Hi, everybody. Welcome. So it's pretty cool to be able to do these conferences over this amazing technology that, you know, what's left of our free market has provided us. So, you know, it's a thrill to be able to do this today. I want to capitalize and talk about really three things. One, is I want to talk about what a response would look like in an ideal society. And we've already gotten a good foundation for discussing that from what Ankar said, and I agree with everything he said. So I will take it from kind of way he ended and maybe develop a few more points regarding that. Second, I want to talk about what it would look like to properly respond to a pandemic like this. In a society like we live in today, we live in a mixed economy, we don't have capitalism. What it would look like, what it would have looked like to have done it properly, objectively, with respect to the role of government in a mix. But granted, we have a mixed economy in January that when we first found out about this pandemic. And then finally, what would happen today if suddenly our political leaders had a conversion to the proper world of government? What should they do now to respond objectively, properly, consistently with their role and the role of the protection of individual rights today, given that we in April and given that the virus is here and it's done the damage that it's already done and the government has responded already in the way it's responded. And I'm hoping that by doing this, you'll see what we mean by the objectivity of government. You'll see what we mean by an objective response to this. And you'll also see how far we are today from any semblance of what an objective pro-individual rights, pro-freedom government looks like. Now, I'm hoping to be able to do all that in 20 to 30 minutes so we can have plenty of time for Q&A because I know there are a lot of questions and people want to dig into the details. So let me get started with the idea of an ideal society, a proper government. And let's remind ourselves what a proper government means. Well, it means a government that is focused on the protection of individual rights as its sole governing purpose. That's what it is instituted for. It is a government that is our servant in protecting our rights and protecting our freedom, our freedom of action, our freedom to act in pursuit of our own values, in pursuit of our own individual happiness. It's a government that is completely separated from the economy. So it is a capitalist government. It is a government that separates, that has no involvement in the economic affairs of its citizens, in the choices, in the value choices that those citizens make. Again, unless an issue of individual rights comes up, unless, like in a pandemic, your actions become threatening to others. And as uncarticulated in a pandemic, the government certainly has a role. It has a role in protecting us, protecting us from those who might inflict damage on us. Those who might be carrying the disease, carrying the infection, unbeknownst to them in most cases. But through their interaction with the rest of us, they would be inflicting real damage and depending again on how dangerous the disease is, how contagious it is and how deadly it is, you know, the response would vary, but so would the danger to all of us. And therefore, the response would vary. So it is important for a government in the circumstances like this as uncarticulated to figure out the danger that is actually involved. So you would have this basic law as uncarticulated that this is kind of, these are kind of the things that the government would do. These are the responsibilities. These are the powers that the government has in the case of the pandemic. But then when a specific pandemic comes about, what a government needs to do is first figure out how dangerous this is, how much transmission there is, to what extent rights are being potentially violated. Is this just the flu or the common cold or something like that? Or is this something unusual on top of that? It requires some action. How deadly is it? To what extent is civilization at stake? If you've listened to some of Amesh Aduljah's talks about pandemic planning, part of what he has thought about is what happens when you get a pandemic where 30% of people who get a die, the Middle Eastern is a disease in which 30% of the people who get a die. Now, luckily, it doesn't transfer from human to human effectively. So it dies very quickly. The people die quickly and they don't transmit it. But also, human interaction, it seems, it's very difficult to get this disease from another human being. So that's why it hasn't spread widely. But what happens if you get a coronavirus like where a lot of people, maybe 30%, civilizational threatening kind of disease happens? The government needs to have a plan on how to deal with that in concept. In an ideal society, the first thing that would happen is that the CDC, the equivalent of the CDC, and I do think the CDC is a legitimate government function that is a agency within the government similar to the Defense Department, but dedicated to monitoring infection diseases and having the skill set to be able to determine the level of threat that they involve and be able to provide the different branches of government with accurate objective information about the threat and about the timeline.  Such an agency should be funded to the extent that is needed in order to keep monitoring and to have the skill set to be able to respond effectively, primarily with information, to what is going on in the world in terms of infectious diseases. So the first step would be to, with an executive branch, to approach the president of the United States and say, here's the new infectious diseases, here's our first estimate of risk, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's what we need in order to continue to monitor this and we will continue to monitor this. This is what we think is going to happen. This is what we think the timeline is going to be. These are the resources and these are the steps that we think are going to have to be taken at that point. And the president should go to Congress and let them know that this is happening. He should make this information known to the American people. One of the characteristics of a proper government, of an objective government is transparency. It is the willingness to, the lack of secrecy, the availability of information, indeed the constant flow of information, not just about what we know, but also about what they don't know about the uncertainties involved and about the process, about what is going to happen depending on how the virus and how our information, you know, it lands up, lands up being, or what the information lands up being. So first step is put a strategy together, plan and give the information to both Congress and the people. Second, once this becomes obvious that indeed this is a pandemic that's going to affect our country, Congress needs to pass a law specific based on the kind of the, call it the basic law, based on this umbrella law that gives, that spells out how these things should be addressed. It needs to declare an emergency. It needs to declare the specific pandemic, the specific threat, and declare specifically what powers the executive branch has in such an occurrence. And the bigger the threat, the more powers you would, I think it's legitimate to provide the executive branch in such a circumstance. And it should also frame, in a sense, what is reasonable for states, for local governments to be, to do, and what is unreasonable to do, that is what would constitute violation of individual rights for those local governments to do. And then you could imagine even that particularly if the threat was grave and the powers granted that the executive extents it, that this would have to be reviewed by like the Supreme Court, by the legal system. So somebody outside of the political mechanism says, yes, this is reasonable and within the boundaries of the constitution, this is not a massive power grab by government when the threat is either unknown or the threat is minimal. But the more power is granted to the executive, the more certainty there must be about the threat. And the more certainty there must be about what needs to be done to address it. Generally, the more uncertainty we have, the less information we have, the more we don't know the less government power, the less power the government should have over our lives. That is, if we just don't know what's gonna happen, we have to let it happen. The government cannot take arbitrary power saying, we don't know exactly what's gonna happen. But just in case, just in case it turns out bad, we're gonna, we're gonna stop life in a particular way or we're gonna, we're gonna quality people or we're gonna, we're gonna do all these things just in case. No, they have to have objective knowledge of the actual threat, what it constitutes and how they're gonna act and how that action is likely. You don't expect certainty here, but how that action is likely to address that threat. Now, for the most part, the action that the government would take are the actions that on call mentioned, test, track, quarantine or isolate depending on the severity of the case and depending on the specifics of the pandemic. In rare cases, particularly if a pandemic is spreading very fast and there's not enough time to test and track and isolate, you could imagine local specific time defined lockdowns that are very rare and very, very, very kind of controlled in a sense of the timeline. You know, we're gonna shut this down for two weeks and then we're gonna free it up and here's the plan for how we're gonna free it up. You know, imagine I was thinking of examples from other areas where the government has that kind of power to lock down a neighborhood and remember the Boston Marathon bombing when there was a bombing and there was these two terrorists on the loose and the government shut down Boston in order to hunt them down and chase them down and ultimately killed one and caught the other one. That seems to be a massive exaggeration. The whole of Boston was not a threat and they did not think that the whole of Boston was where these terrorists were going, but neighborhoods, streets, specific locales where the threat that the terrorists are there and in order to catch them in order to subdue them, you need people to stay home for both their safety and the safety of the security forces chasing them down. It's fine to have a lockdown that's finite where victory is clearly defined. We're gonna unlock with specificity when these guys are dead or when we don't think they're in your street anymore, when they've moved on to a different area. So the government has that power in times of emergency, but it's well-defined and very delimited and the burden of proof, the burden that this is really necessary is on the government. They can't just willy-nilly shut down places as is happening today all over the country because they might be a threat or they might be an overload of our healthcare system or so on. So in an ideal society that is the scope of the world of government. Now, things like testing, things like vaccines, all of that, the government should primarily the testing because in order to test they need testing kits. They should be working with the private sector, primarily be purchases of testing and providing the public private sector with whatever information they have. But I'm hesitant here to give too much specificity because one of the beauties of capitalism, and I say this a lot in a lot of my talks when I talk about capitalism, is we don't know exactly how the system would evolve in the free market. So for example, to what extent will insurance companies already have plans to deal with pandemics and to deal with testing independent of the government, in coordination with the government or providing information to the government, but independent of it in terms of launching those testing. To what extent would hospitals, doctors, offices, and others have plans to deal with these kind of things? What other forms will a private response to a pandemic in its details take? And the answer is I don't know and the beauty of it is markets evolve and market find solutions in ways that we can't imagine. Ankar alluded to this with regard to sporting events. I mean imagine an instantaneous test that could on the spot tell you if you had the disease or not. And you felt the basketball arena with people who didn't have the disease and therefore there was no risk of contagion. Now it sounds like science fiction right now but that's only because we live in such a world where innovation is so restricted, entrepreneurship is so restricted by the regulatory state, by the FDIC, by the CDC, by everything else, but imagine a world in which innovation happened much faster, people prepared for negative events much more, people relied a lot less on government and people thought about these things in advance, not just government, primarily not just government, but private enterprise thought about long-term circumstances because they couldn't just say well the governor will take care of it. Why save? I'll just get a part of a stimulus package from the government. Why? By virus insurance. And there's a question of what virus insurance would look like and how a market like that would develop given the systemic risk. So these are not easy questions to answer but people would be motivated and incentivized to think about solutions for it. When they know they can't just by default rely on government because in a truly free market, in a truly objective government, government would have no role in bailing people out even at the time of a pandemic. Government would have no role in the economy period and therefore people would have to plan, markets would have to adjust. So that is kind of an outline of what it would look like in an ideal society to respond to this and again there's a lot of optionality and a lot open depending on the type of risk and what the market's response is. But the government is going to be narrowly focused on the protection of individual rights and what is necessary for that and that primarily involves identifying and quarantining people who actually are at risk of infecting others. Now obviously we don't live in such a society unfortunately. We live in a mixed economy. We live in a world in which government not only intervenes in the economy but maybe with regard to this specific intervenes heavily in healthcare where I don't know what the latest number is but something probably north of 60 cents of every dollar of healthcare spent by the government where hospitals need permission for the number of beds that they have, where drug companies, vaccine companies, testing companies even disinfectant companies you know for the disinfectant using your hands need permission from a government agency, a government bureaucracy, a condition in which the government is involved in almost every aspect of the economy. It cannot be that given that government that when a pandemic hits it's intervening in everything but when a pandemic hits we say well all we do is test and quarantine we don't we're limited government we don't do anything else I mean that would be absurd the fact is whether you like it or not you are responsible for the hospitals the government is it is responsible for that disinfectant that you use in your hands because you know you got an agency approving it. You've also got by the way laws about raising prices during a crisis anti gouging laws. You've got FDAC and CDC and limitation again on hospital bed expansion and who can who can practice as a doctor and who can practice as a nurse licensing laws and on and on and on and on. So any response to be objective here has to take all of that into account and has to take into account oh by the way government heavily regulates insurance companies and disincentivizes them for example from thinking long term and thinking about how they would respond to something like a pandemic and then how they would pay for testing and everything in every respect. So you can't say okay it's blank slate we're starting as if as if this is a free a free world it's not. So the government has to respond in more dimensions than just test and you know track and isolate. So what would an objective government have done given the world as it is in january when the pandemic was discovered? Well first it would have put together pulled together the CDC pulled together all the resources the intelligence resources the CIA everybody and said what do we know what is the information what is the data what are the risks what is the upside what is the downside what can happen here and then it would have actually formulated a strategy a strategy around based on what they knew now granted there was limited information but it was already known certainly at the end of january that it was there was human to human transmission they started in china they was moving to the united states because there were flights coming into the united states ended that it primarily affected old people i remember late january early february we already knew that so what would they have first done first they would have communicated that information to the american public they've communicated what they knew to all of us not downplaying it not panicky but just the facts and they would have made certain recommendations recommendations about social distancing recommendations about isolating not forced isolation not cost isolation but voluntary isolation of vulnerable groups primarily anybody over the age of 70 i mean what has happened in some of the facilities taking care of older people it's just horrific and was preventable so imagine that they had come out with recommendations old atrium should be locked down people should not be allowed to visit grandkids kids should not be allowed to visit people people working in these facilities should be tested they should be tested regularly and they should abide by these hygiene requirements that we know or seem to help the virus so given what we knew and at the same time the government should have brought together the fdic and the cdc and said look we know you've got all this red tape that has to do with testing and has to do with approval vaccines and treatments get rid of it now quickly as soon as possible go into emergency mode they would have gone to congress and asked congress to do two things one to decline emergency because i think still think that needs to happen just like congress declares war and second allocate a budget for all of this war with the budget would have included well included testing given that the market is not working in testing there are no buyers because insurance companies are not part of this market hospitals are really not part of this market they can't just buy stuff without the red tape the government needed to step forward and buy testing now the way to make sure and and here there's an important principle what the government should have done is used whatever market mechanisms still exist in our world to facilitate the response so one testing you don't buy you don't negotiate the lowest price possible for the test and expect huge supply supply curves are upward sloping the more you pay the more you'll get pay people to produce tests and give them a nice juicy profit so that they're motivated produce more tests and at some point there'll be so many tests out there available for purchase you can drop the price same thing you can't expect hospitals to take care of all the ppne the protective gear you can't expect hospitals to take care of all the ventilators because you've disinvent you've disincentivized them for decades from doing exactly that and you've made sure that they're not too profitable that's what Medicare Medicaid and state and federal regulations of hospital do make sure they're not too profitable so they don't have a capital account where they can go out and buy this equipment so it's completely legitimate in an emergency like this for the government in a mixed economy for the government to step in and buy the necessary equipment so that hospitals are overrun you could use the military to provide the kind of logistics and infrastructure to get things to where they need to be to open up field hospitals to get beds to where they're going to be if they're going to be needed now this is late january early february this is not in late march and early april you make certain assumptions or you prepare to deploy when the hotspots arise so you test en masse you have that prepared you find ways to incentivize hospitals doctor clinics new entrepreneurs i've seen entrepreneurs come up with all kinds of tests in in different parts of the country insurance companies others to go out and do testing and provide that information to government and then you track and you isolate and if necessary quarantine the people who have the disease at the same time you ramp up production of necessary equipment and you hold it back until hotspots identified in order to provide that you provide guidelines to how to isolate the people most vulnerable to this people certain pre-existing conditions as we get more data we're learning more about those pre-existing conditions and clearly from the beginning when you people over 65 or over 70 isolate them isolate them within a house isolate them in these in these uh you know facilities homes uh provide in congress could allocate money to help with that isolation again given the word in a mixed economy and then provide as much information accumulate information try to provide as much information as possible about the disease not about how to treat the disease you should leave that to doctors and hospitals and the professionals but how to just information about who is susceptible and how it's treated and where the hotspots and what are the what is the data available so that's what i would have done in january early february i think a lot of what we've seen over the last month i think a lot of the deaths would have been avoided i think you could have saved tens of thousands of people's lives by doing the right thing early on and basically listening to the experts as uncle mentioned the cdc had a plan uh you know epidemiologists like amesha dulja had plans they had worked on plans there were plans on how to deal with the virus they did not involve lockdowns but they did involve getting ahead of it in terms of information it did involve testing testing testing and that would have required very early on for the executive branch to basically tell and and pass whatever laws you need in congress to free up to eliminate the rate tight red tape and to allow for all this and the same by the way with licensing laws and all the other laws that restrict the supply of products and i would i would have gotten rid of anti gouging laws made them illegal at the state level allowed supermarkets to raise prices of toilet paper you know and all of these shortages would have gone away so that's what we should have done in january so what do you do today well you play catch up primal first first the first thing you do in order to establish legitimacy credibility is the first thing you have to do is admit to all the mistakes you've made so the government should today admit to the errors that have been made admit to the massive failure in testing in isolation and tracking but primarily in testing and identify what the problem was where were the bottlenecks what happened what were the bad decisions made because only then should any rational individual trust you to do anything right going forward i need to be about able to i need to know that you know what you did wrong second admit the lockdowns were just a panicky response partially the consequence of the fact that we failed in testing and admit that it is inappropriate to lock down whole city's whole whole states is just bizarre irrespective of the local conditions locked down a whole state and it is wrong not an appropriate response to an epidemic and not an appropriate response for america not an appropriate response for any government that respects individual rights admit you still not caught up that you're still behind the curve that this 2.2 trillion trillion with a t stimulus package has no provisions for testing has no provisions for actually addressing the problem doesn't even really have provision for helping the people if you're gonna help people you would think you would help the people who at most risk from this maybe help old people isolate themselves but no none of that and then admit that you don't know much i mean it's stunning that because of course of the testing we don't know how many people in america have infected we don't have accurate data about hospitalization or about fatalities or about how infectious it is what they call the are not or what interventions work and what don't work what medications work and what don't work that that's up to the doctors and they're still testing it and there's no and then at that point then you become credible at least to some extent and at that point what you have to execute is focused completely on is testing isolating quarantining tracking undoing undoing a lot of these lockdowns figuring out if they really are hotspot still that require significant additional equipment making sure it gets there if there are places that are short on doctors using the army or or other states that might have low you know making it possible for doctors to be able to step in and help out liberating pharmaceutical companies even more than they already have done to develop vaccines to develop treatments to test those treatments to try those treatments trust doctors on the ground to test medications to try different things i mean one of the i think an incredibly damaging thing that this administration has done is that the president of the united states has an opinion about which treatment is right and which treatment is wrong he's not a doctor he's not he hasn't run tests he doesn't know yeah other people run tests so maybe he's right but that's what doctors are for maybe that's what the cdc is for in the world in which we live today looking at different treatments and advising doctors on what seems to be working and what's now but the cdc doesn't agree with the president but it can't be politicized i see today online people saying republicans all think that the malaria drug is good and democrats think the malaria drug is bad irrespective of science facts medicine reality so a real focus on reality on facts and on liberating the system as much as possible for all of that to be applied it's still the case that in spite of our mixed economy in spite of how bad things are we should rely primarily on voluntary decision-making of individuals the voluntary decision-making and we should instruct them and guide them and recommend that they do the hand-washing the social distancing using disinfectant all of that provide them with the best science and rely on people to do the right thing and if people don't if people will die and and that's part of living in a free society people make mistakes people don't always do the right thing and people do die and to the extent that we can make people pay the consequences after the fact it's a good thing but with an infectious disease that's not easy to do in terms of large gatherings you restrict them unless there's the kind of testing or whatever controls that you put in to make it possible you advise people to wear masks you do all the things that science tells us are going to reduce the threat but if you start isolating if you start testing on mass and isolating those who have the virus quickly and on a scale and at the same time if you isolate the most vulnerable and you protect the most vulnerable then i don't think a virus like this needs to get out of hand and again if you provide the supplies and everything and you use the price mechanism in order to do it and you incentivize producers to produce and you provide the right incentives to consumers then there should be no shortages and there should be no you know health care supply problems so the principle is decontrol to the extent that you can rely on individuals to do the right thing as much as possible and areas where the government is already involved where the government cannot get out of quickly like medicine you can't do Medicare and Medicare in three days then the government has to step in and do only what is necessary to deal with the crisis without but while minimizing the amount of power it grabs an amount of intervention in individuals lives that it takes on so the goal should always be to move us towards more freedom even if it's a slow pace even if we have to in a some sense take half a step backwards in order to take two step forwards all right and we have a question from Kat on YouTube basically what do you think of the Canadian government's response so we talked a little bit about in general what the what a proper government would do and then what you know what the US government did and and commented on that what about do you know do you have anything to say about Canada not I've read a little bit about it I'm Canadian so I probably should know more but I don't actually know more about the response it hasn't to me what I've read doesn't seem very different from the US response so but if there's something more specific about the response that that Kat wants to bring up if she posts that we could talk about that but yeah I don't know enough and I haven't seen that there's something very distinctive about the Canadian response okay so we got a question from Facebook that's similar to a question a question from Mallory on Facebook similar to a question from Mark on Zoom that is kind of looking a little more broadly at the culture and there's a lot of uncertainty in this situation uncertainty about the nature of the virus what we're dealing with that sort of thing and that's provoked a lot of fear and I think Mallory's question I think is suggesting that that that kind of fear is maybe partly what's driving the kind of denial that we saw so broadly how do we deal with with that issue in the culture I mean what how can we help is it a result of the education system misinformation I think it's it's I think this kind of issue is a vicious circle the more the educational system and the wider culture teaches people and especially young people that you don't really have control over your lives you're determined by all kinds of outside factors some combination of your biology and your who happens to be in your community and so on you're not fundamentally in control then you look for well okay I need to turn over control power to someone who seems like they are in control this is part of the growth of the state I ran out of you which I agree with completely that determinism and dictatorship go together if you tell individuals you don't have power then someone has to hopefully have power and so I don't quite understand how the state knows everything it knows but I don't know I don't know anything so I'll hand power over to the state and the more that happens politically the more the political system makes it yeah you don't have control over your life because the government's making all kinds of decisions and that makes it seem like yeah I don't have power because you don't so it's a vicious circle and in this kind of case with the uncertainty yes I think an element is well the government must know what it's doing so I'll turn it over to them and if they tell me I have to shelter in place and be locked in my home I guess that's what we have to do and if you've watched I think one of the reasons people should watch the actual conferences news like Trump's daily thing you don't have to watch it every day but if you leave aside a few of the scientists like Fauci if you when you watch Pence or Trump's do you think they have any idea what they're doing do you when Trump is reading do you think he has any idea even what the words on the page mean he can't pronounce them do you think he even knows what and so the idea that they know what they're doing and oh yeah if we hand them the power it's if you actually observe what is going on it's a complete fantasy but this this is part they're thinking of an American system of government when it was about self-responsibility self-governing it was yeah I'm not just I can do this I want this power to make these decisions I don't want to hand it to the government and we're too much in a context now where people want to do it and pretty good when it's uncertainty I don't know what's happening maybe they do all right we got a couple questions on zoom about insurance and what kind of restrictions so could there be such a thing as pandemic insurance and what kind of restrictions are there that would might prevent that from existing in the first place and and what insurance companies so Muhammad is asking a question about this and David is asking a related question on zoom what kinds of what kinds of policies might insurance companies put into place and what kind of restrictions prevent them from doing that um I guess you're on your back so you could yeah I'm happy to so I think I mean it's difficult to it's difficult to come up with a good insurance product for pandemics because pandemics are systemic so one of the things that insurance companies do very well is they diversify so if you have fire insurance uh you don't just have fire insurance in one neighborhood you cover many neighborhoods if one if one you know thing burns down you don't have to pay out everybody right you're only paying out the house that burned down with pandemics is difficult because it's systemic uh and it's and it's widespread and almost everybody is going to be affected or many many people are going to be affected but you know I I still think I mean insurance companies are unbelievably innovative and creative markets I mean think about Lloyds of London and the kind of things that they ensure anyway for pianist hands to to you know in 300 years ago ships sailing across the oceans so I think that if if if they actually was um if people actually planned long term and thought long term in this way and didn't rely on government for it I think some kind of market would have developed that would have would do pandemics the problem today is and this is true of all kinds of systemic risk of but also localized risk earthquakes even fires floods definitely floods is that insurance companies uh you know price these things they're very expensive because the risk is high that the the the payout is very high so the insurance companies insurance is very expensive people don't buy it because they assume FEMA is going to bail them out FEMA is going to cover this uh so fewer people buy it which makes the insurance even more expensive and at some point it's so expensive nobody wants to buy it this is what happened to earthquake insurance in California and at the end of the day the the state comes in and provides earthquake insurance or sells earthquake insurance uh cheap and it's going to bankrupt the state when there really is an earthquake so the government intervenes not necessarily by regulating it intervenes by the fact that everybody knows it's going to pay out right so for example in california the government provides earthquake insurance explicitly FEMA provides earthquake insurance to everybody who doesn't buy the insurance that the government provides um insurance companies won't sell or they will sell they'll sell flood insurance to people who build homes on the coast in Louisiana and South Carolina but it's really really really expensive which should be a motivation not to build there right and in a free market would be motivation not to build it but instead the the the homeowners run to the government and say wait a minute they're gouging us right they're extorting us so the government says okay don't worry we'll provide you with insurance so today most flood insurance in flood plains and flood areas is provided by the government on insurance companies so the only way uh you would see what would happen in a purely private insurance market is to have one and to get rid of FEMA and to get rid of all the restrictions and limitations and back stops and that the government provides today um in a sense with implicit insurance and also in the way it regulates insurance companies themselves so there's no surprise there's no pandemic insurance when the government can write a two point two trillion dollar check to basically to cover losses of everybody in the world why would any insurance company uh compete with that how could they did you want to add to that alka I just say so I agree about the pandemics when they're at such a severity but there's a way like people think of this as the apocalypse that I think important that it's not so if it like if you take this situation and the insurance was if you need ICU care now you've got insurance like it's a very small percentage of the people who need that and if a lot of people are paying in it's it's random and it's so I could see insurance for this guy you can imagine with like the it's contagious and the death rates 50 percent and so on that it insurance companies go bankrupt because they didn't estimate could be this severe but a lot of this I think they would figure out how to do oh by the way a business interruption insurance right so business is going to be interrupted because of pandemic but you cannot have business interruption insurance when the state the government locks down a whole state then the government has to back it update you know you can so insurance has to be I mean I can imagine a provision in the insurance policy business interruption unless this was mandated by government for whatever and then they they don't cover it so yes absolutely they could develop it but they're not going to as long as government has the kind of power it has and the government has the tendency to bail everybody out everybody out when it happens making insurance superfluous and on a free mark so our friend Jonathan Honig posted a comment on YouTube that there'd be all kinds of ways of managing the risk call you know secure selling it off by a reinsurance or securitization putting call options on pandemic risk there's all kinds of mechanisms that would absolutely so all right so in the given in the situation that we're in and the and the path that we've taken since January what about the the role that the government has played in taking the issue of hospital capacity and making sure hospitals are not overcrowded is that a legitimate thing for them to be to be doing in general in in this situation is it something they needed to do so again in a in a truly private market no the government has no interest in supplying demand it is interested in people who violate rights and the people who are violating rights are the people who have the infection and that's their focus and the market takes care of hospital capacity and by the way i don't believe there would be an issue of capacity hospitals are disincentivized i don't know if you know about that if a hospital x wants to grow its capacity it has to get permission from the government and other hospitals get the lobby to say no no no we've already got it will drive down prices and you know so there's this whole mechanism because the medicare and medicaid that drive that where the state is involved in how much capacity hospitals have so it hospitals used to have many many more hospital beds than they do today and over the last 30 years as government has got involved more and more in medicine capacity rates in hospital in the united states have declined dramatically and it's all because of regulation and government controls so i think in a free market no there would be no thinking about there wouldn't be part of what government does but in the world in which we live in where government is so involved in health care i don't see how they can avoid it in a sense they own in quotes 60 percent of the health care system and and they're responsible for it and and they can't walk away because there's no mechanism alternative mechanism for it so i think right now they would have to on a delimited basis and again use the price mechanism as much as possible get increased production you know again instead of the 2.2 trillion dollars for miscellaneous imagine a focus bill they just got pp and e ventilators and and maybe transportation to ship doctors from place to place to where they would need to i don't know but do the cut you you'd spend a lot less money than the spending now if they just focused it on the true needs i there's a lot to say on this question so i think it's a good if someone wants that in the general q&a ask about this because this i think should be taken as such a reputation of government involvement in health care not the kind of bernie sanders line or no we need full control and if you think of if they're really running the health care system and their view is look this is a really serious situation why wouldn't you just divert money so in two trillion stimulus that's complete inflation like they're printing the money so why wouldn't it be okay we're going to reduce social security payments for six months by 10 percent and use all that money to spend on health care because it's these older people are going to end up in health care and so so we have to get the capacities and there's no there's nothing resembling thinking about prices and a market and the idea that everybody needs hospital service right now or there's a surge in demand and they're not making money they're worried about going bankrupt is that it's it should be taking as bizarre and shocking but there's a lot more to say on this you know about the testing that so that so one of the reasons the shortage is the testing is because the government is paying $40 per test and $40 I mean labs are making a little bit of a profit but not much and the the ABAT test actually costs quite a bit more than $40 so ABAT basically said we can't produce it so that they haven't been even though they announced it about two weeks ago there are no ABAT tests out there almost not because the government is paying them below cost of what it costs to produce imagine if the government just said okay for the next three months we're going to pay $200 per test you're going to make a fortune off of this and then everybody is going to try to make tests right and they're going to flood the market the same with hospitals imagine if they told hospitals early on given that they're paying for the patients assume they're paying for the treatment of the patient we're going to pay you x but x is whatever the cost is multiplied by double it and if you run the numbers that is so that is a rounding error in the stimulus bill in the 2.2 trillion it's a rounding error and yet it would make most the stimulus bill unnecessary because you wouldn't have to shut down the economy you wouldn't have to do all these things so i wanted to kick this off by just you know we talked there was we covered a lot of issues here but i think it would be useful if one of you maybe on car you could leave this off or your own just could you summarize in a few sentences what exactly is our position so you know we were getting questions even after all the presentations is what exactly is a rise position was the general shutdown inappropriate you know where the different actions that people taking uh that the government has taken proper improper could you summarize in just a sentence or two what the basic position is i can take a stab it's um so part of what i was talking about is what the powers of the government should even be and i don't think there is such a power that it can shut down a state i can't even think in a time of war that this would be legitimate to do um so that in in the peacetime that you shut down a whole state i don't so it's not just it's wrong i don't even think it should have the power and one of the things we should be concerned about as citizens is removing that power from government that it's not even in the playbook and part of the reason i brought up the cdc reports nothing like that was remotely in the playbook um and that's relevant to thinking that this is panic and then government saying we need total power so that it's so it's not just illegitimate it should not be a power of government um what the government should have done given how involved it is in the economy and particularly healthcare is uh uran was talking about this it's a legitimate function to be involved in testing not to control testing and there's harrowing stories of people early on who wanted to test and uran was telling me to read about helen chou in washington state about she want and she's trying to get permission from boards and so on and she can't get permission and eventually they just defied the authorities and started testing and so on and it should not have that power but it has to test if it's to test and isolate it has to purchase tests and perform that function um the most complicated one i think in the mixed economy is how to think what it should do in healthcare and there's been questions about the flattening the curve and so on we could talk about those but i just say in regard to healthcare the primary i think the two primary things is one divert if your view is this is really a pandemic divert funding from other areas that now are lower priority to this that's a higher priority and again it's spending so you're buying things you're buying ppne you're buying ventilators and so from the open market um so that's again it's not taking control of companies and so on it's buying stuff for the money the government's already spending that it's now spending on fighting covid-19 versus other things in medicare and so on um and the issue of being so part of the transparency is look government runs healthcare that means healthcare is rationed it means markets prices don't function you can't save your money and say okay i'm going to spend this on icu and i want to book this and so you there's no there's nothing resembling a market in healthcare so the more the government was clear about this is how we're going to ration the more than individuals could think okay well that's what's going to happen so if it's if you're old and have a lot of pre-existing conditions you're going to be at the bottom of treatment because your chance of survival is low and we're prioritizing younger people in the icu if you knew that that this is how it's going to be rationed older people would have much more incentive of okay i maybe i need to really self-isolate here and versus the fantasy that we have free healthcare it's available for all if you need a test you can get a test and so if you convey that to the public and then you wonder like why aren't they taking the social isolation seriously and so on you haven't been at all open about the state of the healthcare system that's government run and you have to be open about it like we have to ration we don't have ventilators we don't understand the stockpile we don't know what's going on and so this is the reality of it and you make free choices accordingly knowing like this is the state of government run healthcare so in a in a in a proper system do we face is there is it is it valid to think that we face a tradeoff between help protecting health and economic activity or is that just a creature of the system that we have i think it's a creature of the system that we have government is not involved in healthcare period it doesn't run hospitals it's not concerned with capacity it's it's sole responsibility is to find a way to extract from society those who are threatening others and in other words the people who are carrying the virus but in a proper system there is no there are no shortages because the again the supply and demand system works there might be local shortages there might be momentary shortages but that is not any more than it is during warfare if if it was going on that it's the government's responsibility to to make sure that there's food or that there's washing machines or there's anything else it's responsibilities to defeat the enemy and it's the you know it's it's the the market adjusts in the way that it adjusts and if that means that people have less food or people people struggle which they would in a war then they have less food and they struggle during that period it's you know it's not the responsibility of the government to maintain our standard of living even in times of emergency where it has a role in dealing with that emergency in some narrow way some narrow way i think greg wants to say something it's worth it not all of the economic trouble is the fault of the government shutting things down right if there's a virus and it's killing a lot of people and people are going to have to voluntarily change their behavior around that or the government does all the right things and some of it involves shutting down this small part for this period or advising people to do this well people are not going to be going to stadiums and there are things people aren't going to do and some money is going to be lost that's in the nature of nature here but it's being compounded by the degree of imposition of force that everything is being frozen and even worse than that this tremendous uncertainty of that we're all at the whim of of um who i think are transparently incompetent and dishonest people but in any case we're all at their whims and mercies and you can't make a plan about what's going to happen um and with regard to hospital capacity just part of what would be part of what the calculation that i think has to go into a proper government's thinking about um how to classify different diseases uh how big a threat they are how contagious they are uh how bad they are if you get them and so forth uh part of the context for that would be what the state of medical science and medical infrastructure is in the country so for example there are some things you know like uh we've got antibiotics and the fact that we have antibiotics means that some things that might have been possible plagues you know in the past there are no big deal if you catch this from somebody you take a moxasillin and you're fine um so knowing what hospital capacity is uh and therefore what would create an overrun and a cascade of extra deaths and so forth is i think the kind of thing that the government would have to take into account in um formulating plans for what would happen if we had different kinds of viruses including what kind of governmental responses would be appropriate and some kinds of stronger local more temporary lockdowns or whatever um uh or more temporary local restrictions on motion or certain kinds of motion could be appropriate for short periods of time in order to enable a health care system to ramp up or readjust if that's known and explained and it's like you know it will take three weeks before this hospital can get enough ventilator or whatever therefore the stadium's got to be closed for three weeks or something but it's got to be a particular you know there's got to be particular knowledge with a way out of it um and so forth and there has to be an opportunity to opt out i think so if people wanted to say in even like if you're thinking of parts of a city or city um i'm not going to go to the hospital i accept this risk that if i get it i'm going to treat it home and yeah i might die but i can't shut down my work and so on and you had a mechanism that yeah they've opted out of the hospital system um that it again you're you're trying to maximize that free people can make decision based on the actual facts and if the hospital's going to be overrun it maybe yeah i'll shut down my work and so on but maybe i'll opt out and take that risk and part of the problem with socialized medicine is you can't opt out and i can't opt out from paying your health care bills so i you know this is the evil one of the many evils of socialized medicine is i now care about whether you self isolate because if you don't self isolate i'm going to land up paying the icu bill and everything else associated with you i now am responsible for what you do and this really is a an insidious aspect of this i mean this is why governments can now say you can eat sugar you can eat meat or you can eat this again because hey we're all paying for this we're all in this together right and that that is just horrific it did it it separates us from the consequences of our own actions and that is that is part of the evil of socialism in any respect i want to say something about what is being done you know i'm going to make a blanket statement nothing that's been done has been right in this sense that it has not been rationally thought out there is no strategy of plan i haven't seen a single governor say here's the strategy here's what we're going to do we're going to shut this down this is how we're going to reopen it these are the this is the data we're basing this on even when an action might have been necessary in a rational context it's not being done in a rational way it's all being done out of fear out of emotion out of political calculation out of looking presidential comal with a flag in the background and everything and it it it has a randomness and a fear and emotionalism to it you know a government does it's not functioning right now rationally and and so it's so in that sense nothing it's doing is appropriate so let me ask so because we got a few questions that are talking about the response from the trump administration i think i will put it in a certain way that i think it is it's it's it's a good question that i've heard you give you you've addressed this question before which is didn't this just take us by surprise and so isn't the administration doing the best job under the circumstances you know if they're one of the persons putting it in terms of certainty is contextual and we didn't have a lot of information at first and some people are saying that you know the president inherited an inadequate system for pandemic preparedness is that true and isn't this the first time we faced a situation like this was a question around youtube is asking that so that's the question didn't this take us by surprise and and aren't we just kind of figuring this out as we go along so before you would be critical of what the government saw a figure what anko said there's actually a cdc plan that there's actually documents and i know from speaking to dr dulja that people in this in the specialization have worked up plans of what to do during pen pandemics and what the government should do and how should react and again anko laid out what the cdc that the cdc had a plan all of that was ignored you know i've looked at careful timelines of what is what happened what was known when now you know it's hard to tell what in back rooms was done but this this real evidence suggests that our intelligence services were briefing both the white house and congress about the dangers of a serious pandemic in in mid january that early and yet the president and that you can you can list the quotes you can look it up online the quotes of him saying oh it's going to go away tomorrow it's going to go away in five days ignoring all this stuff really until the end of february so there was clearly a month and a half lost of action any and then when the action happened it ignored the plan right it ignored the planet being developed by experts and instead there was a plan that was kind of shooting from the hip based on who knows what we don't know we don't know if this is fauchi we don't know if this is trump we don't know if it and notice also the cdc was sidelined so no i i think there's nothing here um you know somebody says to my knowledge the president said that he was not aware of course he was aware and people people have testified that they or at least have said that they were in meetings where this was presented so there's no reason to think he wasn't aware and people within his administration were aware so if they didn't let the president know it's still his fault because he should have better people around him so the administration acted here incompetently and yeah you look no question there's huge uncertainty no question this is a very difficult situation to deal with this is why you have a plan in advance which there was this is why you have institutions with a government that's supposed to deal with this they are for example the cdc all this the infrastructure was there it was not utilized um the idea that this came out of the blue is crazy um first of all in january there was the installation of a travel ban that was a dishonest policy there's no reason to have a travel ban unless this thing spreads from person to person if you think it spreads from person to person and you know it's been going on for some time which they did then you know it's going to get here anyway and this is what everybody in the field that i know was saying uh you know it's going to get here anyway and then you therefore you need testing and or things in a travel ban so to have all and only a travel ban is to put a do the thing that's easy for you to cast it aside and for trump that's travel ban because trump doesn't like freedom to move so he wants to put a travel ban on everything if it was an objectivist who was the president uh who liked uh uh getting rid of regulations on things but who was dishonest and didn't want to face the facts then he would have said oh i'll free up the f the uh fda i'll lift this one regulation you know that is i'll do one thing i wanted to do anyway or that's in my thing to do and not think anymore about what needs to be done but it either that project either that thing wasn't necessary at all or it was necessary to think about developing a plan so in january they were doing the wrong thing but trump didn't it's not like trump got impeached and pence came into office in january and then pence was caught flat footed and he just did this one thing this guy's been in office for several years so what's been happening for that several years uh under the previous administration which it was no great shakes right there was a pandemic preparedness person on the national security team so somebody whose job was to brief the president constantly on what's going on with pandemics what's doing that office was limited was that a good idea or a bad idea it wasn't just trump it was done in nor bolton i don't know if it was but i mean he's responsible for running his white house and his government over time in such a way that the various agencies are coordinating with one another that information is going the right way into if you poke out your eyes and then say oh well i was blind how could i have seen this coming it's your damn fault now it's not the case that everything is trump's fault the the medical government in medicine has been screwing things up since the mid 60s there are tons of things that even if he was you know what some people the god some people imagine him to be we wouldn't have been in the situation you know the best situation we would have been if everyone's cards had been played right for the last hundred years uh and you know it's not like he could have he's magic if he were good but no there's a lot that could have been done better here and the fact is you can't tell everything that could have been better or worse but you can tell if you look and if you look at what was said versus what the evidence was at the time that he's being dishonest about it and dishonesty is bad and destructive and what you can't do is say would we have saved ten trillion dollars two trillion a hundred thousand lives fifteen lives maybe you can't quantify it but you can know that there's dishonesty going on here and that that dishonesty has a cost now most politicians are dishonest whether he's ten percent more or less than the next guy you can argue about that but but this is a dishonest response okay are you wanting to add to that yeah i mean i've even it's possible even lower view of trump that i think everything he's in technical objectivist terms everything he says is arbitrary that he has no interest in do i have any grounds or reasons for what i'm saying and part of what he projects is he can't even imagine that someone else would like why would anyone in my audience care about if there's evidence or reasons for this um and on particularly on the cdc so one of the things when you start reading the experts and it it doesn't matter their political persuasion and so they're all i can't understand what the cdc is doing and where are they why are they marginalized and what and this is january february so if you watch trump at the cdc and you watch that video and you watch the experts there and it's like they don't they want to disappear from the seat because he's spewing about he's got some he's inherited the ability to understand infectious disease because he had an uncle who's really skilled like this so like some completely arbitrary bizarre thing and these are scientists in the room and it's like what do you do with this and you also get the fear of like what happens if he displeases and he tosses me out and you can even see that with Fauci a lot of people are very critical of it of him but if you think from if he's well motivated you've got someone who's anti-knowledge in here and is it better that i get some things in and have to compromise on some things and it's not exactly right and i correct some things but i let some things go and so is that better for the country that you had a guy who's just um he's anti-knowledge and nobody says anything ever to challenge him and so on it's really hard to think like what should he do in that case you just give it up and say yeah we'll turn it over to this guy um and it's if you actually watched it you can see it in real time um that why the cdc is marginalized you can't value reason and have anything less than utter contempt for trump he is an anti-reason in essence so looking at where we are now and and the path forward you know what uh what can you say about about what things that have been proposed in terms of gradually reopening the economy um are we anywhere near where we need to be in terms of testing and the processes for doing that sort of thing safely um i think to say what's safe if by safely mean what'll happen what kind of uptick in infections will there be if we open this place with this fact with doing this much testing or not testing you have to know about all the kind of things that we don't know about you have to be someone who knows about how the tests work who know about how quickly the the disease spreads and so forth and so um i think what you could say is what morally or and politically are the conditions for reopening and what i think we should be looking for is how to empower people to make the choices in so far as is possible given all the factors that exist now to make the choices about their own lives and their own health care and so my sense is i don't know if i think i'm fairly in line with what i'm currently thinking that so long as there's not imminent cascading uh reason to think there's imminent cascading collapse of the hospitals that we should uh lift whatever only have what restrictions on freedom of motion are necessary to prevent that and the evidence is i understand it in my very amateurish way is that outside of a few places very few restrictions are needed on that maybe like not having sports stadiums functioning um but uh you know i don't we should be asking about what will happen if we do that people who are experts on the spread of the disease yeah i mean i i think i think we're in i i think greg's right i think we're in a position to open up much of the country with exception of few hot spots i think everything else could be opened up but i see no evidence to suggest that it's going to happen quickly or that anybody has an incentive to do it right or quick or and i mean we haven't talked about the massive economic consequences of these stimulus and the Fed action and there's just so much going on i mean even as an economist it's it's almost impossible to figure out what the consequences are of all the economic stuff that's going on never mind on top of that all the medical aspects of the virus and where it comes back and and all of this but it doesn't look good it doesn't look good for the future of this country uh it doesn't look good for the future of this country from political perspective because of the amount of power we've granted government and nobody's challenging or very few people are challenging the power they have it doesn't look good economically because of the power we've granted government if you look at the federal reserve we basically granted the federal reserve the power to own a significant amount of the assets and the types of assets which which means a complete distortion and massive economic injustice and we don't have enough time to go over everything bad that's related to that and then to just print literally print out of nowhere 2.2 trillion dollars and and distribute it which creates all kinds of misallocations and again economic justice i think we should pick up the term of of justice from the left i mean these things are created creating real injustice both and then and then there's the the the injustice and the economic damage done by just the the lock up and the shutdown and you know many of us are gonna you know some of us are gonna be defined some of us maintained our jobs we can do this kind of stuff remotely and everything but there are real people out there indeed millions and millions of real people out there who don't have jobs who don't have the small businesses that they started and they put their blood sweat and tears and capital into and and now have nothing or maybe they have a little bit of a handout that the government's giving them but that is not enough to sustain them through this and and maybe it is maybe it isn't but who knows a lot of lives are being destroyed a lot of lives have been destroyed and and and you know and this idea that komo has one life we can't get one life you know we must shut down everything for one life i mean it is so destructive and and wrong uh because literally millions of people it means sacrificed here but now i agree with greg the economy would have taken a hit anyway right you can't have a pandemic without having bad economic consequences but the extent of of of the damage is just it's we all know it for year for months and maybe years but it is truly horrific and most of it is not the virus it's our response to the virus and and a whole class of politicians from trump down across all sectors of government state local and federal you know have this on their hands have have the future generations of lack of economic growth and and a lot of blood of people who died who didn't have to die and a lot of this is on is on the hands of the minds of the politicians who who've just you know screwed this up in and that's a nice way of saying it uh from beginning to end and you should and and you also be mad about this because it's your life right i mean they're sacrificing your future and your parents and grandparents and this is not something it's not an academic issue just a detached academic issue this is real in in in and i'm sure you all know people out who are working who've worked hard who've struggled and are now being wiped out by this and nobody nobody cares okay we have time for one final comment did you want to uncle wanted to say something yeah i want to um so i have no confidence in the testing um and when you hear governors i think the more honest ones say we don't know what we're doing with testing so to the extent that testing is relevant to them thinking that we have to reopen i think it's still a disaster and just anecdotally the people i know who've tried to get tested because they have symptoms and so on it's been not not any work close to smooth and you still see stories and this is what i wanted to bring up because it's relevant to the government healthcare and opting out of nurses and doctors and so on who still can't get protective equipment yeah and they should be able to opt out they're held hostage by the love of their work and it's like in a time of crisis we double down we work over time they don't get any more money um you uh the story is about nurses that the ratio of a nurse to an ic unit was one to one they're now five to one to five icu patients with not equipment to protect themselves and so on in if they were encouraged to say enough is enough that also would reveal what the nature of government healthcare actually is that it's sacrificing the doctors and the nurses and one of the reasons i social distance um and to quite a bit that i have been is i take seriously but it's again on a voluntary basis the overloading of the healthcare system i'm not going to be a participant in making these people martyrs that the the healthcare government healthcare system does but it it's a really a real problem so for me testing is still a disaster okay well i think let's draw a line there um we kind of ended on a bit of a bleak note but i think the the positive thing is that we are out here uh you know spreading iran's ideas trying to improve the way people think about things and change the culture for the better so that brings us to the end of this iran con live event i just wanted to say a thank you to all of our speakers i think this was a really fascinating and insightful discussion


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