Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Le sacrifice que l’on fait en employant une chose à un usage plutôt qu’à un autre, c’est le sacrifice de l’utilité qu’on aurait pu retirer de cet autre usage.  

Ainsi, quand on emploie un capital à construire une maison d’habitation, on renonce à l’intérêt qu’il aurait rapporté s’il avait été placé en valeurs publiques ou prêté à intérêt; quand on emploie un terrain à la rente qu’on aurait pu en tirer en le louant ou en le cultivant autrement.  

Le vrai coût d’une chose, par conséquent, ce n’est pas seulement le travail qu’elle a exigé, c’est encore tout ce à quoi on a renoncé pour l’obtenir.

Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil (December 22, 1813 – June 29, 1892), Traité théorique et pratique d’économie politique (1858, volume I, chapter VIII, § 144–145). Here the eminent diplomat and economist presented the powerful concept known over a decade later in Austrian literature as “opportunitätskosten” and more than half a century before it became common in English as “opportunity cost.”

Progress is in inverse ratio to the coercive action of man on man, in direct ratio to his command over things. The Protectionist, by trying to prevent his countrymen from consuming what they choose, wishes to remove them from the effects of all external progress, and when he gains his ends he may indeed find the most extravagant conceptions of Swift pale before the irony of his creation.

Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection, 1906, viii.

Macro-data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) are shown to have significant data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations. This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90 percent) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020. Importantly, excess deaths remained elevated following mass vaccination in 2021, but were statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections, while remaining significantly correlated to Midazolam injections. The widespread and persistent use of Midazolam in UK suggests a possible policy of systemic euthanasia. Unlike Australia, where assessing the statistical impact of COVID injections on excess deaths is relatively straightforward, UK excess deaths were closely associated with the use of Midazolam and other medical intervention. The iatrogenic pandemic in the UK was caused by euthanasia deaths from Midazolam and also, likely caused by COVID injections, but their relative impacts are difficult to measure from the data, due to causal proximity of euthanasia.

Wilson Sy, Director, Investment Analytics Research, Australia, “Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic” (February 15, 2024).

As centuries pass by, the mass of works grows endlessly, and one can foresee a time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth subsisting in nature, as lost among an immense number of books; then one would have to undertake, out of necessity, a labor that had been neglected, because the need for it had not been felt.
If we think of the image of literature in times before the invention of printing, we see a small number of men of genius busy creating, and a countless throng of workers busy transcribing. If we anticipate centuries to come, and think of the image of literature once printing, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, we will find it once more split into two classes of men. There will be those who read little and immerse themselves in new research or what they take to be new (for if we already are ignorant of part of what is contained in so many books published in all sorts of languages, we will know still far less about what is in those books increased a hundred-, a thousand-fold); the others, workmen incapable of producing anything, will be busy leafing through those books night and day, and separating out what they deem worthy of being anthologized and preserved. Is this prediction not already being fulfilled?

Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 5 (1755), pp. 635–648A.