Thread by @TomLevenson

Enraging: @GOP's push to kill millions is turns on the idea that the economy is both more important than & immune to mass death comes (in part) via @RichardAEpstein, a libertarian, as in, a proponent of an intellectual tradition that collapses at each confrontation w.reality 1/

2/ It's worth noting. Epstein is not a trained statistician, public health expert, ID researcher, etc. He's a guy who has written influentially on property rights, public domain, etc. As in--he's a superannuated bro w. a bit of UG math training theorizing beyond his expertise...

3/ To which, add that the central tenet of modern libertarianism, expressed most readably in Friedman's work, is that economic power is a counterweight to political power, and hence economic freedom is an essential bulwark of liberty. Which is perfectly consistent as theory...

4/ and yet, as demonstrated by the recent election of Donald Trump and the actions of the GOP since (and long before, of course), is obviously false in the real world. Economic power purchases political power and strangles both freedom of work and thought as it does...

5/ That gap between cartoon imaginings (born,TBF, of the v. different ideological environs of the mid 20th c.) & how money works in the world we all live in is not a new phenomenon, nor one any non-theory-drunk (or not-a-stats/software-capable techie) finds difficult to grasp...

6/ And yet a cloistered legal theorist (Columbia-Oxford-Yale educated, Chicago Law prof, now Hoover Inst.) with, no doubt, a very agile mind but no actual deep expertise in any of the relevant disciplines, is out there promoting both PH views (how quickly we can bend the curve...

7/ and a policy-and-moral argument about how we could mute our response to the virus in order to affect economic results. He's already admitted to one arithmetic mistake in his argument, reason.com/2020/03/24/ric… but seems to be unbothered by the health-system issues. But...

8/ My point here isn't to quarrel with a clearly ill-informed and flawed bit of motivated reasoning. It is to note a) that libertarian analyses are systematically bad, because of assumptions not in evidence about human behavior, (not to mention repeated empirical failure)...

9/ And that taking either economic or public health advice from someone trained in neither arguing from a theoretical starting point known to produce results incompatible with reality is a very bad idea.

And it is the one the GOP and @realDonaldTrump have embraced.

#TrumpVirus

10/ Finally: the GOP has long relied on libertarian "scholarship" and language to justify all kinds of wealth transfers up and the socializing of risk while privatizing profit. This isn't new. It's just more obviously fatal.

/fin

#TrumpVirus