Source: spiked
by Molly Kingsley

“The World Health Organisation’s proposal for a global ‘pandemic treaty’ has been a political and public-relations disaster. Talks between WHO member states began in late 2021 and resumed last month, with final negotiation sessions taking place this week. WHO officials aim to settle on a new pandemic agreement and amendments to existing International Health Regulations (IHR). The initial pandemic agreement plan (or ‘zero draft’) was so controversial when it was published in 2023 that much of the negotiation process has since been conducted in secret. This draft agreement would have granted the WHO the power to issue legally binding mandates to member states and their citizens during pandemics. This would include imposing lockdowns, quarantines and mandatory vaccinations. This threatened to fundamentally redefine the relationship between nation states and the WHO. As resistance to these changes mounted internationally, the WHO has responded by smearing those critical of its ambitions.” (05/07/24)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/08/the-whos-plan-for-public-health-tyranny/

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker

“It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in ‘fact-checking’ organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind. And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason.” (05/07/24)

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-proof-of-censorship-is-censored/

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Patrick Carroll

“Walsh’s concern about jobs being lost due to technological development is nothing new. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, people have been raising concerns that technology would ‘take jobs’ and leave many out of work. One of the earliest groups to raise these concerns was the Luddites, a 19th-century group of English textile workers who opposed the use of machinery in their trade because it was being used to replace workers. The term ‘Luddite’ has since become a pejorative for someone who opposes labor-saving technological advances — one that Walsh has clearly earned with this take. The issue with Luddism is that it gets in the way of economic progress. Technology is an immensely powerful tool for improving our standard of living, and much of the prosperity we enjoy today is a result of technological advances that replaced human labor with machine labor.” (05/07/24)

https://fee.org/articles/what-matt-walsh-gets-wrong-about-ai-and-work/

Source: EconLog
by Tarnell Brown

“Police department budgets are subject to the same laws of scarcity as everything else, and every enforcement priority comes with opportunity costs. Money and manpower dedicated to, for instance, investigating auto thefts, cannot be used to investigate homicides. Indeed, research has shown that shifting resources towards drug enforcement has lowered the opportunity costs of property crime, leading to an increase thereof (Benson, Rasmussen, & Sollars, 1995). Asset forfeiture allows the drug enforcement apparatus of police departments to supplement their revenue at little cost to the taxpayer outside of the costs of seizure. Moreover, individuals who have their assets seized are often permanently bereft of their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.” (05/07/24)

https://www.econlib.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-the-war-on-drugs-as-a-law-enforcement-revenue-center/