On December 17, the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a series of emails between outgoing National Institute of Health Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In the emails, Collins refers to the authors of something called “The Great Barrington Declaration” as “fringe epidemiologists” and states his desire for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of its premises.

Collins defended his characterization and call for action on Fox News Sunday, telling host Bret Baier that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died” if the Declaration’s recommendations (strong measures for the protection of the elderly and otherwise vulnerable, leaving the rest of us to achieve herd immunity through widespread infection) had been followed.

I’m reminded of something William F. Buckley, Jr. said about the 1964 presidential election, which US Senator Barry Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Baines Johnson: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater we’d be at war in Vietnam in six months and I did and we were.”

I supported the Great Barrington Declaration — and hundreds of thousands died.  Not because US policymakers implemented the Declaration’s recommendations,  but either because of, or in spite of,  US policymakers following the recommendations of Collins, Fauci, and others.

The question isn’t which set of recommendations would have produced better outcomes. It’s whether science should be reduced to the status of  handmaid to bureaucratic diktat, with scientists whose findings don’t support that diktat marginalized through the influence of those same bureaucrats.

How “fringe” are the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration?

Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Princeton and a PhD from Imperial College London (her doctoral thesis title: “Heterogeneity and the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases”).

Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, where he’s earned four degrees, including an MD.

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, with a bachelor of science from Sweden’s Umea University in mathematical statistics and  a PhD from Cornell in operations research. He sits on scientific advisory committees for the US Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control.

Agree with their recommendations or not, neither their credentials nor their policy positions qualify as “fringe” by any reasonable definition. Their only real offense was disagreeing, on what they considered relevant scientific grounds, with policies advocated by Francis Collins.

“Francis Collins has spoken” was neither good science nor a good up-or-down test for determining the quality of public policy recommendations. Freedom of scientific inquiry and unconstrained public discussion of the alternatives are too important to sacrifice on the altar of technocracy.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“There’s scientific consensus, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in a 2019 livestream on climate change, “that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?”

Less than three years later, AOC’s mad at US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) for suggesting that perhaps Congress limit itself to one or two, rather than three, federal subsidies (from among a child tax credit, paid leave, or “universal” child care) in its multi-trillion dollar spending bill.

Ditto Bernie Sanders, who in 2019 indicated his support for population control to fight climate change, but in 2021 pronounces himself “delighted” by the expanded child tax credit and thunders that “we must now either make this Child Tax Credit expansion permanent or, at least, extend it for a number of years.”

I’m agnostic on the relationship between population and climate change, but I can’t help notice a contradiction when prominent progressives who claim to believe that overpopulation is a problem simultaneously support paying Americans to have more kids.

And that’s exactly what schemes like the child tax credit come down to. It’s a time-worn truism: If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of something, penalize it.

True, those same progressives generally support using foreign aid to subsidize “family planning” elsewhere, but if overpopulation is the concern, that amounts to bailing water out of the bow of the boat and pouring it into, rather than off, the stern. At best.

At worst … well, paying rich white people to breed and paying poor black and brown people not to sounds like something I’d expect to hear from a Tucker Carlson guest panel on “replacement theory.”

In addition to being agnostic on the relationship between population growth and climate change, I’m agnostic on the desirability or undesirability of population growth as such.

Assuming certain conditions — conditions which prevail in the United States, where contraception is inexpensive and widely available — it seems to me that population growth is largely self-regulating.

The costs of having children correlate strongly with the conditions affected by population. Prices will reflect food aplenty, or not enough. Childcare will be easily found and inexpensive, or scarce and costly.  Wages will be high and unemployment low, or vice versa. More or fewer people will choose to become parents based on those conditions.

Government subsidies in either direction disrupt the complex but largely rational operations of that “market.”  To at least some degree, they encourage having children when conditions say not to and discourage it when conditions say to go ahead.

Lowering taxes for everyone would be better policy than spending tax money on encouraging, or discouraging, parenthood.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Today,” the White House announced on December 13,  “the President is taking decisive action to promote fiscal stewardship by improving the Government’s service delivery to its customers, the American people.” Joe Biden’s latest executive order “includes 36 customer experience (CX) improvement commitments across 17 Federal agencies.”

Portraying government as a business and you as its “customer” ranks right up there with “the consent of the governed” on the list of fictions contrived to confer “legitimacy” on an institution that does its best to run every aspect of your life, at your expense, whether you consent or not.

Let’s have a look at some of the “customer experience improvements” on offer in the new executive order.

First up, the Internal Revenue Service. Income tax filers, we’re told, “will save time by having the option to schedule customer support call-backs,” and get “new online tools and services to ease the payment of taxes.”

The IRS isn’t a store selling you a product or service. It’s a protection racket that takes money from you whether you care to “do business” with it or not, on pain of fine or imprisonment for declining. If this is “customer service,” so is a mugger assisting you in getting your wallet out of your pants pocket.

How about the State Department? “Americans will be able to renew their passports securely online, saving time from having to wait and the effort and cost required to print, go to a post office, and use a paper check.”

You’re required to beg the government for permission to travel, and fork over a bribe to get that permission, but hey, now you can beg and pay (the second time, anyway) online! Wow, what a deal!

Some of these “customer service improvements” do run in the other direction,  making it easier to request access to some of the money taken from you over the years with or without your consent.

For example, online tools for collecting Social Security benefits that come nowhere close to the return an indexed mutual fund would have provided had you been permitted to choose your own retirement plan. You’re not Social Security’s “customer.” Customers get to choose with whom they do business with and on what terms.

Some of these “customer service improvements” may be real experiential improvements for you over previous methods, but they don’t magically make you into a “customer.” They  just make government’s constant victimization less unpleasant.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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