Since votes at Hungary’s Parliament Elections and 1st Round of Presidential elections in France have been counted, the paper “Coercive Policies and Some Reactions to the Coercion in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic” (supplementary to our “COVID-19 Library. Filling the Gaps“) has been updated. 1st Round of Presidential elections gives the best opportunity to observe the current ideological preferences of the citizens of France. There is quite a significant number of politicians are registered every time to run, representing all significant positions from across the political spectrum.
In the 2nd Round, acting president – the promoter of lockdowns & compulsory vaccination M.E. Macron faced the candidate with a dissenting opinion, endorsed by E.Zemmour and Dupont-Aignan (among the 1st Round candidates – 9.2% combined). M.E. Macron won endorsements of traditional parties (Republican and Socialists’ candidates; the Green party candidate also endorsed Macron, 11.1% combined), while 3rd leader Mélenchon has called to vote against Le Pen. Macron won the support of 58.54% of voters in the 2nd Round of Elections, M. Le Pen 41.46% (66.1 : 33.9 respectively in the 2nd round of 2017 Elections ). So, it is clear, that a sizeable share of Mélenchons’ 1st round voters had voted for Le Pen in the 2nd Round. One cannot say for sure, how many of them voted against their favorite candidate’s recommendation because COVID-19 policies were an issue of crucial importance. The speculation on the share of staunch opponents of coercive policies in France is well above 5% and, maybe even making up to 10% looks quite reasonable.
Socialist, ‘green’ experiments had weakened Western economic power and emboldened Putin. Economic power is one of the key advantages of Israel in the Middle East and the basis for our military power. We can’t afford useless and dangerous political decisions harming our economy. We can’t afford to burden our business with heavy unjustified and frivolous regulations. We must scrap all this nonsense for the sake of our economic growth and, first and foremost, for the sake of our security.
To encourage the development of the gas industry on the reliable basis of well-defined private property rights on gas fields. To scrap sophisticated, burdensome, and generally useless regulations imposed on business. To repeal ‘traditional’ – above-mentioned business regulation is needed as well as the elimination of the ‘new’ regulations restricting private freedom under the pretext of ‘anti-discrimination’. To repeal ‘COVID-19’ coercive measures – let return right to decide to the patient and to his doctor (to vaccinate or not, if yes – how many times, to use old-fashioned or newly invented drugs, etc.).
Weak leadership and socialist policies of the Western Governments, weak Ukrainian economy and Army, and rapid increase in gas-oil incomes combined, had encouraged Putin to start his all-out war against the neighboring country.
D.Trump[1] provided a simple and highly relevant explanation of Putin’s bold assault:
“Russia has become very … rich during the Biden Administration, with oil prices doubling and soon to be tripling and quadrupling. The weak sanctions are insignificant relative to taking over a country and a massive piece of strategically located land.
Now it has begun, oil prices are going higher and higher, and Putin is not only getting what he always wanted, but getting, because of the oil and gas surge, richer and richer. The U.S. was energy independent under the Trump Administration, independence that we had never obtained before, and oil prices would have remained low…”
The only reliable scientific (economic) advice on how to encourage both, economic progress and a cautious approach to the environment is to secure private property rights and to provide well-defined delimitation of these rights on lands, forests (case of Finland), etc. Secured and well-defined for generations property rights cause strong personal interest to care about clean air and water (see, first and foremost, classical Ronald Coase book (Coase, 1988[3]). The governmental care for the environment manifests a clear case of ownerless property, therefore, ownerless ‘public’ resource is routinely doomed to predatory use.[4] So caring government can’t prove successful in environmental protection comparable to privately owned lands and forests.[5]
We had imposed a heavy regulatory burden on our business.[6] The business climate in Israel is rated among the worst among developed countries (OECD members) and far behind some developing countries (like Georgia).
In addition to ‘traditional’ (Doing Business measured) costs: “trading across the border”; “registering property”, “getting electricity”, “Construction permit” etc. our business suffers the heavy burden of ‘anti-discrimination’ control, manifesting, in fact, assault on freedom of private contracts.[7]
Last, but not least, we shocked our economy numerous times without any scientific foundation by lockdowns (see for references the Library, III.3 and latest update February, 16)[8] Then we assaulted businesses and households by useless coercion to vaccination.[9] To say nothing of surprising preference for expensive experimental vaccines over reliable old and cheap drugs outlawed by healthcare bureaucracy.[10]
All these wrong decisions sent a message of weakness to our numerous enemies, encouraging their resolution to invest in wars against Israel.
We need further development of the gas industry on the reliable basis of well-defined private property in gas fields.
We can’t afford sophisticated, burdensome, and generally useless regulations imposed on business. We need to cut off ‘traditional’ – above-mentioned business regulation costs and eliminate the ‘new’ regulations restricting private freedom under the pretext of ‘anti-discrimination’.
We can’t afford to waste resources on ‘COVID-19’ coercive measures – let return right to decide to the patient and to his doctor (to vaccinate or not, if yes – how many times, to use old-fashioned or newly invented drugs, etc.).
Drop all this nonsense, break with self-destructive policies now, and send the most impressive signal of our force to our enemies.
“When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ‘I am violence. Run away, make way for me — I will crush you.’ But violence quickly grows old,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in Live Not By Lies. “After only a few years it loses confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally — since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence. Violence does not lay its paw on every shoulder every day: it demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.”
The new updated version of “COVID-19 Library. Filling the Gaps” contains important references on the mandatory vaccination issues. Mandatory vaccination by the experimental vaccine (FDA and CDC agree that “Information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes…”) looks highly problematic.
I’ve noticed the following conflict of interest reporting puzzle, working on “COVID-19 Library. Filling the Gaps“. Almost all the “people of Science” rallying around never proven efficient harsh measures empowering the governmental bureaus and, at the same time getting funds from the budget under the auspice of the same bureaus, surprisingly never declaring their conflict of interest. They are interested in more and more funds from the budget, so they are pushing more powerful, ‘bigger’ and ‘bolder’ unlimited Government and not feeling any problems in this regard.
Diagram 1. Voting History of Federal District of Columbia. Sources: https://dcboe.org/Elections/Election-Results-Archives; https://electionresults.dcboe.org/election_results/2020-General-Election
So it isn’t surprising they are ready to be aggressively partisan (say, anti-Trump in the USA sharing preferences of Washington bureaucrats – see FDC voting history). Worse, the “cancel culture” and the war on “whiteness” looks like they destroyed the residuals of moral self-restrictions, so the authors proving the loss of social-economic status (SES) harming health and life expectancy badly could publicly denouncing Trumps’ statement ‘We cannot let the cure be worse than the Problem itself to claim that the crisis is good for health and even to reference on their own book proving the opposite (see for details Who Teaches the Fact-Checkers or Why Trump Must Be Wrong? https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3771015).
The Omnipotent Government push for government-run Healthcare making Doctor to a greater extent bureaucrats, not accountable to the patient and to society’s noble expert. Mandatory vaccination spoils pharmaceutical firms’ incentives as investing in the desirable political decision-making turned out to be more profitable than in R&D, to say nothing on information for consumers about vaccines for really informed consent). Mandatory healthcare causes dangerous temptations for physicians and is a really big threat to patients. Informational Asymmetry Problem became more and more grave and troublesome for the patients. While under free society and democratic rule, the information asymmetry problem is mitigated more or less successfully by a number of reliable, tested solutions, under totalitarian rule, doctor-patient asymmetry is not counted as a problem at all, at best (see for details “Institutional Aspects of the Power Abuse Problem in Healthcare Under Totalitarian Rule: Case of Nazi Germany” https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3724313).
“Intellectually, the greatest benefit I derived from the experience [of working in the office of President Ronald Reagan] was to be able to observe at close range how political decisions are made at the highest level. … I thought that high politics resulted from a careful, inductive process by virtue of which all the information available to the government is conveyed upwards and there subjected to judicious analysis, with all the pros and cons weighed until a decision is reached…. Reality turned out to be quite different.”
Richard Pipes, Ronald Reagan’s adviser
“Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger”. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, p. 208
The presented material contains numerous references to articles, papers, data, and books relevant to the current discussions around COVID-19 medical and political responses to the pandemic. The principal purposes of this collection of references are:
To fill (at least, partly) considerable gaps in current discussions on COVID-19, often based on never proven assumptions, like the feasibility of stopping a respiratory infection by means of lockdowns.
To present and highlight some crucially important factors that had been discussed in the scientific literature for decades, but totally ignored by most governments in their decision-making – for example, the very strong dependence of healthcare progress on economic progress, and the very strong dependence on both economics and healthcare on safeguarding personal rights and property.
We find an astonishingly strong leaning of politicians and public healthcare officials to never-tested responses, potentially more dangerous than the disease itself. In our opinion, the special interests of decision-making groups may provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon.
We will greatly appreciate our readers’ criticism.
As every crisis, current COVID19 pandemic causes economic setback, fuels demand of special interests and emboldens bureaucrats’ claim for more and more discretionary power. But the same crisis brings not only heavy losses for all the countries, but opportunity to succeed also. The opportunity to succeed will not need heavy governmental spending but it will require termination of various practices harming both business climate and public morale. Deep deregulation and respect of freedom of contract, termination of violation of freedom of private choice under pretext of ‘fighting discrimination’ will benefit the courageous society and will pave the way for lasting prosperity.
The following moves and measures are recommended:
Repeal of modern ant-trust legislation and disbandment of ‘Anti-monopoly’ authorities;
Nature, environment protection will be vested to private interests, based on privatization and due delimitation of the property rights (including forests, lakes etc.), responsibility for negative externalities established in the court disputes; respective governmental bodies disbandment;
‘Anti-discrimination’ through ‘positive’ discrimination legislation repeal and abandonment the respective policies, liberalization of real estate and Labor markets
Limiting the scope of [welfare state] activities and responsibilities of the Government, respective Balancing of the budget under moderate tax burden.
Abandonment so called ‘stimulus’ Governmental policies.
General repeal of business regulations through Idaho pattern – based solution (for Israel – Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation (1994) Amendments – new Edition of the Basic Law).
All above mentioned measures would lay solid foundation for healthy, sustainable economic growth in Long ran and will attract direct investments in the country in short and medium ran period, exploiting opportunities lost by the rest of developed nations and the opportunities unleashed because of weakening PRC competition for the investments caused basically by worsening of guaranties for private property in the communist China and, currently, – by the panic, caused by COVID19.
The paper, presenting the proposals and providing some materials to support it one could find at SSRN site.
The final argument of m-r Amidror is: “The end result, if you look at the bottom line, is that the IDF does not dare cross the border into Gaza”. Pretty strange and disappointing is his deliberate ignoring a little bit changed (extremely complicated) procedures of decision making on crossing in and invasion. I can’t explain why Amidror keeps silence about ‘Military attorney general corps’ fighting tirelessly to protect Hamas from IDF… One really brave Russian (Ukranian) general and dissident Petro Grigorenko once told something about civic courage which is much superior to military courage.
Our paper “Universal Suffrage: The Century of Corrupting Incentives?” has been published (at long last) at Volume 14 of the New Perspectives on Political Economy (now on-line) – see pp. 63-89.
The paper could be downloaded from the SSRN web site also (separately from the whole NPPE Volume).
Conflict of interest of welfare dependent voter creates wrong incentives. These incentives inherent to universal suffrage, yield consequences, as predicted by John Adams back in the 18-th century. Historically the rise of the modern welfare state might be traced to the emergence of mainstream left parties, which promoted government care “from the cradle to the grave”. This paper will address the damages to Democracy caused by conflict of interest, which led to irresponsible leadership and permanent peacetime budget deficit. Historical examples from the 1990s show possible escapes from the trap of universal suffrage.
