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Good Fellows: Still A Free Society?
Our friends (or in some cases, our colleagues) at the Hoover Institution have assembled a panel of three of their Fellows (John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, and H.R. McMaster) to discuss current events, moderated by Bill Whalen. In this inaugural episode the Hoover GoodFellows have a lively discussion about how much civil liberties can be sacrificed in an emergency, what steps should be taken to prevent the health crisis from becoming an economic and financial crisis, and whether the decoupling of the US-China relationship will accelerate.
Hoover will be producing this show weekly for the foreseeable future, so look for new episodes every Wednesday.
Recorded on March 31st, 2020
Published in General
it’s a good episode.
I’ve never seen John Cochrane get annoyed or upset until this video.
I thought Ferguson and McMaster spoke too much and didn’t give Cochrane enough time to respond.
@blueyeti: why are you not the consigliere?
Neil Ferguson is full of it when he says the US was not prepared for this pandemic. The US was the most prepared of any developed country according to an assessment done by Johns Hopkins in 2019. That was all undermined by the perfidy of the Communist Chinese government.
Also, regarding people who say, “Well, we should just take the extra one, two or three million deaths so that I can keep my car wash open.” Sorry, buddy, but the car wash was going to lose all of its business whether the government shut down things or not. What might be different if the government acts is all those millions of people won’t be killed. Some people are blaming the firemen rather than the fire for the damage to their store.
Niall is the Hoover fellow.
Neal created the Imperial College model that has now been discredited
I found this to be a fascinating discussion. With a military background I tend to agree with the idea that this is a new Cold War. Like our own Democrat party, the Chinese make up their own rules and expect everyone else to abide by the normally accepted rules. Pretending as John Cochrane seems to do, that treating them with undeserved respect and showing them the joys of the free market is going to change them is nåive to the extreme. It was nice for a time to think that the trading relationship between the US and China was a solely positive thing and the beginning of real detente, but, in reality, China has never changed its attitude towards us or its intention of world domination. The evidence of this is everywhere, in our media, on our university campuses, and throughout our markets. Somewhere in the discussion the comparison of the ants and the grasshopper was mentioned. We are the grasshopper, silly and complacent. They are the ants, united, of a single mind, and determined to survive to the end.