by Jeffrey Tucker
Murray Rothbard’s wonderful History of Economic Thought opens with a blast against what he called the Whig theory of intellectual history. It’s a variant of the Victorian-era idea that life is always getting better and better, no matter what. Apply it to the world of ideas, and the impression is that our current ideas are always better than ideas of the past. It rules out the possibility that there is lost knowledge in history, peculiar incidences when humanity knew something for sure and then that knowledge mysteriously went away and we had to discover it again.
I’m writing this under a five-month near-global lockdown for fear of a new virus. And just today, a major epidemiologist in the UK, Raj S. Bhopal, dared say precisely what my mother said at the outset of this disease: the way we must manage it is to develop natural immunities to it. Yes, he said the taboo thing: people who face no fatal threat need to get it. This is precisely what my mother told me back in February.
It’s a bit late but at least the subject is finally on the table. The idea of (badly named) herd immunity is consistent with how all societies have come to manage diseases. Protect the vulnerable while groups at no or low risk acquire the immunities. It is especially important to understand this if you want to preserve freedom rather than pointlessly impose a police state out of fear and ignorance.
It’s extremely odd that we woke up one day in the 21st century when such knowledge seemed almost to evaporate. When famed statistician and immunologist Knut Wittkowski went public with the basics of viruses, he created shock and scandal. YouTube even deleted his videos!
How did my mother know about immunities? Because her mother taught this to her, and hers before her. It was a major public-health priority after World War II in the United States to school each generation in this counterintuitive truth.
Saw Jeffrey Tucker on OAN's Tipping Point, and he was brilliant. In going to the American Institute for Economic Research, this article by him struck a cord. Written in August, it is still timely considering the utter destruction of our economy by politicians.
https://www.aier.org/article/is-immunity-a-case-of-rothbards-lost-knowledge/
