Brownstone Journal

Brownstone Institute
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Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

  1. 14h ago

    The Multi-Billion Dollar Tamiflu Con

    By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org. I like to add a mildly amusing quote from Mark Twain at the end of my conference lectures, when I post a slide showing a few photos of my book covers: "Be careful of reading health books," Twain once famously warned, "you may die of a misprint." If Mr. Twain were around today, he might agree with an update of his warning for our modern pharmaceutical era: "Be careful of taking federally recommended, multi-billion-dollar stockpiled antivirals. You may die of the treatment." After 30 years of wading through the cherry blossoms of Victoria and the murky swamps of pharmaceutical policy, raging on about the medicalization of ordinary life, it's rare for me to have an "I told you so" moment. A repeated refrain in my writings is that "disease mongering"—the fine art of widening disease definitions to turn healthy people into patients—is alive and well. This activity turns many of us "worried well" into lifelong paying customers of the pharmaceutical industry, all on the basis of drugs we are often told are to "prevent" a bad outcome. Before Covid, if there was ever a poster child for the grand social experiment in trying to prevent disease (ie: doing something medically to prevent future illness) it is the drug oseltamivir, better known as Tamiflu. Come with me and let's travel back a little in time. In 2009, during the H1N1 swine flu panic, I was among a few vocal health policy critics remarking that public health officials were strangely and repeatedly invoking the terrifying spectre of the 1918 Spanish flu. Why? We had no idea what was going on, but in hindsight the game being played was quite clear: Evoking the worst infectious outbreak in living memory was pretty much a corporate-backed push to justify the stockpiling of an antiviral known as Tamiflu (generic name: oseltamivir). The company in question is GSK, which, to refresh your memory, had to pay over $3 billion to resolve allegations involving health care fraud and the failure to report safety data related to a bunch of drugs. But I digress. Thanks to GSK's clever medical propaganda, er, I mean "education" campaigns, governments around the world—including our own—spent oodles of billions of our tax dollars to stockpile this particular drug. Why? Because Roche, the drug's manufacturer, assured us that it would prevent flu complications, reduce hospitalizations, and stop transmission. Those are the bad things we hoped Tamiflu would help us avoid. The global gastronomic appetite for Tamiflu came with a bit of heartburn: the manufacturer hid the data which supported its approval and licensing. Not only hid it, but kept it under lock and key so no one could see it. A guy who I would consider a friend and comrade-in-arms (we both served in peacekeeping missions while in uniform) is Dr. Tom Jefferson, the Cochrane Collaboration's indefatigable "flu guy." Tom spent five years fighting Roche to get access to the full Clinical Study Reports, documents which were essential to understand how Tamiflu performed against a placebo, in whom, and to what effect. After five years of embarrassing pharma draftdodgery GSK was finally required to cough up the tens of thousands of pages of raw data and the truth struck like a hammer blow: When this came to light in 2014, Tamiflu not only didn't prevent complications, or stop viral transmission, its modest ability to shave about half a day off flu symptoms was outweighed by serious side effects like psychiatric events, vomiting, and other complications. Back then, I wrote and lectured about this. I told anyone who would listen that the world had been bamboozled by laundered clinical trials and a public relations machine selling an antiviral that barely worked. I felt the world owed a debt of gratitude to Tom Jefferson, who had the intestinal fortitude to go after one of the biggest drug companies in the world. But alas, there was pushback against skeptics like me, usually delivered with a solitary defensiv...

  2. 1d ago

    The Fairy Tales of Empire The First Fairy Tale Is That Conquest Was About Bringing Infidels, Pagans, and Idolaters to Christ Terra Nullius A Necessary Aside for a Moment The Indian Removal Act of 1830 Opium As Free Trade 1884 — "The Civilizing Mission

    By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org. Good afternoon! I want to thank Jeffrey Tucker for creating a sanctuary for dissident scholars during the most troubling era in American history. I cannot imagine what the last five years would have been like without the courageous leadership of Brownstone Institute. And I want to thank Joel Salatin for hosting us at his beautiful farm where he is creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. The argument that I want to make over the next twenty minutes goes something like this…For the last 500 years our economy has been based on conquest and domination. It started with the conquest of the New World by Europeans, who had gunpowder, horses, and hardened steel. The indigenous did not, horrors ensued. Europeans took their gold, land, and labor. And this has continued in various forms for five centuries. Yes, some of the economic growth since the 1800s has been driven by innovation. But it was built on a foundation of ill-gotten wealth that created the leisure time and the early capital that funded creativity — and then industrialization often led to new waves of exploitation. We'll talk about each of these different eras in a moment. The current crisis that we're in stems from the fact that eventually there were no new lands left to conquer — so the ruling class decided to exploit all of us in the developed world via vaccine injury. So the violence and exploitation that used to be directed from the First World outward to the periphery in the Third World is now directed inward toward enslaving the middle class in the US and Europe via iatrogenic illness. Jeffrey coined the phrase "biological colonialism" to describe this moment and I think that's exactly right. But what's striking to me about all of this is that every time the ruling class figures out a new way to exploit people, it requires a Fairy Tale in order to justify the exploitation — to launder it and make it okay. In every era there has been the actual mode of production — usually based on exploiting other people and taking their stuff — and the official story which glosses over the exploitation and says that it's justified or maybe even sanctified. And the immediate question is why? Why would Empire need a Fairy Tale to justify its actions? For that, we turn to the great evolutionary biologist Frans de Waal who discovered that even primates have an innate sense of empathy and fairness. It seems to be the result of a long evolutionary process. Chimpanzees reconcile with each other after a fight, care for the dying elderly, and share food with those who have none. These animals display a sort of rudimentary kindness, even when there is nothing in it for themselves, or even when it costs them something (time, reputation, energy). De Waal is arguing against what he calls "Veneer theory" which is the view that human morality is only a thin cultural layer over a fundamentally selfish, amoral animal nature. De Waal believed that morality isn't a surface layer at all but grows out of deep, evolved social emotions (empathy, reciprocity, fairness) that we share with other primates. Primates aren't always benevolent of course. They go to war and kill each other and often behave in ways that are brutal. They are bivalent like us — they have both prosocial and violent tendencies and it's not always clear which one will win. My point being, if Empire is going to take the gold, labor, and lives of another civilization, it needs to find a way to turn off our fundamental sense of empathy and it does that through official narratives that I'm calling Fairy Tales. I believe that if we can unmask these Fairy Tales and show the world as it really is, we can begin to address the current crisis. In the 1400s, innovations in shipbuilding and navigation enabled the Portuguese to begin sailing down the coast of Africa. Along the way they conducted raids and returned home with Africans whom they auctioned off as slaves. Portugal was a deepl...

  3. 2d ago

    September 9th Is International Falsely Accused Day

    By Wendy McElroy at Brownstone dot org. On October 13, 2023, 15-year-old Owen Poirier was on a school bus with four other students, two girls and two boys, all of whom engaged in what was described as "talking, taking photos and…harmless albeit chaotic play." Several hours later, one of the girls accused Poirier of touching her crotch—a claim which the surveillance camera did not seem to corroborate. Without allowing Poirier to defend himself or call his parents, the school interviewed the boy and suspended him; some accounts say the authorities expelled him. "I didn't do this," he told his parents. Facing a criminal investigation, however, the distraught Poirier committed suicide. According to one news report, "After Poirier's death, the school's superintendent wrote in an email that the educational institute 'unequivocally' did not find evidence of sexual assault, the Poirier family argued in court filings." Owen Poirier's story is typical in several ways. The accuser, usually female, is automatically believed even without real evidence. A cursory 'investigation' provides little if any due process to the accused. The consequences to the accused are life shattering. His family is devastated and will not recover. International Falsely Accused Day (IFAD) is an annual day of awareness that spotlights the devastating impact of false accusations on those accused, even if they are ultimately exonerated. People often lose their children, their jobs, their reputations, and can be driven to suicide. The desolation is especially absolute in accusations of child, sexual, or domestic abuse. And it hits men especially hard because they are usually the ones accused. Our victim-obsessed society turns a blind eye toward this particular type of suffering, perhaps because the majority of victims are male. We want to believe the 'victim,' but the victim is often predefined as female. It takes Herculean efforts for the profound pain of those falsely accused to be acknowledged on the same level as the pain of sexually abused women. Former teacher Lyn Crabtree launched IFAD—then called National False Accusation Day—in the UK in 2020 after her life and her husband's were destroyed by allegations that later proved unfounded. They were dragged out of bed in the early hours by a police raid and arrested repeatedly thereafter; their reputations and careers were gutted. No official record indicates that the police or the press ever issued an apology or retraction when the Crabtrees were exonerated. What remains public are the accusations. September 9 was chosen as International Falsely Accused Day as a way to honor former schoolteacher and BBC broadcaster Simon Warr, who made headlines in 2012 after being accused of indecent sexual behavior toward three former male students; the 9 is his birthday. The charges were so flimsy and contradictory that the jury in Warr's trial returned a unanimous non-guilty verdict after a few minutes of consideration. By this time, however, Warr had spent two years "on police bail;" that is, Warr was released from custody but he remained under active police investigation, with his behavior restricted. Once vindicated, he became an ardent activist on behalf of other falsely accused. The title of one of his articles captures Warr's message: "The falsely accused can never get their lives back. False accusers are handsomely compensated but their victims get nothing." The compensation received by accusers includes attention, sympathy, revenge, and monetary reparations. On September 8-9, 2023, IFAD went international. Global demonstrations occurred in the UK, the US, and 13 other nations. The event now encompasses more than 20 nations and a coalition of activist groups, including the Falsely Accused Network in the UK and the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance based in the US. It has grown without government funding and with little media support—a true grassroots movement in response to an ignored global wrong. ...

  4. 3d ago

    More Access. More Choice. Less Cost. The Real Cost Problem America Already Has a Broader Healthcare Workforce The Problem Is Not CPT. It Is Exclusivity. Don't Replace CPT. Expand What We Measure.

    By Margaret Hampton at Brownstone dot org. Secretary Kennedy is right to question the cost and power of the American Medical Association's Current Procedural Terminology monopoly. But eliminating CPT would solve the wrong problem—and could create a much larger one. CPT is deeply embedded in American healthcare. It is the common language used to describe conventional medical services, process claims, and move enormous volumes of information through the insurance system. Whatever one thinks of the AMA's role in controlling it, CPT has become critical infrastructure. Replacing it outright would be expensive, disruptive, and unnecessary. The better answer is competition. HHS does not need to tear down the existing coding system. It can preserve CPT while recognizing a complementary code set that fills the gaps CPT does not—and was never designed to—cover. That single change would end the practical monopoly over reimbursable care, open the claims system to a broader licensed healthcare workforce, and allow policymakers to measure whether those additional choices actually reduce costs. Keep CPT. Fill the gaps. Open access. Measure the results. America spent approximately $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, or $15,474 for every person in the country. That is the number reform should be organized around. For decades, the dominant strategy for controlling healthcare spending has been to squeeze payment within the existing system: lower reimbursement, tighter networks, more utilization review, fewer covered services. Yet the underlying cost problem remains. At the same time, physicians and hospitals face increasing administrative pressure, workforce shortages, and shrinking capacity. There is another way to think about cost. Sometimes more access to lower-cost care can mean less spending overall. Consider a patient with hypertension, chronic pain, anxiety, or another condition that can worsen gradually before producing an expensive crisis. Earlier access to lower-cost services—whether behavioral care, acupuncture, nutrition support, physical therapy, massage therapy, or another legally authorized intervention—may help manage symptoms and risk before the patient reaches an emergency department, hospital bed, or more intensive treatment pathway. The point is not to assume that every alternative service works for every patient. The point is to create a system capable of finding out. Guardrails against overuse are appropriate. So is outcome measurement. But excluding care from reimbursement before it can generate claims data creates a circular problem: the system says there is not enough evidence because it does not collect the data, and it does not collect the data because the service is not coded and reimbursed. Millions of licensed healthcare professionals already provide care outside the physician model: advanced practice nurses, chiropractors, acupuncturists, naturopathic doctors where licensed, behavioral health professionals, midwives, nutrition professionals, massage therapists and bodyworkers, physical and occupational therapists, pharmacists, and others operating within state-defined scopes of practice. These practitioners do not replace physicians. They give patients additional doors into the healthcare system and can allow physicians, emergency departments, and hospitals to concentrate on the patients who require higher levels of medical care. But much of this work remains difficult or impossible to identify accurately in the conventional claims stream. Without an appropriate code, there is often no practical route to reimbursement. Without reimbursement, there is little or no claims data. Without claims data, lower-cost approaches remain largely invisible to the people deciding what insurance should cover. That is the central policy failure. Coding identifies the service. Reimbursement brings the service into the claims system. Claims data then makes comparison possible—against CPT-coded care, HCPCS Level II services, hospi...

  5. 4d ago

    Saving Lives Should Not Require Permission The Apparently Dead Did Not Need Permission Experts, Bellows, and Tobacco Smoke A Protocol Has No Conscience Covid and the Cult of Obedience We Followed the Wrong Leaders When Compliance Becomes the Treatment P

    By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. When did saving a life start to feel like breaking the rules? When did the doctor at the bedside become less trusted than the people making decisions from far away, such as administrators, regulators, or distant experts who have never met the patient? And how did a profession built on judgment, uncertainty, and moral responsibility end up rewarding people for just following orders? These aren't just abstract questions. They decide who can act when someone is dying, and who gets blamed if the official plan fails. Amsterdam, 1767. A body is pulled from a city canal. The victim is still, not breathing, and shows no clear sign of life. Most people assume the person is dead. But a small group of citizens and doctors started to ask a new question: What if this person only looks dead? What if death is sometimes a process that can be stopped? And if there is even a small chance of life, do we have a duty to try to help? This idea led to the first Humane Society, a group focused on rescuing and reviving people who seemed to have drowned. In fourteen months, they reported saving nineteen people. By 1793, they said they had rescued 990 lives over twenty-five years.[1] These numbers might not meet the standards of a modern clinical trial, but the idea behind them changed medicine: apparent death did not always have to be the end. The idea spread fast. Humane Societies popped up in cities like Venice, Milan, Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Glasgow. These weren't just private clubs or government agencies. They were groups of volunteers (doctors, clergy, apothecaries, soldiers, boatmen, scientists, philanthropists, and regular people), working together to save lives. Historians now call them a transnational movement that shared medical knowledge across borders.[2] Something very similar to what Brownstone Institute is today. Before there were international health organizations or emergency medical systems, these societies compared notes, shared tips, gave out rewards for rescues, and encouraged everyone to help. Their guiding idea was simple, even if it sounds bold today: if a life is at risk, the person who can help has the responsibility to act. In London, the movement took on a special character. In 1774, doctors William Hawes and Thomas Cogan met with 32 friends at the Chapter Coffee House in St. Paul's Churchyard to start what would become the Royal Humane Society. Hawes had already been paying boatmen out of his own pocket to bring drowning victims in quickly so resuscitation could be tried. This was not a government project or a plan from professional managers. It was simply a group of people deciding that giving up was not good enough. Someone pulled from the water might look dead, and experts might say there was no hope. Still, there could be a chance for life, and someone should try to save it.[1] Their methods were a mix of smart ideas, wild guesses, and desperate attempts. Victims were warmed, rubbed, shaken, bled, made to vomit, given mouth-to-mouth breaths, and exposed to heat and electricity. Believe it or not, tobacco smoke was even blown into the rectum using special devices, some kept in barbershops and other public places. That might sound almost comical now, but there's a real lesson here. The same people who helped make artificial ventilation a real medical practice also believed a tobacco enema could save a life. They were brave, but sometimes wrong. That's not a knock on science. It's how science actually works. Medicine moves forward when people try things, see what happens, learn from mistakes, and aren't afraid to change course. It doesn't move forward just because a committee says all the uncertainty is gone. The Humane Societies became places where different medical ideas competed. The Dutch supported mouth-to-mouth ventilation, but many leading British doctors looked down on it. William Hunter called it something done by...

  6. 5d ago

    Pfizer and the CIA Privately Cited High Population Immunity in May 2020, Unclassified Document Reveals

    By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. The latest Fauci-focused document tranche released by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) contains a surprising nugget buried as part of a CIA report. On May 7, 2020, CIA Chief Operating Officer Andy Makridis led a briefing with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner then a board member of Pfizer. He also served on the CIA's External Advisory Board. The agency produced its own summary of the meeting. Deep in the report we find the following: In text: On "herd immunity" Dr. Gottlieb discounts the 2 major studies from Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties showing high seroprevalence. He believes nationally, the seroprevalence is about 20-25% which is insufficient for herd immunity at the R₀ (BRR) value of 3. Let us review the implications. The Santa Clara study from April 2020 by Jay Bhattacharya found a 2.8% seroprevalence level. It was far higher than the existing estimates. He was denounced and hounded for daring to say what we know now: the infection fatality rate was very low and prevalence was very high. The implication: we would get through this with no great disruption necessary. The attacks on the study were brutal but he was just doing science at a time when few others were making sense. Even BuzzFeed, a reliable venue for deep-state actors, slammed Jay and insinuated corruption. Now, in this new release, we find Gottlieb telling the CIA that the virus spread is far higher than most anyone believed at the time. If the R-naught is 3, that means every one person would infect three more, which, according to the math, would mean a herd immunity level of 67 percent. At that rate of spread and resulting immunity, pandemic conditions would turn endemic in a matter of weeks, certainly by the end of summer if not sooner, all else equal. But that is not what Gottlieb was saying in public. On April 17, 2020, he tweeted that the rate nationally was 5% while positing that Santa Clara was an outlying "hot spot." Then three and a half months later, on CBS News, Gottlieb opined that the seroprevalence rate was only 8% nationally. Why the massive difference between what he was telling the CIA privately so early in the pandemic versus what he was saying publicly at the same time and continued to say even after the summer months? There are three possible answers: 1. Scott Gottlieb was woefully misinformed, misspoke, or had no idea what he was talking about. 2. The CIA copied down his words incorrectly. 3. He lied to prolong suffering from lockdowns as long as possible in hopes of profitably testing a new vaccine platform. Let us now theorize. The Fauci diaries strongly suggest that an entire class of scientists, pundits, and officials were united in a grand scheme to delay seroprevalence for as long as possible to 1) create a need for the injections by preserving immunological naiveté of the population, and 2) slow down mutations that would inevitably make the shots inefficacious to whatever new mutation would appear by the time of release. This was likely the whole point of "Flatten the curve" and "Slow the spread." It was to delay the solution and prolong the pain. It certainly wasn't for the health of the population. Just the opposite. That's a dark conclusion from reading them but it remains the best explanation for why officials enacted brutal lockdowns that wrecked businesses, closed schools, isolated vast swaths of the population, violated religious liberty, and ended freedom of association. Labor participation rates have never fully recovered and continue to fall. Disability rates keep hitting new highs. This new piece of evidence darkens the picture even more. It suggests that Gottlieb and the CIA believed from the first week of May 2020 that the virus spread was very high, the fatality rate quite low, and the march toward herd immunity was happening far faster than anyone knew. This is what they said privately, not what they said publicly. In private, they could have been receiving...

  7. 6d ago

    Human Rights in the Post-Pandemic Era

    By Michael Tomlinson at Brownstone dot org. In 2020, governments around the world panicked in response to the declaration of a pandemic and imposed drastic interventions to impede the spread of Covid-19, interventions which crushed human rights on an unprecedented scale and without sufficient justification. Yet this was widely accepted, even by human rights organisations. How could this happen? And how could we amend human rights protections to ensure that it does not happen again? In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was recognition that rights should be codified, leading to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These rights are taken to be universal and inalienable. The Declaration includes declaration of the rights to 'life, liberty and security of person,' freedom from torture, equality before the law, freedom of movement, including 'the right to leave any country including his own, and return to his country,' freedom to own property, freedom of thought, opinion and expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to education. These are a mix of fundamental rights and other categories. Fundamental rights are everyone's birthrights originating in fundamental capabilities or states of being which we all have unless we are actively prevented from exercising them by others. We do not need to apply for permission to exercise this type of right. The classic case of a fundamental right is freedom of expression. We all have this capability as soon as we can speak (or sign), and no one should take it away from us. Freedom from torture is fundamental to health and well-being and again is the natural state of being unless torture is inflicted on us. Freedom of education is in a different category, as education by its nature needs to be provided by someone, a government, or a private organisation, which costs money. There is no fundamental right to have education provided without contributing to the cost of it through fees or taxes, but where it is provided it should be accessible to all on an equal basis. So, this right is really about equity. Commendably, the Declaration does not include any qualifications to fundamental rights, although it is understood elsewhere that: They should not be taken away, except in specific situations and according to due process. For example, the right to liberty may be restricted if a person is found guilty of a crime by a court of law. No one would dispute this exception: even the most libertarian of countries puts people in jail if they break the law (but authoritarian countries have laws that put people in jail for reasons that would never be acceptable in truly democratic counties, for example, insulting the President). Once the possibility of wider exceptions is recognised, however, abuses become possible. The best justification for exceptions is where someone exercises their own right by contravening someone else's right. Even in the case of free speech, one of the most fundamental of all rights, it is universally accepted that it is not permissible to advocate for or incite violence, especially against an ethnic or religious group. The most notorious examples of this over the last hundred years have been the Nazi campaign of vilification against the Jews, which led directly to their killing around six million Jewish people in the Holocaust, and the Hutu government incitement of the population against the Tutsi ('cockroaches'), which led to at least 800,000 deaths. In these cases, a direct line can be drawn between incitement and genocide. In other cases, incitement is more coded and difficult to prove. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights expands on some of the rights in the Declaration and adds others. It also adds a critical loophole, expressed as (#4.1): In time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogat...

  8. Aug 31

    A Nothing Burger

    By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org. People are emailing right and left about this proposed Executive Order from President Trump giving farmers and ranchers the right to process their animals on their own properties for their consumption. Duh, that is already legal. What is NOT legal is doing this and SELLING the meat. Be assured that this whole thing has been conceived as an olive branch after the 300,000 metric ton below-market (subsidized?) tariff-free import of ground beef product (what's with the "product?") for 90 days, coinciding with the midterm elections. It's not just about red tape. It's about rights. Secretary Rollins doesn't seem to understand this either. It appears Trump has alienated almost every person who thinks and has set up the Republican Party for a shellacking this November. The below-market import of ground beef product created a firestorm among Trump's base–rural Americans, and this idea to ease restrictions on processing is just the latest in a string of finger-in-the-wind reactions to hold onto political equity. I have news for him: he's shot his political equity by doing the opposite of nearly everything he campaigned on. Remember the Bush "Read my lips, no new taxes?" Secretary of Ag. Brooke Rollins responded with her checklist to implement the executive order, which may come out soon. Here is my interpretation: 1. Waiving red tape in processing. If Tyson wants to build a new processing plant, they can get it done easier and quicker than ever. 2. Expanding ranchers' ability to sell across state lines. Under state inspection, a steak in Virginia can't be sold in Maryland–but state inspection must be "equal to" federal, so this is no big deal. 3. Rescinding outdated guidance. Replacing paperwork with digital work. 4. Adding technology for faster safety data. Resurrection of mandatory Radio Frequency Identification tracking on all livestock. Now is the opportunity to push it through. 5. Growing real support for small processors (funding and deregulation). Grant programs so more pseudo-entrepreneurs who love to write grants and fill out federal paperwork can bilk taxpayers out of more money to open plants run by people who don't know squat and go bankrupt in five years. It's happened over and over already; we don't need money; we need freedom. All grant programs attract people who like to write grants instead of rolling up their sleeves and doing things. Sorry for the rant. 6. Fighting consolidation so small processors can compete. Make it easier to transfer title from small processors to large ones, giving the appearance of preserving small outfits, but actually further concentrating ownership in the Big Four. 7. Expanding truth in labeling. Make it more difficult to put "grass finished" on a label, or saying anything that tries to differentiate it from vaccinated, hormone-added, chemical-laden, toxic industrial fare. Here is what everyone must understand: Brooke Rollins will not invite me to the room where this Executive Order is written. In that room will be at least one representative from each of the Big Four beef processors. They will use this moment to further protect their interests and increase their stranglehold on the beef industry. This whole drama is not about freedom; it is about a president and political party that has completely lost its bearings and is gasping for something that will give it breath. Why can't they just say "We're going full force to pass Congressman Thomas Massie's PRIME Act?" It's already written. It already has 60 bipartisan sponsors. It's easy. But no, Trump hates Massie with a passion and therefore will bungle this by making it complicated, subjective, and easy to overturn in two years. Who would invest in a processing facility on the strength of an Executive Order that can be reversed in two years? Only a dimwit who writes grants. Sheesh. Are you happy about the ground beef product import dump?

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About

Daily readings from Brownstone Institute authors, contributors, and researchers on public health, philosophy, science, and economics.

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  • Creator
    Brownstone Institute
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Brownstone Journal

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