The Libertarian Party’s Science Caucus aims to create a strong intellectual beacon or beachhead of medical and scientific freedom and literacy within the Libertarian Party.
Of all people, Libertarians should have the very best understanding of how government and thus coercive competition-immune bureaucracies destroy, not just the economy and freedom of people, but also the very competition of ideas needed to discover the best information which includes ‘the science’ with the recent CovidMania disaster as the perfect example. If you’d like to be a part of and help grow and solidify this beacon and meet like-minded people please consider joining our discord, Facebook group, and newsletter.
The Role of Freedom in Society and its Impact in Science and Medicine
The great ‘Austrian Economist’ and 1974 Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, in some of his seminal writings like‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’and the aptly titled ‘Competition as a discovery procedure’ helped us realize that economic competition is how we discover and spread superior information throughout society. It is the freedom of nearly 8 billion minds in their role as consumers to ‘freely trade’ their private property for what they calculate to be best, which motivates companies to innovate and copy each other’s innovations-information-ideas, thus inadvertently turning the entire planet into a global supercomputer via this system of ‘competitive knowledge discovery’.
Coercion, whether by the old religious Priesthoods or central planning bureaucracies like those of the former Soviet Union or Maoist China, not only make criminals and bring tyranny to people who want to do things differently than as coerced by the Priesthood-Bureaucrats-“experts”, it inadvertently destroys the very ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ that creates and spreads the information that coordinates our increasingly technologically advanced and prosperous socioeconomic order.
Government or public sector “orders” lack the incentives to innovate or copy existing innovations since the wealth that sustains them comes from taxes and not by acting based on information superior to competitors. Government regulations are coercive-competitionless-monopoly information which is not subject to continuous replacement via competition so they paralyze entire industries slowing down ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, driving up costs (more lawyers-regulators-bureaucrats), and making criminals out of people who harm nobody but just prefer to do things differently. This explains why the increasingly regulated-paralyzed healthcare sector has grown from consuming 5% of the economy in 1960 to over 20% today culminating in the recent CovidMania tyranny. By comparison the Software-IT sector has few regulations, there is no American Computer Programmer’s Association monopolizing-paralyzing the knowledge relating to software like the American Medical Association does for medicine so free competition motivates the creation and spread of innovations at breakneck speed.
The former Soviet Union had plenty of highly educated scientists and ‘experts’ who arrogantly mocked religious tradition and whose ultimately inferior central plans required the coercion of millions as still happens in Cuba and North Korea, but they were thoroughly crushed by freer Americans, their Bibles, their traditions which respected private property and thus emergent superior ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. The “classic” night-time image below helps explain the difference between competitive-private-free orders and monopolistic-government-coerced orders. Keep your eye on how information arises and spreads via competition and continuously restructures the social order.
Since the Soviet Union had no ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ it quickly got many “experts” coercing millions in various industries. The scientific monopoly “expert” or “great leader” was Trofim Lysenko. His competition-immune ideas relating to farming led to massive famines in the USSR and later the Great Chinese Famine which claimed over 20 million lives. Being a favorite of Stalin and also on good terms with his successor Nikita Khrushchev it wasn’t until Khrushchev’s downfall in 1963 that Lysenko was thoroughly discredited.
Having our own competition-immune top-down bureaucracies like the CDC, AMA, FDA, and NIAID we too suffer a massive lack of innovation in science and medicine and evolve our own coercive central planning Priesthoods-Bureaucracies and Lysenkos with Anthony Fauci being the perfect example.
What we really need is not necessarily the right answers, but the public’s understanding of how freedom and resulting ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, not a coercive bureaucracy of do-gooder ‘experts’, is what will provide the best means of discovering them.
We must help fellow citizens overcome the economic ignorance which constantly has them fervently falling for coercive central planning ideologies which destroy their prosperity.
Hayek:
“It is necessary to realize that the sources of many of the most harmful agents in this world are often not evil men but high-minded idealists, and that in particular the foundations of totalitarian barbarism have been laid by honourable and well-meaning scholars who never recognized the offspring they produced.”
Hayek again:
“Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies.”
