the moderately small producer better than he does [25].” Big business knew best, and they were here to help.
Business leaders championed the plan to the national government, and it crystallized into the National Industrial Recovery Act, creating the National Recovery Administration.
Big businesses’ public/private manipulation of competition, though, didn’t work out well for everyone else. The government-promoted and government-enforced cartels created a new impediment that kept prices for products and labor [26] from being swiftly adjusted to maintain production and employment, as in past depressions [27]. Instead, investors were sheltered from or shut out of competition, investment prospects were grim, and the depression lengthened interminably into the Great Depression [28], [29].
The new government/industry partnership depressed many people and many investors. The partnership made these people’s productive capacity unusable, which made their crash-triggered losses unrecoverable and which piled on further losses, of opportunities.
Deaths from heart disease, cancer, and liver cirrhosis kept rising significantly [19]. Fertility stayed depressed. Children experienced even-worse productivity and health across their lifetimes [20].
Government/Healthcare Malpractice
Doctors and hospitals began as entrepreneurial or charitable concerns.
In the late 1800s, germ theory became recognized and procedures became safer [30]. Doctors and hospitals turned to state governments to seek regulations. State governments were there to help, and this help restricted competition. Prices rose.
To maximize patients’ care and doctors’ and hospitals’ pay, patients developed mutual-aid societies, joined unions, or formed consumer cooperatives. Doctors developed physician practice groups, which were multispecialty and were prepaid.
Doctors also developed the American Medical Association. Eventually, in the pivotal 1930s, the AMA, like the industrials, developed a big-bureaucracy model: the companies that already insured for nonroutine, costly treatments would also control routine care. These big, centralized companies would replace the smaller, decentralized, patient-driven and doctor-driven associations. To break up the existing smaller, decentralized organizations, these new big health-insurance companies wouldn’t contract with the existing associations, they would contract directly with doctors. Once again, government people were there to help. Breaks in national-government taxes for providing big insurance brought big industrials into the new model. Prices rose more [31].
Manufacturers of pharmaceutical drugs turned to the national government to also shelter themselves from competition. National-government people exploited the resulting political opportunity and campaign money by granting new privileges: easy efficacy standards [32], ever-more-expensive trials [33], and cozy funding and career paths.
Branded drugs became less innovative [34], typically matching incumbent drugs’ mechanisms of action and efficacy but modestly reducing side effects, and often just slightly altering existing molecules, either to bypass others’ patents or to effectively extend the lives of their own patents.
Covid’s onset made it a priority to reuse existing technology [35]. Big pharma, though, only wanted to use technology it could patent to create new branded drugs to generate substantial revenues. Big pharma turned mostly to existing candidate drugs and genetic technologies. These were marginal drugs and technologies that had been extensively tried and had never panned out before, and now were rusting away in big pharma’s boneyards.
The quickest way to introduce new products would be through emergency-use authorizations [36]. To allow such authorizations, existing law required that there be “no adequate, approved, and available alternative.” Existing supplements and existing generics were approved and available, so if anyone found that any of these were “adequate,” then no new branded drugs could have legally received emergency-use authorization.
Patients needed efficacy immediately, because for them, efficacy was life or death. For big pharma, though, life or death, or at a minimum the quality of life years, is always affected by their people’s every action. When everything always matters, it becomes as if nothing ever matters. Life or death can get normalized [37], potentially even becoming background noise that’s unperceived and unconsidered.
Big pharma controlled governments and strongly influenced others in healthcare. Many researchers, doctors, and hospitals performed misleading research [38], created cautious-sounding protocols, and changed their behavior under threats that licenses and privileges would be revoked, which would destroy careers. The result was that the use of existing supplements was ignored, and the use of existing generics was blockaded [39].
These actions resulted directly from typical crony relationships; nothing in these relationships was unique or novel. What was new was that patients had become increasingly dependent on healthcare technology, and had become increasingly vulnerable to government and media coercion on healthcare.
The newly-controlling government/healthcare partnership perpetrated gross malpractice—and intentionally maximized revenues, maintained professional standings among peers, even produced desired political outcomes—at the cost of millions of lives.
This public/private partnership will cost untold more millions many of their life-years, and will cost even more millions their health and the quality of their life-years, as complications unfold from circulatory and immune damage from harmful vaccines [6], which even now keep getting pushed onto our most-vulnerable young people and impoverished people.
Government powers are like Chekhov’s gun hanging on the wall in Act I—by the end of the play, they will be used, and this will kill.
If we don’t limit governments, governments will be used by big businesses and nonprofits. As technologies proliferate, this non-self-correcting system [40] will be the vehicle by which more technologies kill people, including even the people in these public/private partners. The problem is much more than bad actors, the problem is a harmful system.
Guns don’t kill people; unlimited powers kill people.
Government people must use their constitutional powers to limit other government people. A future good party will make this widespread and effective [41], but voters will get this started every time they vote for the most-constitutionalist Republicans in every Republican primary, and for the most-constitutionalist candidates from any party in every general election [42], for every office [43].
The time is always right to use constitutional powers to limit governments.
References
James Anthony is the author of The Constitution Needs a Good Party and rConstitution Papers, publishes rConstitution.us, and has written in The Federalist, American Thinker, Foundation for Economic Education, American Greatness, and Mises Institute. Mr. Anthony is an experienced chemical engineer with a master’s in mechanical engineering.
Commenting