The variables have changed, but this still is - and always has been - about rationally balancing risks and rewards, costs and benefits. Our society's inability to do so, crippled by hysterical media and opportunistic politicians, has cost us dearly.
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1420725522963775491
It's no surprise that we've come to this state. The great project of the political class across most of my lifetime has been aggressively destroying the ability of the American people to measure costs against benefits and make rational decisions. It's been a cultural lobotomy.
In a way, politics has always been an extreme form of salesmanship, which always seems to minimize a customer's perception of cost and maximize perceived value. Politics takes salesmanship to another level, utterly divorced from reality.
But it really seems to have gotten worse since I was a kid. Maybe the final links between politics and economic reality were blown away by the Great Society, but we started spiraling into utter madness after Reagan left office. The very notion of sane policy came under attack.
How do you define "sanity?" Well, one significant attribute of sane people is that they understand cause and effect, costs and consequences. They think about downsides and missed opportunities. They know every action produces reactions.
Our collective sanity as nation has been under sustained attack for decades, as our political class promises to repeal the laws of cause and effect, supply and demand, cost and benefit. We're actually ATTACKED for asking if the benefits of a political crusade are worth the cost.
We've been told it's IMMORAL to ask if the benefits promised by our political class are genuine, if they're worth the price, or if there are unintended consequences or lost opportunities to consider. It's driven us utterly mad. We tumbled over a cliff of lunacy in the pandemic.
Even the tiniest marginal gain is now said to be worth infinite cost. Everything bad is utterly intolerable and everything good must be "free." If you ask whether one group should be burdened so another can benefit, you're a callous bigot and hatemonger.
Even our culture wars are fought with total disregard for proportion, for costs and benefits. That's why they seem so utterly deranged to anyone with a shred of common sense. You're not allowed to ask if the cultural costs imposed on the many are worth the benefits to the few.
Political promises of "free stuff" are criticized by shrewd people as camouflaged robbery. That they are, but they're also the deliberate elimination of choice: a political judgement that you can't be trusted to decide if a given benefit is worth the price you'd voluntarily pay.
Costs are "socialized" and benefits made "free" when the political class destroys our ability to measure one against the other and make rational decisions. Remember the Obamacare scam, and how its con artists OPENLY said people can't be trusted to buy free-market insurance.
The crusade for socialism has deliberately wrecked our ability to measure risk and make informed personal judgments about benefits. No wonder the Chinese virus reduced us to a neurotic heap, shivering in terror at the tiniest risks, throwing away freedom and prosperity.
What was the lockdown debacle, but a catastrophic failure to consider opportunity costs and negative consequences - a staggering economic AND human cost paid for the illusion of reduced risk? Have we learned nothing from that? /end
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