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In order to be a good American these days there’s a long list of preposterous claims you are expected to believe.
One is: despite the horrendous death toll in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo did a great job and is a hero.
I could come up with a bunch more — as could you, dear reader — but this is surely one of them.
I hate to make this about Democrats and Republicans, since most Republicans (with some noble exceptions) have been pretty much useless during the lockdown fiasco, but: imagine if Cuomo had been a Republican. Any chance the Borg would be cheering him?
Here’s why I bring this up.
Longtime Tom Woods Show listeners will surely know the great Gene Epstein, former economics and book review editor at Barron’s, and director of the Soho Forum.
Gene is a member of the Tom Woods Show Elite, and there he just posted the following, which I rather suspect you’ll find interesting:
We’re told by Mayor DeBlasio’s Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma: “The vast majority of New Yorkers weren’t infected. So the most likely explanations for our current situation are, as the mayor pointed out, physical distancing, wearing face covers, good hygiene — and the massive increase in testing that’s tied to identifying contacts and safely separating cases with contacts.”
We New Yorkers know enough about our fellow New Yorkers to doubt that our feisty fellows are uniformly following such protocols. Since COVID-19 is, by all accounts, highly infectious, we have to wonder why these delinquents aren’t infecting others once they go home. We have the following on the authority of Gov. Cuomo investigators:
“On July 22nd, Chairman Bradley conducted a compliance check of Aqua in the Bronx and found 12 patrons consuming alcohol inside the premises. In addition, kitchen staff and servers were observed without facial coverings.”
“In Jackson Heights, La Pollera Colorada II’s non-compliance began on May 4th, when NYPD officers found patrons drinking inside the restaurant who refused to disperse.”
“Brik Bar is one of the worst offenders in Astoria, Queens, where large crowds have assembled for drinking and partying.”
The NYC government has warned against the dangers of having intimate relations with others, But does anyone really believe these revelers don’t often relish that “enchanted evening,” when they “see a stranger, across a darkened room”?
For every violation the authorities see, there must be 100 they don’t see. So shouldn’t there be at least some general rise in infections as the delinquents infect their parents and housemates? Yet we’re seeing the reverse. What other explanation but herd immunity?
That sounds reasonable to me.
Naturally, government officials want to take credit for everything, and the blame for nothing. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, that wasn’t federal policy combined with Federal Reserve bubble-blowing. Nope, government was just an innocent bystander in all that!
With the virus, the state wants to claim responsibility for all of the good and none of the bad.
I think the truth is the opposite: the virus makes its way through one population after another according to the same pattern, almost in complete defiance of our mitigation measures — which in turn cause massive and (of course) unacknowledged damage in other areas.
Masks, everyone says. Maybe. I don’t rule out the possibility that they could work. But given that this very week there have been spikes in places where masks are widely used — Japan, China, Australia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong — and in Scandinavia (which has borderline zero deaths these days) they’re barely used at all, let’s just say the masks-solve-the-problem crowd have an empirical presumption working against them that won’t be overcome by shaming people about masks.
In any case:
It’s borderline impossible to get sensible coverage of the virus these days, and essentially impossible to discuss it rationally.
Except inside the Tom Woods Show Elite.
For the sake of your sanity, you know it’s time to take up residence there.
Here’s the juicy link:
https://www.supportinglisteners.com
Read the original article at TomWoods.com. https://tomwoods.com/andrew-cuomo-is-a-hero-say-your-brain-dead-friend/
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the 2019 winner of the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award from the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna. He is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute and host of The Tom Woods Show, which releases a new episode every weekday. Visit https://tomwoods.com