Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #862
09/22/2023, 09/23/2023, 09/24/2023
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1) COVID Science-Deniers Want More Lockdowns In The Future
Just as we predicted, the left and the public health "experts" are now repudiating reality and stone-cold evidence about lockdowns. This frightening assessment of what happened in 2020 and 2021 has just been published by The Royal Society:
NPIs on transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus:
Masks and face coverings
Social distancing and ‘lockdowns’
Test, trace, and isolate
Travel restrictions and controls across international borders
Environmental controls
Communication of NPIs in the UK
Regular readers of the Hotline know that the governmental response to COVID was a mega-failure in almost all instances and in places all over the globe. Their impact on saving lives and stopping the spread of the virus was negligible. Their toll on the economy, children, mental health, businesses, and individual liberty — was catastrophic — and the damage will last for years and decades.
One of our closest COVID advisors, Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins, and a co-author of the definitive study on the ineffectiveness of lockdowns alerted us to this scary conclusion from the Royal Society and refuted every word of it here.
Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is making a mad last-minute push for price control regulations on Visa and Mastercard. (American Express is exempt.) The play here is to mandate that these two companies put cut-rate competitor logos on their cards and allow merchants to route their transactions over those other networks.
But Durbin, other Senate Democrats — and even our friend Roger Marshall a Republican from Kansas (who should know better) — can't explain how this industry is broken. Americans love the convenience of using plastic cards for swiping and tapping to make purchases. They love the rewards programs.
That's why there are more credit and debit cards than there are people in America.
That's why Americans make trillions of dollars of purchases a year on plastic cards.
Retailers love accepting credit cards because they almost all gladly take credit cards as forms of payment. Cards also reduce the burden of handling cash and theft at the cash register (by employees and thieves) while Visa and Mastercard assume the risk of non-payment. And they do all that for a remarkably small fee of roughly 2%. The chart below shows how small these fees are:
Our advice to Dick Durbin: if it ain't broken don't fix it.
And, by the way, when have government price controls EVER worked?
We're not especially prudish, and no one will ever accuse us of being fashionistas. But shouldn't there be some reasonable decorum and dress standards on the floor of Congress? Shouldn't there be a little class in the halls of government?
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman was allowed to preside over the Senate this week in sneakers, a dark short-sleeved collared shirt, and dark shorts that displayed his tattoos on Wednesday…
He then showed up in what looked like the exact same outfit Thursday to meet with the Ukrainian president.
The Spectator magazine, which notes that everyone else who appears on the Senate floor must still be in business attire, commented that “Much like how an entire kindergarten class must accommodate one problem child who refuses to do his work unless his own special conditions are met, we are being misled once again under the guise of a dress code.”
Senator Joe Manchin is circulating a proposal to reestablish the Senate’s dress code. Almost every Republican has signed it.
The Senate used to be known as the world’s Greatest Deliberative Body. If it allows the “Fetterman Dress Code” to remain in place, it will soon be ridiculed as the world’s Greatest Laughing Stock.
Chabad Lubavitch, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
We noted yesterday that British PM Rishi Sunak rebelled against Net Zero climate craziness.
But London Mayor Sadiq Kahn never got the memo. The United Nations is hosting hundreds of foreign leaders in New York this week to celebrate Climate Action Week. Kahn is the headliner as he celebrates his title of “greenest mayor” his city — or perhaps any city — has ever had.
Khan has turned all of London into a Universal Light Emissions Zone, in which drivers of older vehicles are charged $15 a day to drive. He has vastly expanded the number of roads where motorists can only go 20 miles per hour.
That’s not all. Kahn is also the chair of C40, a global collective of 96 city mayors, which advocates extreme measures to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030.
Khan has also chaired a climate commission which Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports endorses such radical suggestions as "the abolition of private vehicles; the prohibition of meat and dairy consumption; the rationing of new items of clothing to three each per year; and the restriction of short-haul return flights to one every three years."
The report has also proposed "slashing the use of steel and cement in construction and significantly increasing the proportion of buildings made from wood, disregarding the major restrictions this would place on attempts to solve the housing crisis by building more homes.”
Beware folks: this is the green movement's idea of a modern Garden of Eden.
