Stop trying to create a zero-risk society.
That’s the sensible advice — indeed, the title — of a Reason think-piece by Veronique de Rugy.
Every action has costs, at the very least in opportunities forgone, and all solutions to problems are better expressed as “trade-offs,” as Thomas Sowell put it. But, specific to this historic moment, “we will suffer many tragic effects from the pandemic-induced changes long after lockdowns are lifted,” Ms. de Rugy argues. First, the lockdowns themselves were a bust, “when all costs are considered, such as the short- and long-term health, educational and psychological harms the lockdowns caused, their costs far exceed[ed] their benefits.”
One humungous tragic effect of the pandemic is what she dubs “the utterly insane expansion of federal spending.” Acknowledging that it is now “traditional for the federal government to expand during emergencies,” de Rugy contends that “the size of the response this time around is both unprecedented and unwarranted.”
Well, hardly unprecedented … but it was the biggest over-reaction yet, and definitely unwarranted.
I wonder, though, if Veronique de Rugy may not have missed the biggest thing: the quickness with which we accepted a rushed-to-market-and-subsidized quasi-vaccine.
I say “quasi,” because the Pfizer vaccine is not a normal vaccine … it is gene therapy. Experimental gene therapy. But hey: people should be able to try an experimental medicine.
But no one should be forced to take such a thing.
Why? The risk!
Oh, and our rights to medical freedom.
While people line up to take the “jabs” as they become available, surely de Rugy is right to caution that “Americans believing that governments can and must do anything to achieve a zero-risk society” is the riskiest notion of all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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