[ExI] Some virus statistics

Tue Jul 14 19:03:19 UTC 2020

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Some virus statistics

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 1:18 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

>>… If another country is reporting a lower covid rate because they have the authority to order the people to do this or that, Americans are still a free people. If we hand the government dictatorial powers in order to save us from covid, we have a lot bigger problems than covid. [...]

>…And every other country in the world, aka every country that has handled this crises better than the US, is a dictatorship just like North Korea. There is nothing we can learn from them because Americans are the only free people on earth. Right?

Oh there is something we can learn from them: if you accept dictatorship, your covid death rate will be whatever the dictator says it is.  We get to die of government abuse of power rather than covid.  There are no masks which stop a dictator. 

I’ll taaaaake… Freedom, forever please Alex.

 > [...] we have a lot bigger problems than covid.

>…A bigger problem than death?

 John K Clark

Giving government more power doesn’t reduce death, it increases it.  To government professionals, power is currency.  As soon as we reward bad performance with more power, the result is more bad performance and more demands for more power.  John, you are one who argues the government failed, then argue for more government.  Giving the government more power is more death than covid.

Keep this in mind: no one has offered a believable scenario for what happens if we pile on more power and responsibility to government but it has insufficient funds to carry out even what it did before.  You suggested just printing more money, but you offer no indication of understanding of what happens in countries where that has been done.  Weimar Germany, repeatedly in South American and central American countries: they printed a bunch of phony money, the result was predictable and horrifying: it robs those whose savings and pensions are in the form of US currency.  The rich do not hold their wealth in currency, the poor do.

John, I will again offer you a chance to suggest how government (at all levels) will even maintain the services it has already been doing, in the face of severely declining revenue (at all levels.)  Previously you suggested printing more money, which only is even theoretically possible at the Federal level.  John I think you may be the only one here who believes that idea of printing our way out of the hole is feasible.  Do you want to try again to sell that notion?

If you wish, I can offer stories from a brother-in-law who did mission work in South America when that government was printing money without backing.

spike  

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