Originally Posted by
Patrick Abraham
This is an interesting thread because I haven’t seen the viewpoint you guys have be so clearly articulated anywhere else. Maybe I’m just in a bubble. I’ve read about 50 pages of this thread so please forgive me if the questions I’m about to ask have been addressed elsewhere. It seems like you guys want Americans (of which I’m one, though living as an expat) to defy government regulations, and Americans should choose to defy the govt after rationally evaluating the science surrounding COVID. It also seems though that you guys favor a system of government which doesn’t fund public institutions—like public schools. Do you see a contradiction there? No doubt public education in the U.S. sucks, but at least in theory it could be good. How do you expect huge masses of people to learn to read and understand scientific papers if there’s no public education system?
I’m also perplexed by y’all’s support for big business and small businesses. Isn’t it clear that the worst enemy of small business is big business? Liberals may want to regulate small businesses more than you like, but people on the right want big businesses to grow so big that there aren’t any small businesses. Unless you guys are strongly in favor of anti-trust regulations, it seems like you’re getting hoisted by your own petard. There’s a portion of the left which wants to do away with all businesses, but that’s a pretty radical fringe. Most liberals love small businesses.
It’s also the case that the media conglomerations you guys are railing against are winning in part because big concentrations of capital—private equity firms especially—are killing off local and independent news outlets. How do you guys expect there to be some kind of mass uprising if there aren’t restrictions on big businesses gobbling up and killing off local news?
Finally, you guys have talked a lot about how COVID isn’t deadly for the vast majority of the population. But I haven’t seen y’all acknowledge that the people who COVID is deadliest for make up Trump’s biggest base of support. No doubt Democrats, Cuomo especially, have been terrible for seniors. You’ll get no argument from me that Democrats are good guys. But I don’t see how it’s not terribly obtuse to expect seniors to support Donald Trump when he’s done as little as possible to contain a virus which could kill them. It seems to me that even if I accept your premises, you guys are being terribly unrealistic.
One other thing I'd challenge you guys on is your claim that you're taking the position you're taking because "in the big picture" it's not worth shutting down the economy for 200k deaths (if those numbers are correct). I don't get the feeling though that you'd change your positions if we were going to have 2 million deaths instead. It seems like the numbers are a rationalization and that you'd never agree to a shutdown or other measures for any period of time.