Tag Archive for: politicians

Fauci Claims He Had ‘Nothing to Do’ With School Closures. His Own Statements Suggest Otherwise

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Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent dodge on school closures is at odds with many of his own statements.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”

The line comes to mind after watching Dr. Anthony Fauci’s interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl over the weekend. In the interview, Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked whether it was a “mistake” for schools to remain shut down for so long during the pandemic.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’ Jon, because if I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci explained on Sunday. “We should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.”

Fauci is correct that there were serious “deleterious” consequences of school closures. For example, it was recently reported that the class of 2022 saw average ACT scores plummet to the lowest level in more than thirty years, and there’s no reason to believe that younger students didn’t experience similar results. Lost learning is hardly the only “deleterious” consequence, however; the decline of mental health among youths during lockdowns has also been well chronicled.

Some may see Fauci’s response as reasonable, because he’s now acknowledging the collateral damage of these policies. The problem is that Fauci is not actually conceding anything. Nobody—and I mean nobody—ever believed you could shut down schools (and society more broadly) for any meaningful amount of time and not experience some “deleterious” consequences.

But it gets worse. Fauci goes on to claim he had nothing to do with the damaging policy.

“I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I have said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” Fauci told Karl. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci was responsible for closing schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it].”

Fauci may not have sat on a school board or wielded police power during the pandemic, but his claim that he bears no responsibility for school closing takes chutzpah. It’s undeniable that many schools, cities, and state governments shut down schools precisely because of what the White House’s top medical advisor was saying, and what Fauci was saying was clear.

The journalist Jordan Schachtel has a timeline of Fauci’s statements on school reopenings, and it’s worth examining.

Fauci calls for a nationwide shutdown of schools.

“The one thing I do advise and I said this in multiple hearings and multiple briefings, that right now we have to start implementing both containment and mitigation. And what was done when you close the schools is mitigation.”

The New York Times, America’s paper of record, reports that Fauci ‘gave his blessing’ to Mayor Bill DeBlasio to shut down the New York City school system.

Fauci slams Ron DeSantis after the Florida governor announced he wanted to get schools open “as soon as possible.”

“If you have a situation where you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected,” Fauci stated.

Fauci has a testy exchange with Sen. Rand Paul, who argued schools should remain open.

Fauci dismissed the idea that schools should be opened back up fully because “we don’t know everything about the virus.”

CNBC reports: Fauci then turned Paul’s own phrasing on him. “You used the word we should be ‘humble’ about what we don’t know. I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really had better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children,” Fauci said. “Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe. For example, right now children presenting with Covid-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome,” Fauci said.

In August and September, Fauci was singing the same tune. Schools could open for instruction—after the virus was under control.

Fauci’s about-face did not go unnoticed. Other health researchers questioned his attempt to distance himself from school closures.

“Why is he saying he did not encourage, suggest and recommend lockdown and school closure?” asked Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Certainly he didn’t make the call by himself, but he used the weight of his reputation in science to advocate for these policies… .”

This is not the first time Fauci has attempted to deflect blame for school closures and lockdowns. In a July interview with Newsweek deputy editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, Fauci was asked if he would recommend closing schools again, considering the amount of collateral damage the policies caused.

“First of all, I didn’t recommend locking anything down,” Fauci responded, adding that that was the purview of the CDC.

Fauci was correct that it was the proper purview of the CDC to make specific policy recommendations, not the head of NIAID, whose job was to see that his agency provided sound scientific research to the CDC. Yet this did not seem to stop the doctor from becoming essentially the official spokesman of the federal government’s public health response, conducting literally hundreds of interviews during the pandemic and posing for numerous magazine shoots. (Many public health experts I’ve spoken with say this is precisely why science became so politicized during the pandemic.)

Now that these policies are rightly being criticized for their “deleterious” consequences, Fauci—who grew quite wealthy as a result of all the media attention he received—is claiming he had “nothing to do” with the policies.

Fauci’s claims are almost too hard to believe, but they call to mind a piece of wisdom from economist Thomas Sowell.

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong,” Sowell once observed.

The pandemic shows just how right Sowell was.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Who are the Biggest Crooks in America?

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Dinesh D’Souza spoke to the Park Cities Women’s Republican Club about the progressive heist of America on December 1st in Dallas, and the conversation was broadcast nationwide on C-SPAN Book TV. During the talk, D’Souza shows that progressive politics is nothing but a series of scams and cons aimed at stealing the wealth of America.

Watch now:

In Stealing America, D’Souza shows that the biggest crooks in America are the progressives perpetrating this con. Andrew McCarthy’s review of the book in National Review shows that despite Obama’s best efforts, D’Souza is intent on exposing their crimes:

“America flourished because it was an anti-theft society: freedom inextricably linked to the protection of private property, unleashing creativity, entrepreneurship, and unprecedented prosperity. The progressive critique of that society is not advanced in good faith; it is, as D’Souza portrays it, a “con.” Its purpose — not its unintended consequence but its aim — is to seize the wealth and power of achievers. The con is systematized by the Democratic party now under Obama’s leadership, with Hillary waiting in the wings.

Dinesh D’Souza implores us to recognize the con for what it is, and work, as he works, to expose it, rather than dignify it as an alternative political philosophy. America, he contends, is well on the way to being stolen. We will lose our country if we fail to reaffirm our anti-theft roots.”

Are CEOs Overpaid? by Gary M. Galles

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Are corporate managers and CEOs overpaid?

Many politicians rail against “overpaid” corporate managers. But these attacks overlook the issues of risk and uncertainty.

Workers agree to compensation before performing their work. Consequently, their compensation reflects not a known value but their expected value when arrangements are made.

Managers who turn out more productive than expected will have been underpaid, those less productive than expected will have been overpaid. But examples of the latter don’t prove managers are generally overpaid.

As performance reveals productivity, competition will also bid compensation of superior managers up and inferior managers down. And we must consider the present value of that entire stream, not a given year’s results, to evaluate managers’ productivity versus pay.

No manager is always right, but not every mistake is proof that they’re overpaid. They are paid for superior, not flawless, judgment — fewer mistakes, but not no mistakes.

That is another reason top managers of large enterprises will be very highly compensated. A 1% higher probability of being right on a $1 billion bet is very valuable, and even more so for a $10 billion bet. But even the best will err sometimes, so mistakes don’t prove shareholders are overpaying for managerial judgment.

This is part of a series of micro-blogs by Professor Galles responding to frequently asked questions on economic issues. If you have a question, emailAnythingPeaceful@FEE.org. 

Who Ignores the Principle of Scarcity? Progressives and Politicians by Sandy Ikeda

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Everyone has a theory of the way the world works, a way of connecting cause and effect. Without it, we wouldn’t know how to start the day: “If I wake up at 7:00 a.m. tomorrow, I should make it to work on time. And then…”

Our theories, the rules and principles by which we interpret the world, help us to think and plan, but they also constrain our thinking and planning to some degree. That can be a good thing, as long as our theories conform reasonably well to the real world. We understand, for example, that the best way to exit the 10th floor of a building is not necessarily to step out of the nearest window.

For economists who study human action in the real world, one of the principles we cannot ignore is that scarcity exists — to get more of one valuable thing, you will have to give up some of another valuable thing. In fact, you could say that not understanding the nature and significance of scarcity is the hallmark of someone who isn’t an economist, or is a very bad one.

In everyday life, it’s usually impossible to ignore the existence of scarcity. For most of us, it’s pretty obvious that time and money aren’t unlimited, and that if we want a bigger house we’ll probably need to earn more by giving up some leisure time and working more. In a free market, one without arbitrary political power and aggression, the economic reality of scarcity is a “hard constraint” that’s always good to keep firmly in mind when making plans.

Economics versus politics

But tracing out the more subtle and far-reaching implications of scarcity in a given set of circumstances is a skill that takes a lot of training and practice, which of course not everyone has done or, really, needs to do.

As Murray Rothbard puts it,

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.” But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in the state of ignorance.

Unfortunately, politics sorely tempts us to act irresponsibly. Politics is essentially about acquiring and using political power  — the initiation of physical violence. If the first principle of economics is that “scarcity exists,” then far too often the first principle of politics is, “ignore the first principle of economics!”

In the absence of legal privilege or persecution, people in a free market have to deal with scarcity’s hard budget constraint. But in the world of politics, people can try to immunize themselves against scarcity by making others pay for the things they want for themselves or for their cronies. Politics is the realm of the “soft budget constraint,” which may have prompted Margaret Thatcher to say, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Unfortunately, the same could easily be said for garden-variety politics almost everywhere today.

Principles versus consequences

This suggests perhaps another way of differentiating libertarians from the progressives of the left. For libertarians, economic principles constrain ourthinking. For progressives, economic reality constrains their outcomes.

What I mean is that when progressives, for instance, demand that people pay ever-higher minimum wages to those who work for them, they ignore the hard reality that someone, often unseen, must bear the cost of their “compassion,” and that those others are mostly young and unskilled workers that employers will now find too costly to employ. Or, an employer may cut back on nonwage payments they previously used to compensate their employees, making the employees worse off.

But because libertarians from the outset tend to be more mindful of economic principles, they are better able to shape their proposals, at a minimum, so as not to harm the very people that progressives aim to help. Libertarians are less likely to be disappointed when their policies confront economic reality. As someone once said, “Economics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias.” Scarcity is one of those parameters.

(Some may be reminded of Thomas Sowell’s distinction between “constrained vision” and “unconstrained vision,” which, however, I believe focuses more on one’s view of human nature: whether it is perfectible or not perfectible.)

Innovating within constraints

Faced with poverty, unhealthy working conditions, criminal violence, and a host of other persistent socioeconomic problems, we’re often admonished by the left to think beyond capitalism, to think creatively “outside the box.” Why not try to change those parameters or remove some of them altogether?

Well, even musical geniuses from traditions as different as classical, jazz, and rock must learn the rules of their genre before they can break through and go beyond them. Before he pioneered bebop, Charlie Parker had first to master the saxophone and the musical conventions of his day. Only then could he push outside mainstream jazz. To color outside the lines, you need to know where the lines are.

Moreover, scarcity is not a man-made thing that can be unmade purely by human willpower or by wishing it away. We have to account for it when we confront the real world. Otherwise, we risk personal failure or perhaps much worse. None of this means, though, that we can’t dramatically reduce scarcity and address those problems.

Sometimes there are free lunches. It’s possible to push that constraint outward and reduce scarcity through efficiency (getting more out of less) or, more importantly, through innovation (creating something of value that didn’t exist before). Henry Ford, Estee Lauder, and Norman Borlag significantly reduced the scarcity of cars, cosmetics, and food — to a world of ordinary people within the constraints of physics, chemistry, and economics.

We can get to where we want to go faster when we can see the road.


Sandy Ikeda

Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.