I made the mistake of sending out my Tuesday newsletter with the subject heading "Why Medical Licensing Should Be Eliminated - Part I". As I began drafting that newsletter, I though I would split it up due to length, so that was my original title; but midway through the writing, I changed my mind and decided it worked better as a single piece. I just forgot to change the subject line.
So, when I hit send on that one, I no longer intended to do a part two. But since I made that implicit promise with my unedited subject line, I figure I might as well do a follow-up to address a few objections I've received to some of my recent thoughts on liberty, law, and the marketplace.
Objections to the Idea of a Free Market Economy
Last week, I sent a newsletter sharing my half-hour interview on The Power Hour, which started out
discussing my free e-book The New York Times vs Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: How the Mainstream Media Spread Vaccine Misinformation, but which ended up being mostly a back-and-forth about political philosophy.
I explained my view that the act of voting serves to legitimate our own disenfranchisement, but once in a while an extraordinary candidate appears who represents such a total departure from the thinking that pervades the criminal organization in Washington, DC, that they are worth supporting. (Ron Paul and RFK Jr are the only two candidates in my lifetime who I've felt worthy of consideration.)
I also expressed my opposition to government intervention into the market, observing how there is no more perfect manifestation of the principle of democracy than the free market -- i.e., all of us voting with our dollars how scarce resources ought to be most efficiently directed toward productive ends (something no bureaucrat is capable of determining in lieu of the market's pricing system).
While the US Constitution was certainly innovative for its time, I pointed out during the interview, it has utterly failed in its chief purpose of limiting the power of the federal government.
A reader responded with agreement that the Constitution has failed in this regard but disagreement that we should have a free market economy.
The problem, as this reader saw it, is not some inherent problem with the institution of statehood and use of government force to obtain ends, but instead that corporate powers have taken control of the government.
This is a common viewpoint that I see expressed a lot.
The idea that the power of government should be strictly limited, he argued, is only useful if the power of market forces is equally limited, which requires some form of government -- a true dilemma!
However, this objection stems from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding about what it means to have a free market. I responded with the observation that "if corporations could acquire such power as you allude to operating in a free market, they wouldn’t need to try to gain influence in government to achieve their aims through the use of government intervention into the market."
"A perfect example", I added, "is the Federal Reserve, a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply that is the type of entity that could never exist in a free market."
Next came an objection that a free market economy would not be a utopia in which everything would function smoothly for the benefit of all.
That is certainly true, but, I pointed out, I had not suggested that no wrongs could occur in the absence of government intervention; I was simply saying that the government's interference in our lives causes far more harm than good.
Additionally came the argument that market actors are motivated by "profits and power", and so market forces result in the powerful subjugating the will of the majority.
But this objection, too, stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy functions. There is nothing wrong with having a profit motive. We all have a motive and a very literal need to profit from our labors, and the profit motive is precisely what drives entrepreneurs and investors to find solutions to people's problems for the betterment of society, which is what drives real increases in our standard of living, i.e., real economic growth.
Yet another objection was that I couldn't possibly really want for powers like the Gates Foundation, the WHO, and Big Pharma colluding for profits by running rampant over all of us.
But that objection perfectly encapsulated the fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy functions in the absence of government interventionism. The subjugation of the population this reader had identified was precisely the outcome of government intervention into the market! What I am instead advocating is the elimination of the power systems by which the politically and financially powerful rule over us.
This is a mistake I frequently encounter: people tend to blame "the free market" for problems that are actually caused by market interventionism, the proposed solutions always being even more market interventionism.
The WHO, of course, is a governmental organization, not the product of market forces, and the power that Big Pharma holds over us comes precisely from the industry's utilization of government force.
In a free market, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry would not be immune from injury lawsuits for its products that are recommended by the CDC for routine use in children. In a free market, we would not be coerced into using these products. It is government violating our right to make our own informed choices about product consumption, not the market.
In other words, market forces are not the problem but the solution to the types of problems that this reader had identified.
The reality is that corporations like those that manufacture vaccines could have no such power over us if there were no government for them to take control of.
On that note, in case you missed it, check out the article I published on Monday, "Vaccine Mandates Are an Unethical
and Unlawful Violation of Human Rights". It tackles the absurd argument that coerced vaccination is "Constitutional" because the Supreme Court said so in the 1905 case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts.
Objections to the Idea of Eliminating Medical Licensing
Another reader, a health care professional, respectfully objected to my Tuesday newsletter advocating the
elimination of medical licensing.
The government's licensing regime, I had argued, is being used to penalize doctors who act in our interests by departing from the harmful "standard of care" that the government's legal and regulatory apparatuses define for us in lieu of free market competition and real prices (i.e., prices determined by supply and demand for health care products and services).
The Oregon medical board's attack on Dr. Paul Thomas, which is the subject of my book The War on Informed Consent, is a
prime example. (FYI, the book is currently out of print and unavailable from Amazon, but I still have a very limited number left if you want to own a copy.)
The reader agreed with me that sometimes government regulations are beyond ridiculous, that bureaucrats generally should not be butting into the doctor-patient relationship (she made room for exceptions), and that market forces would expose the charlatans who scammed people instead of providing alternative care that truly helps people maintain or improve their health.
However, she maintained that licensing is still required. The first objection to my idea of eliminating this system is that there is a certain amount of training that people need to have to do certain jobs competently, like working as a scientist in a medical lab. There are real risks not only to the individual doing the job but to others if the person is not qualified for the job. As far as I understand the counterargument, licensing ensures that people working potentially hazardous jobs are qualified and won't cause harm to others.
However, it isn't obvious to me that the licensing regime protects us from more harm than it causes. On the contrary, my argument is that licensed medical professionals are causing great harm to the health of the population precisely because of how licensing is used by the government to favor the interests of various industries, the foremost of which is Big Pharma.
In my own personal experience with the medical system, it has been the "alternative" health care practitioners who are truly helping their patients, while the licensed professionals following "standard of care" are the true quacks.
More directly to the point, it doesn't follow that if health care professionals or scientists did not obtain a license from the government that they therefore would not have the education and skills required to do their jobs safely and effectively.
I view this argument as equivalent to the common objections, "But who would build the roads?!" if we didn't have a government, or "How could children get an education?"
Eliminating medical licensing would not eliminate job education or certification programs. It would just free up the market to enable us real choice between health care services and products, with real competition and real prices.
This reader additionally made a reasonable and compelling argument that the requirement for labs to be licensed helps to ensure standardization of testing so that you won't have wildly varying results depending on which lab is used, which could potentially put patients' help at risk.
This is an excellent point, but it overlooks how market forces, too, lead to standardization, if there is a practical need for it. An example that leaps to mind is the competition that Blu-ray Discs had when they first came out with the HD DVD format. Ultimately, the Blu-ray format won out the high-definition optical disc format war, not because the government stepped in to ensure standardization of players but because the market determined that there was a need for a single standard and that Blu-ray was the superior format. There are lots of brands of light bulbs, but they all fit into the same standard sockets. Etcetera.
(Granted, these examples come from the electronics industry, but this is in part by virtue of their being some semblance of a free market for electronic devices, which compares to the so-called "health care" system where there is practically no semblance of a free market remaining from which to draw examples.)
And what happens when the standard dictated by the government's regulatory apparatus gets it wrong? What if it's the wrong standard used, like how COVID-19 PCR tests were being run in labs across the country at cycle thresholds so high (like 35 or 40 cycles) that even the New York Times conceded that 90% of people who received a "positive" test were probably non-infectious?
When standardization occurs as a result of government interventionism, I perceive a high risk of getting the standard wrong and impeding progress for the benefit of certain special interests, whereas the existence of competition in the marketplace leads toward standardization that is beneficial for all consumers.
Concluding Thoughts
Anyhow, that's my view of things. I think most people have a hard time accepting the idea that a free market economy would be better than an interventionist economy because we are all so used to the government interfering in every aspect of our lives that it's difficult to even imagine what a truly free market would look like.
I am just imagining out loud and asking you to imagine with me. 😁
People have all kinds of misconceptions of what it would even mean to have a free market, and it doesn't help that professional propagandists masquerading as economists or journalists incessantly blame market forces for problems caused by the government's interventions. (E.g., Paul Krugman blaming the free market for the housing bubble.)
I don't expect my readers to all agree with me on this, but hopefully I've given you some food for thought and challenged your own viewpoint a bit.
We all need to respectfully challenge each other's viewpoints, after all! That is how we grow and advance. I appreciate my readers who respectfully challenge my own views.
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