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Richard Epstein brings his encyclopedic knowledge to help break down some of the pivotal matters being debated in Congress and before the Supreme Court. Plus, James and Rob look back on the Covid lockdowns four years later, along with Minneapolis’ move against Uber and Lyft.
- Sound this week: Rep. Mike Gallagher (R – WI 08) on the Ingram Angle (FNC) speaking on TikTok
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Public health is worthless.
The next time you could actually have a contagion that could be controlled by government force and everybody is going to ignore them.
Have they done a complete colonoscopy on why they lied so much about the shot controlling the spread? It didn’t control the spread at all. Shouldn’t people be in jail for this?
Government schools = 1000% no merit. Cut a check to the parents.
The other day I looked at the warnings at the gas pump while putting a big chunk of my wallet in my gas tank. One of the requirements is that you have to be a licensed driver to operate the pump. I don’t know if that’s a state law or federal but one more crazy mandate out there.
My wife let our daughter help her pump gas a few weeks ago. She’s eleven and wanted to help. Now I know that we were wrong. I bet a lot of Rob’s neighbors don’t have driver licenses. They can’t pump gas either. Who is this protecting?
For Rob: “The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace. Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.”
What a joy listening to Richard Epstein! Please bring him back next week. And the week after. And the week after….
I would say at three minutes in that Lileks has an accountable anger at had badly Covid was handled. It seems his anger is an entirely logical part of an accounting.
I calculated Richard only took ten breaths while he spoke. Anyone have a different number?
So he is like a Dolphin?
Always a pleasure to listen to Richard Epstein…I used to say that the late Henry Kissinger spoke not in complete sentences but rather in coherent paragraphs. Prof. Epstein speaks in coherent chapters…Please have him back.
Rob Long’s comments on the public’s acquiescence and its flabbiness are spot on.
René Magritte, not Marcel Duchamp.
Indeed. I’d had a lot of coffee and was thinking of Duchamp’s most famous work.
Thank you for mentioning how great Rob Long’s comments are.
Lileks is also correct that many people were willing to go along with about a month of government stuff but the bureaucrats kept pressing for more power.
Two things can be True at once. There was a huge public demand for control and bureaucracy and there were many people who wanted to be free but they didn’t want feel like weird radical right-wingers want to cough on your Grandma while carrying a tiki-torch.
Both represent important parts of the populations of America.
I swear, the man can talk continuously without seemingly taking a breath . . .
That’s gotta be more difficult than whistling both while inhaling and exhaling, which I can do.
I just tried it – me too!
I can kinda “talk” while inhaling too, but it doesn’t sound the same. For whistling it makes no difference as far as I can tell.
Richard Epstein is phenomenon! His reasoning is clear and deeply reasoned. When many of us have trouble speaking in complete sentences, Richard is able to assemble spoken paragraphs and even chapters without missing a beat. I can’t get enough of his capacious wisdom. More Richard, better.
Whew, 10 minutes in and where to start?
1. No one gets a pass for the initial COVID lockdowns, which broke societal norms and natural rights. If they had worked, we’d be obligated to do them forever (and we almost did), and if they didn’t they were a huge waste of time and money (they were).
2. The vaccines did little to nothing. Seasonality and Omicron made the pandemic go away. The vaccines only ruined what little reputation pharma companies had, and destroyed medicine.
3. The job of the govt is to calm the populace.
This is very good, but the problem is, all they did was lie about almost everything. The risks to the populous were very limited and obvious. They should have operated in that sense. The way they were talking – and I mean all of them – that the vaccine was going to stop the spread. It didn’t do anything to stop the spread. There were areas with huge vaccine and mask compliance getting destroyed in what is effectively their outdoor season, two months after the vaccine came out. It didn’t go down at all because of the vaccine.
I tend to be libertarian on everything, but public health is a legitimate government function. They need to not lie, and they need to stick to things that can be ***accomplished*** with government force. It’s just unbelievable that we are even talking about this stuff. Government is ridiculous at best and evil at worst.
Does anybody know what the actual situation was about running out of medical resources? It certainly happened. Did anything they forced us to do help it? Do they know? Now “horse paste” is a legitimate COVID-19 drug. The government just said so. I vaguely remember somebody saying that even if that stuff worked, it wouldn’t work prophylactically. That’s what we needed. I hate public health and I never saw any of this coming. They are all liars. They just love government force regardless if it improves anything, just like with gun control.
“Two things can be True at once…” Indeed, indeed…Three things too, and that’s what makes the civilized exchange of perspectives on the podcast such a treat.
The job of the government is to tell the truth and represent the people.
I never saw this coming. I thought public health was serious business. As of right now it’s a joke. it’s a communist plot for communist opportunists.
I can’t believe I didn’t notice this great writing and analysis before. Very true and a very big problem.
Terrible. People are so dumb.
It’s fair to note that govt and pharma talked about what they hoped was true and presented it as the truth, rather than speaking the truth. But for me, that’s almost irrelevant. Do we have core principles, or not? One such principle is the freedom to assemble. Another is the freedom to travel in our country without getting govt permission. Both violated. We should never have violated those, as now the govt will violate them for a much smaller emergency, because precedent. Public health’s job is to give advice (which we can use as we please) and then shut up.
Agreed. And in this case, both would have calmed the panic.
The idea that it was the government’s job to ensure we don’t have overrun hospitals was always a non-starter for me. Nevermind the fact that we DO have overrun hospitals every single flu season.
A result and a purpose are two different things.
Even if the truth would not have “calm[ed] the populace”, would in fact have done the opposite, the government still needs to tell the truth.
The people who wanted to be free either clammed up or were censored.